Economically anxious, many parents see their children's accomplishments as a sort of insurance against the financial challenges of old age; high-achieving kids, this logic goes, will become high-earning adults and therefore be better able to help Mom and Dad pay… — Alissa Quart Copy Share Image
In the local state school I attended in England, I saw and heard far more awareness of where a person stood in the social… — Alissa Quart Copy Share Image
Low-cost gear can make restless people like myself feel marginally happier. — Alissa Quart Copy Share Image
'Middle class' used to mean having two children and sending them to high-quality public schools, or even occasionally to private schools. It meant new… — Alissa Quart Copy Share Image
I think our families or parents were trying to do best by us by telling us, 'Do what you love.' On an existential level,… — Alissa Quart Copy Share Image
When I was doing my research for 'Branded,' I'd meet groups of teenagers and preteenagers or tweens, and they would laugh at a magazine… — Alissa Quart Copy Share Image
To be 'squeezed' is to be bound by a very American psychological and socio-economic predicament. Being squeezed involves one's finances, one's social status, and… — Alissa Quart Copy Share Image
Americans overall may live better than medieval aristocrats could dream of, but that means nothing when oligarchs live in the neighborhood next door, flaunting… — Alissa Quart Copy Share Image
A lot of the things that bore adults don't bore children, and people forget that. In some ways, boredom is a projection of adults… — Alissa Quart Copy Share Image
Part of why daycare is so poorly paid is because the sense that they're prisoners of love, that daycare workers love their work so… — Alissa Quart Copy Share Image
Sometimes I think that the public's lack of criticism of the rich - and how they seek their pleasure - might derive from the… — Alissa Quart Copy Share Image
Piercing minds go mute around poetry. It is imagined to be overly technical, like advanced arithmetic; otherworldly, priestess-like; suffocatingly personal; excessively decorative; exhaustingly bourgeois… — Alissa Quart Copy Share Image
Our social fabric is sundered. GoFundMe and the other crowdfunding sites that have proliferated since 2010 are an example of what has sprung up… — Alissa Quart Copy Share Image
