As a single parent who worked full time and didn’t get home until 6 P.M., Ms. Taylor found it difficult to meet the array of demands presented by Tyrec’s involvement in football. She rearranged mealtimes, and she spent time getting him ready, time transporting him, and time watching him play:
He had football practice four nights a week in the beginning because school hadn’t started back yet. It started in August . . . I would start calling [home] maybe at 4:00 from work. [I’d tell him] “Get your things together.” [But] he was never ready . . . So I would come home and grab him and hurry up and find something to eat. [Sometimes] in the summer . . . we could eat afterwards.
Tyrec’s mother also spent time fund-raising. She took a leadership role in selling cheesecakes, at ten dollars apiece, to co-workers, relatives, and neighbors. She sold more than twenty.
Although the pace of practices slowed in early September, football was still a demanding commitment. Games were on Saturday mornings at 8:30 or 9:00 A.M. Tyrec and his mother needed to get up at 7:00 in order to get to there on time. Often they would go out to eat after the game and would not get home until 3:00 or even 5:00 P.M. Frequent changes in the schedule, with practices ending early, games being shifted around, and other last minute changes further drained Ms. Taylor’s energy. Before the season was even halfway over, she was exhausted:
By that time I was really tired. I mean, it had become a lot. When school started it went from four nights to two so that was a break right there. But that by the time it got cold—I mean they gave us a half hour because it started at 6:30, so you just—you come home and you eat and you run right out. After practice, we did homework.
Despite the difficulty involved, Tyrec’s mother continued to show up to watch him play. She felt that it was important to be there for him.
I had to give him support that I was behind him; that’s why I went. And I didn’t want him to feel like I didn’t care . . . I missed a few. I didn’t feel bad about it, either, because I went to more than I missed. I usually was there.
Ms. Taylor believed that her son’s involvement in football had been positive. She noted that Tyrec “loved it,” and she stressed the way the sport helped develop her son’s masculinity, especially his athletic skills.
Tyrec is all boy. His motor skills . . . He’s very coordinated like that, so he can do anything like that . . . very well. He knew that he could do it, and I think he wanted to prove it to himself that he could do it. I think he just liked it. He had all the kids around here playing football every day (laughter) . . . right out here on the street.
When asked what she liked about Tyrec’s involvement in football, she said that she thought the experience had given her son “a little bit of independence, and it showed that he had some [independence].” When pressed to explain what she meant by independence, Tyrec’s mother elaborated:
That he’s brave enough to go and meet people and, you know—and be on a team and blend in with the team. I was glad that he could do that. I think I would have had a hard time as a child. I wasn’t that good at blending in.
Unlike middle-class parents, however, Ms. Taylor didn’t see Tyrec’s football experience as crucial to his overall development. “I don’t know how it’s helped him,” was her reply to the question “Are there any ways that you think it has helped him in other aspects of his life . . . Even in little ways?” Ms. Taylor’s first and most decisive point was that she could not think of any way that it helped him. When asked, “Were there any spillover effects that you didn’t expect—in some other areas of his life?” she generated this answer:
Well, just the responsibility part, knowing that this is what I have to do and this is what I’m gonna do. They give him a routine of his very own: I have to do this and then I have to do my homework and then I have to eat, you know. So I thought that was good.
When the season ended, so too did Tyrec’s participation.5 He did not play on the team as a fifth-grader. Although Ms. Taylor seemed genuinely pleased that her son had enjoyed being on the football team, she saw no reason for him to repeat the experience. She loved Tyrec, cared for him, and wanted him to be happy. Since simply stepping out the front door and joining his neighborhood friends for informal play obviously gave Tyrec much pleasure, his mother felt that was preferable to having him involved in an activity that required extensive involvement on her part. For her, as with other working-class and poor mothers, being a good mother did not include an obligation to cultivate her children’s various interests, particularly if doing so would require radically rearranging her own life.
LEARNING SKILLS FOR LIFE
Tyrec plays over and over with a relatively stable group of boys. Because the group functions without adult monitoring, he learns how to construct and sustain friendships on his own and how to organize and negotiate. By contrast, Garrett’s playmates change frequently, forming and dispersing with each new season and each new organized activity. The only constant is the presence of adults in each setting, ensuring that the players all know the rules, if not one another’s names.
Much of the informal play Tyrec and his friends engage in takes place outdoors, at times and in places mainly of their own choosing. The boys often play games they have devised themselves, complete with rules and systems of enforcement. Thus, the organization of Tyrec’s daily life provides him with opportunities to develop skills in peer mediation, conflict management, personal responsibility and strategizing. The following excerpts from field notes give a sense of this ongoing acquisition of social competencies, which involves a game between Tyrec and a group of friends, Shawn, Ken, Reggie, and Clayton:
The game was sort of like volleyball but much more complex. The players are organized in a rough circle. They volley the ball to one another. Each player must watch carefully to make sure that the person who volleyed the ball to them jumped before hitting the ball. If you hit the ball but did not jump then you are out. If you can cause a person to go out then you “gain a life.”
They often dispute whether or not the person jumped:
“Naw, man, that ain’t [it]. You did just like this.” (Shawn jumps, but his feet barely leave the ground.) “That ain’t my point.” Ken did not protest. He just said, “Okay, play it over.” Play resumes for another two minutes, then they argue again.
When the disputes evolve into prolonged arguments, the boys typically resort to some sort of informal conflict resolution. In this instance, they walk up the block to find a friend to adjudicate:
Shawn suggested that they go ask Reggie. Reggie lives in the next block to Tyrec. They put down the ball and walked to the end of Reggie’s block and they yelled to [people inside the house] . . . “Yo! Reggie–Reggie.” “Come here.” “Is Reggie up there?” Reggie walks down . . . Each person tried to tell his story at the same time. Reggie hollered, “Wait, one at a time. Ken, you first.” Ken gave his version of the story, then Tyrec gave his, and Shawn went last. It turns out Shawn was correct. Ken was out. Ken did not protest. He accepted Reggie’s ruling. He just sat on the hood of a parked car and watched. Reggie and Clayton now join in the fun.
With a new cast of players, the game resumes, interspersed with arguments, for another thirty minutes. Next, they set up a race, running to a point three blocks away, a public building with a small plot of grass outside. There, they initiate a different game (“Scram Ball”); the boys’ play continues well into the hot summer night.
As they pursue their various activities, Tyrec and his friends frequently show genuine excitement and pleasure or, sometimes, agitation. Unlike middle-class children, working-class and poor children rarely complain of being “bored.” We heard Tyrec whine about a variety of things (e.g., being restricted to inside play), but unlike middle-class children, we never heard him complain that he had nothing to do. Despite the lack of organized activities, he has no trouble filling up his schedule. He has ideas, plans, and activities to engage in with his friends. Unlike his middle-class counterparts, Tyrec needs no adult assist
ance to pursue the great majority of his plans. He doesn’t need to pressure his mother to drive him to a friend’s house or to organize a sleep-over or to take him to a store.
In sum, in the routines of his daily life, Tyrec learned important life skills not available to Garrett. He and his friends found numerous ways of entertaining themselves, showing creativity and independence. This experience was extremely valuable, but it was also distinctly different from the more bureaucratic experience of organized activities that dominated Garrett’s life. Tyrec and his peers did not get training in the enactment of organizational rules. Nor, as I show later in the book, did working-class and poor children receive the training observed in middle-class homes in how to pressure an organization to be responsive to a child’s individualized needs. In short, the leisure activities involved in concerted cultivation had the potential to offer more payoff in the world of institutions than did the spontaneous play involved in the accomplishment of natural growth.
Tyrec and his friends did not experience their leisure time as lacking any important component. In particular, they did not seem to either want or expect adult involvement in their play. Middle-class children, on the other hand, who are accustomed to their parents’ and other adults’ regular monitoring of their activities, often feel entitled to adult attention and intervention in their play. The next chapter helps make this class-related difference clear by looking at how playtime activities are approached in the white poor family of Katie Brindle.
CHAPTER 5
Children’s Play Is for
Children: Katie Brindle
Katie told me excitedly on the phone, “I’m making a doll house! My Grandmom brought me some boxes and I am making a doll house!” When I got [to the apartment], I asked her about the doll house. She shrugged her shoulders and looked discouraged. She said, “I don’t know how to make it.”
Katie picks up the box off the Formica counter [in the kitchen] and carries it high in the air over to the living room and plops it down on the rug. She says, “Mom, will you help me?” CiCi says, “Nah.” Katie is silent but disappointed.
In middle-class homes, adults treat children’s activities seriously. A request for help is not likely to be waved aside. Since parents in these homes often are preoccupied with their children’s lives, things that are important to children can easily become major events for their parents as well. This in turn increases the pressure on children to succeed (recall how Mr. Tallinger yells to “encourage” Garrett during a soccer game). Middle-class parents follow up on children’s interests, often by enrolling them in organized activities, but also by watching impromptu skits or joining in backyard ball games or playing word games with their children after dinner. Parents usually enjoy this involvement, but they also see it as part of their obligation to their children. Parental involvement is a key component of the child-rearing strategy of concerted cultivation. As a result, middle-class children gain a sense of being entitled to have adults focus attention on minute details of their lives.
The working-class and poor children we observed, mainly nine- and ten-year-olds, were still young enough to enjoy the attention of their parents. Sometimes they would request adults to pay attention to them or to assist them with their activities. As this chapter shows, adults often (but not always) decline such requests. Generally, children accept these decisions silently, as Katie does with her dollhouse project. They do not pressure adults to cater to their wishes. A significant consequence of working-class and poor parents’ view of their children’s social lives as not particularly important and their children’s acceptance of that perspective is that the children are not trained to see themselves as special and worthy of being catered to in daily life. Children appear to gain a sense of constraint, as opposed to entitlement, in their workings with the larger world.
A feeling of constraint is not the only outcome, however. When parents follow the child-rearing strategy of the accomplishment of natural growth, providing close supervision in custodial matters and granting children autonomy in leisure matters, the children appear to take real pleasure in their playtime. The lack of adult attention and involvement in their activities leaves children in working-class and poor homes free to concentrate on pleasing themselves. The children we studied tended to show more creativity, spontaneity, enjoyment, and initiative in their leisure pastimes than we saw among middle-class children at play in organized activities.
The fact that working-class and poor parents pay less attention to their children’s playtime activities does not mean that these parents don’t enjoy seeing their children have fun. But, as we saw with Tyrec Taylor, this pleasure does not necessarily prompt parents to feel that they ought to regularly provide their children with such experiences. Nor do working-class and poor parents seem to feel obligated to attend to or follow up on children’s displays of creativity. In general, children’s leisure activities are treated as pleasant but inconsequential and a separate world from those of adults. Of much greater importance are the many steps involved in getting children through the day: getting them up, showered, fed, dressed, bundled up in winter jackets, and out the door in time for school, and then at the end of the day, making sure that they get home safely, have dinner, complete their homework, and get to bed at a reasonable hour.
These tasks often take more time, are much more labor intensive and create more frustration for poor and working-class families than for their middle-class counterparts. Trying to make ends meet through public assistance requires repeated encounters with cumbersome bureaucracies. No access or only limited access to private transportation means that even routine tasks like grocery shopping may require waiting for buses; keeping appointments with health-care professionals can involve similarly complicated logistics. In addition, in settings where resources are chronically strained, little problems (e.g., broken washing machines, an unexpected delay in a cash reimbursement) can have serious, far-reaching consequences. Both poor and working-class children are aware of the constraints in their lives, but for poor children, the effects of inadequate resources are more immediate and overwhelming.
It is important to remember, though, that even where economic conditions are the same or nearly the same, individuals may respond differently. Moreover, regardless of their economic position, families (and individuals within families) differ in terms of various other limitations (and opportunities) they face. As C. Wright Mills noted, there is an interaction between social structure and biography.1 The power of Mills’s observation is confirmed by the story that unfolds in this chapter. The Brindle family faces problems—including sexual abuse, severe depression, and HIV infection—that are not class specific and that would be challenging for all individuals, regardless of the extent of their economic security. If, however, this family had had even moderate financial resources—if the social service agencies they relied on had been able to provide even the minimum level of support required to meet the family’s basic needs—the range of choices open to them would have been greater and the consequences of those choices less potentially catastrophic. Put differently, a family’s social structural location gives them a different pool of resources to address similar life problems, but, even within a similar social class location, there are some differences in the ways that people use the resources they have in hand.
THE BRINDLE FAMILY
Katie Brindle is a white nine-year-old who lives in a small three-bedroom apartment with her mother, CiCi, and her eighteen-month-old half brother Melvin (nicknamed “Melmel”). Katie’s half sister, Jenna, who is eighteen, lives with the family off and on bringing Rodeo, a six-week-old pit bull puppy with her. The Brindles’ apartment is located in a rundown building in an overwhelmingly white working-class neighborhood that is dominated by small houses. About five minutes away on foot from the residences are small stores, including an ice cream store, a twenty-four-hour convenience store, a hardware store, and a gas station. Katie attends Lower Richmond Elementary School, which is only a few block
s from her apartment building.2 The nearest grocery store, however, is about a twenty-minute bus ride away.
The Brindles’ apartment is not well maintained. The living room ceiling leaks; Ms. Brindle must periodically move the furniture to keep it out of the way of dripping water. The toilet runs constantly. The mustard-colored rag rug at the entrance to the unit has prominent dark stains on it. Roaches appear regularly; even during the day, they crawl up the walls. At night, when the bathroom light is turned on, roaches scatter, scurrying across the white tiles. These ever-present pests bother Ms. Brindle; she calls the apartment a “roach motel.” The physical disrepair of the Brindles’ unit is especially obvious because there are almost no decorations. All of the walls are bare; the kitchen counters are completely cleared off; the living room coffee table is empty. There seems to be no clutter of any kind in the apartment. Ms. Brindle insists that Katie not leave her belongings, such as her backpack or coat, lying around. Immediately upon arriving home, she is expected to put her things in their proper places. Every part of the apartment is always very tidy and clean. The smell of bleach often lingers in the air. The only noticeable decorative touch is in the kitchen. There, a frame of Ms. Brindle’s General Education Degree (GED) certificate sits on the counter. She is very proud of having earned her GED. At Christmastime, the apartment takes on a slightly festive look, with a real Christmas tree (that Ms. Brindle scrimped to buy), a string of lights hung in the kitchen, and a decorative foil picture of Santa that covers the door.
Ms. Brindle is a gaunt thirty-seven-year-old who looks worn down. Although she has a history of alcohol and drug use, recently she has been sober and clean. She was briefly married at sixteen; she is single now. Each of her three living children has a different father, none of whom Ms. Brindle married. Her first child, “Penny” (with Jenna’s father), was a victim of sudden infant death syndrome; although it has been nearly twenty years since Penny’s death, her name often comes up in conversation. Jenna was born when Ms. Brindle was nineteen. Jenna’s father has been inconsistently (and only peripherally) involved in his daughter’s life. Currently, he lives more than a thousand miles away, in Florida. Katie’s father is a man Ms. Brindle had only a brief relationship with. At first, he denied paternity; a blood test confirmed fatherhood. He pays the Department of Human Services child support to help offset the public assistance payment to the family. DHS passes along a small amount of this money to Ms. Brindle. Katie’s father refuses to see or visit with his daughter. At times, after Ms. Brindle makes repeated phone calls to his parents’ home, he sends gifts. Katie treasures the two videos he sent her as a Christmas present a few years earlier. The year of the study he did not send anything for the holidays or for Katie’s birthday. The father of the youngest child, Melmel, is the most visible and active of the three men. He routinely takes his son for visits, often a few times per month. Ms. Brindle is not currently employed. The family survives on public assistance, food stamps, and a medical assistance card. In order to have money to buy the children Christmas presents, particularly a winter coat for Katie, and a doll, Ms. Brindle says she “[let] some bills go” until after the holidays.
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