The Spencer Foundation generously funded this project. I am very thankful for the funding as well as the feedback and encouragement of the staff of the foundation. I am also grateful to the Alfred P. Sloan Foundation, particularly Kathleen Christiansen, for assisting with a writing grant at a crucial time. In addition, early on in the project, I received a National Science Foundation grant as well as support from Temple Grant-in-Aid, Southern Illinois University Grant-in-Aid, Temple Summer Research Fellowship, and the ASA/NSF small grant. Of course, the responsibility for any errors or omissions rests with me, not the sponsoring agencies.
At Temple University, I have benefited from the intellectual companionship of other members of the sociology department as well as key administrative support. Although the entire department has been helpful, David Elesh, Robert Kidder, Magali Sarfatti Larson, and Sherri Grasmuck each played a special role, as did Nikki Johnson, Sasha Sisser, and Maria Rosario. A number of people helped to “liberate” the data from tapes to transcripts. For their diligent work, I am obliged to Bernice Fischman, Amy Erdman, Abby Knerr, Irene Arnold, and Rebecca Raley. Also, Sue Tomlin, Paul Reed, Sarah Rose, and Valerie Johnson worked on the project at an early point.
Hugh Mehan deserves special thanks. He flew across the country to visit the project in the middle of the fieldwork and gave sage advice. Although he clearly thought I was crazy, he supported the project anyway. Aaron Cicourel gave me the original impetus for the work, and his work has provided a thoughtful model. The Center for Working Families, directed by Arlie Russell Hochschild and Barrie Thorne, gave me a vibrant intellectual home for a semester at the University of California, Berkeley, where I could try out my ideas. Anita Garey and Karen Hansen were especially helpful. Also during that period, Martin Sanchez Janowski was welcoming at the Center for Urban Ethnography.
The work also benefited from the feedback of a number of audiences when I presented findings at the University of California, Berkeley; the University of California, San Diego; the University of California, Davis; the Joint Center for Policy Research at Northwestern University; Princeton University; the University of Pennsylvania; University of Wisconsin, Madison; and, at an early point, the University of California, Los Angeles. My graduate class at Temple University read the manuscript and gave me numerous helpful suggestions. Donald Eckert and his class were also very helpful.
A large number of people talked about the project or gave comments on written work as I stumbled my way through. They include Michael Burawoy, Michelle Byng, Gretchen Condran, Paul DiMaggio, Frank Furstenberg, Flo Gelo, Arlie Hochschild, Trish Houck, Jim Houck, Mike Hout, Robin Leidner, Sam Kaplan, John Ogbu, David Minkus, Aaron Pallas, Jeff Shultz, David Swartz, Janet Theophano, Barrie Thorne, Gale Uchiyama, and Cathy and Tom Vigran. My sociology of education reading group has been helpful in countless ways. At the University of California Press, I benefited from the reviews and, especially, the assistance of Naomi Schneider.
For detailed comments on earlier drafts of the book, I am indebted to Donald Eckert, Anita Garey, David Karen, Paul Kingston, Demie Kurz, Michèle Lamont, Kristine Lewis, Vincent Louis, Mimi Keller, Salvatore Saporito, Wes Shumar, Amy Steinbugler, Lisa Smulyan, Cathy Vigran, Dan Weinles, and Julia Wrigley. Elliot Weininger deserves special thanks for listening to me talk through my argument and for clarifying the ideas of the late Pierre Bourdieu. M. Katherine Mooney not only straightened out my grammar; she also offered valuable substantive feedback and professional help on the art of writing. Erin McNamara Horvat and Karen Shirley helped me in countless ways to bring this project to closure, reading the manuscript multiple times and offering patient and thoughtful advice. Bonnie Jeanne Casey, Elizabeth Freeman Fox, Joan-Erin Lareau, Lucille Lareau, and Anna Vigran graciously checked the proofs for errors. My eighty-three-year old mother, Anne K. Lareau, assiduously read the entire book manuscript, finishing it just a day before she died unexpectedly. It was the last of a lifetime of gifts she gave to me.
Writing a book has been known to induce crankiness and selfabsorption in the author. Perhaps it is for this reason that by tradition, in acknowledgments, children and spouses get the last word. In this realm of thanking family members, I have two favorites: One, said in jest, is something like, “Without the constant nagging of my wife this book would have been done earlier and would have been better, too,” and the other, more serious one, is, “My husband deserves public acknowledgment for the gratitude he knows I feel.” The humorous statement highlights for me the contradictory ways in which the effort needed to write a book is in mutual conflict with dynamics of family life. The demands of writing lead one to not be present at home, and the demands of family life can, at times, impede one’s work. But family members also provide private sustenance; this support is critical.
I am grateful to my children by marriage, Dillon and Rachel Freeman, whom I met after the research was completed, for the ways in which they have added laughter and zest to my life. My biggest debt is to my husband, Samuel Freeman, for the many ways in which he supported me to help make this book come to pass even as we faced demands—and distractions—in our lives. In the clockwork of careers, wherein we are assessed according to our productivity, families are not really counted as a legitimate force. But to be speedy is not everything, or even, when all is said and done, much at all. To have the gifts of companionship, nurturance, and good humor in daily life, however, is quite a lot. I appreciate having them, and him, in my life.
CHAPTER 1
Concerted Cultivation
and the Accomplishment
of Natural Growth
Laughing and yelling, a white fourth-grader named Garrett Tallinger splashes around in the swimming pool in the backyard of his four-bedroom home in the suburbs on a late spring afternoon. As on most evenings, after a quick dinner his father drives him to soccer practice. This is only one of Garrett’s many activities. His brother has a baseball game at a different location. There are evenings when the boys’ parents relax, sipping a glass of wine. Tonight is not one of them. As they rush to change out of their work clothes and get the children ready for practice, Mr. and Mrs. Tallinger are harried.
Only ten minutes away, a Black fourth-grader, Alexander Williams, is riding home from a school open house.1 His mother is driving their beige, leather-upholstered Lexus. It is 9:00 P.M. on a Wednesday evening. Ms. Williams is tired from work and has a long Thursday ahead of her. She will get up at 4:45 A.M. to go out of town on business and will not return before 9:00 P.M. On Saturday morning, she will chauffeur Alexander to a private piano lesson at 8:15 A.M., which will be followed by a choir rehearsal and then a soccer game. As they ride in the dark, Alexander’s mother, in a quiet voice, talks with her son, asking him questions and eliciting his opinions.
Discussions between parents and children are a hallmark of middle-class child rearing. Like many middle-class parents, Ms. Williams and her husband see themselves as “developing” Alexander to cultivate his talents in a concerted fashion. Organized activities, established and controlled by mothers and fathers, dominate the lives of middle-class children such as Garrett and Alexander. By making certain their children have these and other experiences, middle-class parents engage in a process of concerted cultivation. From this, a robust sense of entitlement takes root in the children. This sense of entitlement plays an especially important role in institutional settings, where middle-class children learn to question adults and address them as relative equals.
Only twenty minutes away, in blue-collar neighborhoods, and slightly farther away, in public housing projects, childhood looks different. Mr. Yanelli, a white working-class father, picks up his son Little Billy, a fourth-grader, from an after-school program. They come home and Mr. Yanelli drinks a beer while Little Billy first watches television, then rides his bike and plays in the street. Other nights, he and his Dad sit on the sidewalk outside their house and play cards. At about 5:30 P.M. Billy’s mother gets home from her job as a house cleaner. She fixes dinner and the entire fam
ily sits down to eat together. Extended family are a prominent part of their lives. Ms. Yanelli touches base with her “entire family every day” by phone. Many nights Little Billy’s uncle stops by, sometimes bringing Little Billy’s youngest cousin. In the spring, Little Billy plays baseball on a local team. Unlike for Garrett and Alexander, who have at least four activities a week, for Little Billy, baseball is his only organized activity outside of school during the entire year. Down the road, a white working-class girl, Wendy Driver, also spends the evening with her girl cousins, as they watch a video and eat popcorn, crowded together on the living room floor.
Farther away, a Black fourth-grade boy, Harold McAllister, plays outside on a summer evening in the public housing project in which he lives. His two male cousins are there that night, as they often are. After an afternoon spent unsuccessfully searching for a ball so they could play basketball, the boys had resorted to watching sports on television. Now they head outdoors for a twilight water balloon fight. Harold tries to get his neighbor, Miss Latifa, wet. People sit in white plastic lawn chairs outside the row of apartments. Music and television sounds waft through the open windows and doors.
The adults in the lives of Billy, Wendy, and Harold want the best for them. Formidable economic constraints make it a major life task for these parents to put food on the table, arrange for housing, negotiate unsafe neighborhoods, take children to the doctor (often waiting for city buses that do not come), clean children’s clothes, and get children to bed and have them ready for school the next morning. But unlike middle-class parents, these adults do not consider the concerted development of children, particularly through organized leisure activities, an essential aspect of good parenting. Unlike the Tallingers and Williamses, these mothers and fathers do not focus on concerted cultivation. For them, the crucial responsibilities of parenthood do not lie in eliciting their children’s feelings, opinions, and thoughts. Rather, they see a clear boundary between adults and children. Parents tend to use directives: they tell their children what to do rather than persuading them with reasoning. Unlike their middle-class counterparts, who have a steady diet of adult organized activities, the working-class and poor children have more control over the character of their leisure activities. Most children are free to go out and play with friends and relatives who typically live close by. Their parents and guardians facilitate the accomplishment of natural growth.2 Yet these children and their parents interact with central institutions in the society, such as schools, which firmly and decisively promote strategies of concerted cultivation in child rearing. For working-class and poor families, the cultural logic of child rearing at home is out of synch with the standards of institutions. As a result, while children whose parents adopt strategies of concerted cultivation appear to gain a sense of entitlement, children such as Billy Yanelli, Wendy Driver, and Harold McAllister appear to gain an emerging sense of distance, distrust, and constraint in their institutional experiences.
America may be the land of opportunity, but it is also a land of inequality. This book identifies the largely invisible but powerful ways that parents’ social class impacts children’s life experiences. It shows, using in-depth observations and interviews with middle-class (including members of the upper-middle-class), working-class, and poor families, that inequality permeates the fabric of the culture. In the chapters that lie ahead, I report the results of intensive observational research for a total of twelve families when their children were nine and ten years old. I argue that key elements of family life cohere to form a cultural logic of child rearing.3 In other words, the differences among families seem to cluster together in meaningful patterns. In this historical moment, middle-class parents tend to adopt a cultural logic of child rearing that stresses the concerted cultivation of children. Working-class and poor parents, by contrast, tend to undertake the accomplishment of natural growth. In the accomplishment of natural growth, children experience long stretches of leisure time, child-initiated play, clear boundaries between adults and children, and daily interactions with kin. Working-class and poor children, despite tremendous economic strain, often have more “childlike” lives, with autonomy from adults and control over their extended leisure time. Although middle-class children miss out on kin relationships and leisure time, they appear to (at least potentially) gain important institutional advantages. From the experience of concerted cultivation, they acquire skills that could be valuable in the future when they enter the world of work. Middle-class white and Black children in my study did exhibit some key differences; yet the biggest gaps were not within social classes but, as I show, across them. It is these class differences and how they are enacted in family life and child rearing that shape the ways children view themselves in relation to the rest of the world.
CULTURAL REPERTOIRES
Professionals who work with children, such as teachers, doctors, and counselors, generally agree about how children should be raised. Of course, from time to time they may disagree on the ways standards should be enacted for an individual child or family. For example, teachers may disagree about whether or not parents should stop and correct a child who mispronounces a word while reading. Counselors may disagree over whether a mother is being too protective of her child. Still, there is little dispute among professionals on the broad principles for promoting educational development in children through proper parenting.4 These standards include the importance of talking with children, developing their educational interests, and playing an active role in their schooling. Similarly, parenting guidelines typically stress the importance of reasoning with children and teaching them to solve problems through negotiation rather than with physical force. Because these guidelines are so generally accepted, and because they focus on a set of practices concerning how parents should raise children, they form a dominant set of cultural repertoires about how children should be raised. This widespread agreement among professionals about the broad principles for child rearing permeates our society. A small number of experts thus potentially shape the behavior of a large number of parents.
Professionals’ advice regarding the best way to raise children has changed regularly over the last two centuries. From strong opinions about the merits of bottle feeding, being stern with children, and utilizing physical punishment (with dire warnings of problematic outcomes should parents indulge children), there have been shifts to equally strongly worded recommendations about the benefits of breast feeding, displaying emotional warmth toward children, and using reasoning and negotiation as mechanisms of parental control. Middle-class parents appear to shift their behaviors in a variety of spheres more rapidly and more thoroughly than do working-class or poor parents.5 As professionals have shifted their recommendations from bottle feeding to breast feeding, from stern approaches to warmth and empathy, and from spanking to time-outs, it is middle-class parents who have responded most promptly.6 Moreover, in recent decades, middle-class children in the United States have had to face the prospect of “declining fortunes.”7 Worried about how their children will get ahead, middle-class parents are increasingly determined to make sure that their children are not excluded from any opportunity that might eventually contribute to their advancement.
Middle-class parents who comply with current professional standards and engage in a pattern of concerted cultivation deliberately try to stimulate their children’s development and foster their cognitive and social skills. The commitment among working-class and poor families to provide comfort, food, shelter, and other basic support requires ongoing effort, given economic challenges and the formidable demands of child rearing. But it stops short of the deliberate cultivation of children and their leisure activities that occurs in middle-class families. For working-class and poor families, sustaining children’s natural growth is viewed as an accomplishment.8
What is the outcome of these different philosophies and approaches to child rearing? Quite simply, they appear to lead to the transmission of differential advantages to children. In th
is study, there was quite a bit more talking in middle-class homes than in working-class and poor homes, leading to the development of greater verbal agility, larger vocabularies, more comfort with authority figures, and more familiarity with abstract concepts. Importantly, children also developed skill differences in interacting with authority figures in institutions and at home. Middle-class children such as Garrett Tallinger and Alexander Williams learn, as young boys, to shake the hands of adults and look them in the eye. In studies of job interviews, investigators have found that potential employees have less than one minute to make a good impression. Researchers stress the importance of eye contact, firm handshakes, and displaying comfort with bosses during the interview. In poor families like Harold McAllister’s, however, family members usually do not look each other in the eye when conversing. In addition, as Elijah Anderson points out, they live in neighborhoods where it can be dangerous to look people in the eye too long.9 The types of social competence transmitted in the McAllister family are valuable, but they are potentially less valuable (in employment interviews, for example) than those learned by Garrett Tallinger and Alexander Williams.
The white and Black middle-class children in this study also exhibited an emergent version of the sense of entitlement characteristic of the middle-class. They acted as though they had a right to pursue their own individual preferences and to actively manage interactions in institutional settings. They appeared comfortable in these settings; they were open to sharing information and asking for attention. Although some children were more outgoing than others, it was common practice among middle-class children to shift interactions to suit their preferences. Alexander Williams knew how to get the doctor to listen to his concerns (about the bumps under his arm from his new deodorant). His mother explicitly trained and encouraged him to speak up with the doctor. Similarly, a Black middle-class girl, Stacey Marshall, was taught by her mother to expect the gymnastics teacher to accommodate her individual learning style. Thus, middle-class children were trained in “the rules of the game” that govern interactions with institutional representatives. They were not conversant in other important social skills, however, such as organizing their time for hours on end during weekends and summers, spending long periods of time away from adults, or hanging out with adults in a nonobtrusive, subordinate fashion. Middle-class children also learned (by imitation and by direct training) how to make the rules work in their favor. Here, the enormous stress on reasoning and negotiation in the home also has a potential advantage for future institutional negotiations. Additionally, those in authority responded positively to such interactions. Even in fourth grade, middle-class children appeared to be acting on their own behalf to gain advantages. They made special requests of teachers and doctors to adjust procedures to accommodate their desires.
Unequal Childhoods Page 2
