Unequal Childhoods

by Annette Lareau

  Overall, the routine rituals of family life are not equally legitimized in the broader society. Parents’ efforts to reason with children (even two-year-olds) are seen as more educationally valuable than parents’ use of directives. Spending time playing soccer or baseball is deemed by professionals as more valuable than time spent watching television. Moreover, differences in the cultural logic of child rearing are attached to unequal currency in the broader society. The middle-class strategy of concerted cultivation appears to have greater promise of being capitalized into social profits than does the strategy of the accomplishment of natural growth found in working-class and poor homes. Alexander Williams’s vocabulary grew at home, in the evenings, as he bantered with his parents about plagiarism and copyright as well as about the X-Men. Harold McAllister, Billy Yanelli, and Wendy Driver learned how to manage their own time, play without the direction of adults, and occupy themselves for long periods of time without being bored. Although these are important life skills, they do not have the same payoff on standardized achievement tests as the experiences of Alexander Williams.

  These potential benefits for middle-class children, and costs for working-class and poor children, are necessarily speculative, since at the end of the study, the children were still in elementary school. Still, there are important signs of hidden advantages being sown at early ages. The middle-class children have extensive experience with adults in their lives with whom they have a relatively contained, bureaucratically regulated, and somewhat superficial relationship. As children spend eight weeks playing soccer, baseball, basketball, and other activities, they meet and interact with adults acting as coaches, assistant coaches, car pool drivers, and so on. This contact with relative strangers, although of a different quality than contact with cousins, aunts, and uncles, provides work-related skills. For instance, as Garrett shakes the hand of a stranger and looks him or her in the eye, he is being groomed, in an effortless fashion, for job interviews he will have as an adult (employment experts stress the importance of good eye contact). In the McAllister home, family members have great affection and warmth toward one another, but they do not generally look each other in the eye when they speak; this training is likely to be a liability in job interviews. In settings as varied as health care and gymnastics, middle-class children learn at a young age to be assertive and demanding. They expect, as did Stacey Marshall, for institutions to be responsive to them and to accommodate their individual needs. By contrast, when Wendy Driver is told to hit the boy who is pestering her (when the teacher isn’t looking) or Billy Yanelli is told to physically defend himself, despite school rules, they are not learning how to make bureaucratic institutions work to their advantage. Instead, they are being given lessons in frustration and powerlessness.

  WHY? THE SEARCH FOR EXPLANATIONS

  14

  As I discuss shortly, some commentators today decry the “overscheduled” lives of children; they long for the days when most children had unstructured lives, filled with informal play. But this is a romanticized view of the family in the past. Although there have always been important social class differences in childhood, for much of U.S. history, children played an important economic role in family life. For example, in colonial America, a boy of six or seven was expected to move out of his parents’ home to live with a skilled craftsman as an apprentice. As the country gradually industrialized, children’s small, “nimble fingers” were useful in factory work.15 Children also were economic assets on family farms. According to a 1920 study in North Dakota children helped herd cattle and dig holes for fence posts. They also had daily responsibilities, as this description of a nine-year-old boy’s chores shows: “Built the fires in the morning, swept the floor of a two-room house, and brought in fuel and water; in addition, before he made a two-mile trip to school, he helped feed stock (five horses and twelve cows) and chopped wood; in the evening he did the chores and washed dishes.”16 Children, especially working-class and poor children, also helped with the informal paid labor their mothers did, such as laundry and “sewing, embroidering, flower making, and tag tying”; most older siblings looked after younger siblings, as well. Children did have some time for unstructured leisure, but it was limited.

  Viviana Zelizer shows that through the end of the nineteenth century and into the early decades of the twentieth century, these practices were accompanied by beliefs supporting the importance of children working hard. If anything, the concern was that without specific training in “useful work,” children might grow up to be “paupers and thieves.”17 In children’s books and magazines, in which stories stressed “the virtues of work, duty, and discipline,” Zelizer notes, “The standard villain . . . was an idle child.”18 The period after 1920 saw a dramatic decline in children’s economic contributions, however, as child labor laws were put into place and a new vision of the “economically useless but sentimentally priceless child” took hold.19

  Thus, although a definitive account of historical changes in children’s leisure practices remains to be written, it appears that it was for only a relatively brief historical period that children were granted long stretches of leisure time with unstructured play. In the period after World War II, white and Black children were permitted to play for hours on end with other neighborhood children, after school, during evenings, and on weekends. Other than going to church, the few organized activities children participated in (e.g., music lessons or Scouts) began at a later age than is typical today. The “institutionalization of children’s leisure” and the rise of concerted cultivation more generally are recent developments.20 Today’s parents are not transmitting practices they learned in their families of origin. Parents of the eighty-eight children in our study were born in the 1950s and 1960s. None reported having had a very active schedule of organized activities as a child. Rather, the middle-class parents in this study and, possibly throughout the country, appear to have been raised according to the logic of the accomplishment of natural growth.

  In attempting to understand this historical shift, particularly the institutionalization of children’s leisure and the emphasis on “intensive mothering,” commentators often point to the impact of modern life, especially the impact of increasing “rationalization.”21 This view, termed the “McDonaldization of society” by George Ritzer, finds an increasing standardization of daily life, with an emphasis on efficiency, predictability, control, and calculability.22 Ritzer notes that these principles from the world of fast food have been adapted to other parts of social life, including Kidsports Fun and Fitness Club, Kinder Care, Kampgrounds of America, Toys ‘R’ Us, and other stores.23 Family life, too, is becoming increasingly rationalized, being

  invaded by not only public schools, the courts, social service workers, gardeners, housekeepers, day-care providers, lawyers, doctors, televisions, frozen dinners, pizza delivery, manufactured clothing, and disposable diapers, but also, and more critically, by the ideology behind such institutions, persons, and products. They bring with them . . . the logic of . . . impersonal, competitive, contractual, commodified, efficient, profit-maximizing, self-interested relations.24

  Busy affluent parents can hire chauffeurs to take children to their organized activities, hire educators at “Learning Centers” in shopping malls to help children do homework and improve in school, and hire personal shoppers to help buy and wrap holiday gifts. The services available for birthday parties (e.g., a special room at McDonald’s, an overnight at a science museum, or a professional party coordinator) are signs of the increasing rationalization of family life.

  The rationalization of children’s leisure is evident in the proliferation of organized activities with a predictable schedule, delivering a particular quantity of experience within a specific time period, under the control of adults. That children’s time use has shifted from unstructured play to organized activities does not mean that families no longer have fun during their leisure hours. Many find the time spent together during soccer and baseball games,
for example, to be very enjoyable. The point is that areas of family life are growing more systematic, predictable, and regulated than they have been in the recent past. Forces that have converged to bring about this change include increasing concerns about the safety of children who play unsupervised on local streets, rises in employment (resulting in adults being at home less), and a decline in the availability of neighborhood playmates due to a dropping birth rate and the effects of suburbanization, especially the increased size of homes and decreased density of housing.25

  Greater emphasis on the use of reasoning in the home, particularly as a form of discipline, as well as interventions in institutions, can also be seen as a form of rationalization, particularly the well-documented trend of “scientific motherhood.” Still, any analysis of the rise of concerted cultivation must also, I believe, grapple with the changing position of the United States in the world economy, and the accompanying decline in highly paid manufacturing jobs and increase in less desirable service-sector jobs. This restructuring makes it very likely that when today’s children are adults, their standard of living will be lower than that of their parents. It means that there will be fewer “good jobs” and more “bad jobs,” and that the competition for them will be intense. Moreover, since children must be successful in school to gain access to desirable positions, many middle-class parents are anxious to make sure their children perform well academically. Institutional gatekeepers, such as college admissions officers, applaud extracurricular activities. Thus, many parents see children’s activities as more than interesting and enjoyable pastimes. They also provide potential advantages for children in the sorting process.

  All of these factors may contribute to the rise of a new standard of child rearing in the middle class. As Hays shows, this new standard is legitimated in a variety of ways.26 Professionals actively support advancement of children’s creative and leisure talents, cognitive growth, and school performance through the active involvement of their parents as cultivators. The older logic of child rearing, the accomplishment of natural growth, receives less institutional support. If this analysis is correct, if there has been a shift in the cultural repertoires of child rearing, and if that change has been legitimated, why is there a class difference in child-rearing strategies? Why doesn’t everyone raise their children the same way?

  THE ROLE OF RESOURCES

  Parents’ economic resources helped create the class differences in child rearing discussed in this book. Children’s activities were expensive. A $25 enrollment fee, which middle-class parents dismissed as “insignificant,” “modest,” or “negligible,” was a formidable expense for all poor families and many in the working class. The enrollment fee was just the tip of the iceberg. Many activities also required special clothing. Stacey Marshall needed gymnastic leotards as well as a training warm-up suit. She had special bags to carry her equipment to and from the gym, and a balance beam at home. Participating in tournaments required paying special fees. Children’s hectic schedules increased the number of meals eaten out, as the families raced from one event to the next. Tournaments out of the local area resulted in special fees as well as hotel bills and restaurant bills. There were special end-of-season events, banquets, and gifts for the coaches. There were assorted hidden costs, such as car maintenance and gas. In 1994, the Tallingers estimated the cost (including all of the factors listed above, except car repair) of Garrett’s activities at $4,000 annually; nor was that figure unusual.27 Thus, in addition to disposable income for the cost of lessons and activities, families usually needed other advantages, such as reliable private transportation and flexibility in work schedules to be able to get children to events. These resources were disproportionately concentrated in middle-class families.

  Differences in educational resources are important as well. Middle-class parents’ superior levels of education gave them larger vocabularies and more knowledge. More education facilitated concerted cultivation, particularly with respect to interventions in institutions outside the home. As I have shown, poor and working-class parents had difficulty understanding key terms bantered about by professionals, such as “tetanus shot” or “cavity.” Middle-class parents’ educational backgrounds also gave them the confidence to criticize educational professionals and intervene in school matters. For working-class and poor parents, educators were social superiors. For middle-class parents, they were equals or subordinates. In addition, research indicates that middle-class parents tend to be more sensitive to shifts in child-rearing standards than do working-class parents, probably because middle-class parents tend to be more attuned to the advice of professionals.28

  Others have shown that parents’ occupations and working conditions, particularly the complexity of their work, influence important aspects of their child-rearing beliefs.29 In this study, there were not only suggestions that parents’ work mattered, but also signs that the experience of adulthood itself influenced how individuals conceived of childhood. Middle-class parents, spared severe economic struggles, often were preoccupied with the pleasures and difficulties of their work lives.30 They tended to view childhood as an opportunity for play, but also as a chance to develop talents and skills that could be valuable in the self-actualization processes that take place in adulthood. Mr. Tallinger, for example, saw implications for the world of work in his assessment of the value of sports for Garrett, noting that playing soccer taught his son to be “hard nosed” and “competitive.” Ms. Williams, similarly, mentioned the value of Alexander learning to work with others on a team. Middle-class parents were very aware of the “declining fortunes” of the middle class and of the country as a whole at the close of the twentieth century. They worried about their own economic futures and those of their children.31 This uncertainty made them feel it was important that children be developed in a variety of ways in order to enhance their future possibilities.

  The experiences and concerns that shaped the views of the working-class and poor parents had little in common with those of the middle-class parents. For working-class families, it was the deadening quality of work and the press of economic shortages that defined their experience of adulthood and influenced their vision of childhood. For poor families, it was dependence on public assistance and severe economic shortages that most affected their views about adulthood and childhood. Working-class and poor families had many more worries about basic issues: how to endure food shortages, get children to doctors despite a lack of reliable transportation, purchase clothing, and manage other life necessities. Thinking back over their childhoods, these adults acknowledged periods of hardship but also recalled times without the kinds of worries that troubled them at present. Many appeared to want their own youngsters to spend their time being happy and relaxed. There would be plenty of time for their children to face the burdens of life when they reached adulthood. In summary, then, parents’ conceptions of adulthood and childhood appeared to be closely connected to their lived experiences. The factors influencing parents’ child-rearing strategies thus seem to go beyond the role of education per se to encompass these adults’ occupational and economic experiences as well.

  In fact, it was the interweaving of life experiences and resources, including parents’ economic resources, occupational conditions, and educational backgrounds, that seemed to be most important in leading middle-class parents to engage in concerted cultivation and working-class and poor families to engage in the accomplishment of natural growth. Still, the structural location of families did not determine their child-rearing practices. The agency of actors and the indeterminacy of social life are inevitable. It is important to keep in mind this “relative autonomy” of individuals in the enactment of social structural position and biographical outcomes.32

  Aside from economic and social resources, there are other factors that might influence child-rearing practices by social class. Indeed, one might imagine two different scenarios: if the resources of the poor and working-class families were transformed overnight so that
they equaled those of the middle-class families, would their cultural logic of child rearing shift as well? Or are there cultural attitudes and beliefs that are somewhat independent of economic and social resources that are influencing parents’ practices here? Unfortunately, the size and scope of this study do not permit a clear answer to this question. On the one hand, some poor and working-class parents reported that they wanted their children to have more organized activities, expressed a belief in the importance of listening to children, and felt it was important for them as parents to play an active role in their children’s schooling. In these families, the parents’ practices appeared to be directly limited by their resources. On the other hand, in other families, parents did not view children’s participation in activities as particularly important. Ms. Taylor, for example, “prayed” that Tyrec would not want to play football again; she did not see his involvement in the sport as helping him in any special way.

  Other parents were even more dubious. For example, during the parent interviews, the research assistants and I described the real-life schedules of two children (using data from the twelve families we were observing). One schedule was similar to that of Alexander Williams: restricted television, required reading, and many organized activities, including piano lessons (for analytical purposes, the child was described as disliking his piano lessons and not being permitted to quit, neither of which was true for Alexander). Some working-class and poor parents found this scenario unappealing.33 One white, poor mother complained:

  I think he, I think, uh, I think he wants more. I think he doesn’t enjoy doing what he’s doing half of the time (light laughter). I think his parents are too strict. And he’s not a child (laughter).

  In addition, even parents who remarked that this kind of schedule would pay off “job-wise” when the child was an adult, still expressed serious reservations, as these comments (each from different interviews) show: