Unequal Childhoods

by Annette Lareau

  Over in Lower Richmond, Tyrec echoed Harold’s complaints. He felt that while he was out driving, he was a magnet for police:

  The cops, they . . . kept giving me tickets, trying to mess my license up, so I was like [I’ll] just sell the car. I don’t know—it’s just up here they really like tend to mess with people. I’d rather catch the bus than keep having to go to traffic court and all that.

  The white working-class and poor young men in the study also complained bitterly about the police. Billy acknowledged, “I mean, these kids around here are bad, half of them aren’t going anywhere.” Still, he was insistent that inequity and corruption were interwoven with police work in his neighborhood:

  (Extremely serious tone) They’re crooked. I never committed any crimes, half of us didn’t. But we all get locked up because the cops don’t like us around here. It’s a fact. They love locking us up.

  Although quite different from young people getting “locked up,” there were signs of variation in how storekeepers treated young men in public spaces. As noted above, although Alexander is pursuing a pre-medical curriculum at an Ivy League school, he was regularly treated with suspicion in stores. He reported, “Sometimes I play games with them and [stand] in a not very visible place in the store and someone will come to ‘put something away.’ ” “My parents have always talked to me about that kind of thing,” he told me and, in a tone of resignation, said he tries to “just ignore it.” In this regard, his experience is similar to others from less affluent social classes. Harold, who works full-time and has never been “locked up,” sounded equally resigned when he talked about being harassed by the police: “You can’t dwell on it, though. It’s going to happen regardless.”31 White middle-class youth did not raise the issue of treatment by the police. When I queried them, they described the police as benign or as positive forces in their lives.

  Awareness of Social Class

  Despite signs that the middle-class youth had benefited in critical ways from the social class position of their parents, these young adults appeared largely unaware of the advantages that had been bestowed upon them. Instead, they stressed how hard they had worked, implying that they thought they had earned on their own the position of privilege they held. Also, they were very focused on their position only vis-à-vis others in their own neighborhood or school. They seemed unaware that there were youth living less than an hour away who had very different lives. Although the degree to which the middle-class youths’ life paths had been structured by their class position was not clear to them, in contrast, the working-class and poor youth and their families were keenly aware of neighborhoods where life was different.32 Many dreamt of moving to the suburbs someday. Billy directly observed the impact of middle-class neighborhoods on life chances. In his interview, he described a friend who had moved to a middle-class suburban community 20 minutes from Lower Richmond. Before the move, his buddy was “going nowhere”:

  I had a friend who I grew up [with] here that lived here and then moved up there. He’s a whole different person now that he moved up there. He’s going to college, he dressed different, he’s nicer than the people who live around here.

  Billy was convinced that it was the move to a school in a middle-class neighborhood that had made the difference:

  If he lived down here, he wouldn’t really have made it through high school. Because I went to high school with him, at Lower Richmond. And he was going nowhere. He was in the lunchroom with me every day. And as soon as he moved, he changed.

  Witnessing this transformation firsthand made an impression on Billy. When I asked him if there was anything he wished had been different in his childhood, he said, “I wish I lived in a different neighborhood. Up there [where his friend now lived] somewhere.” He then added:

  They seem like better people than us a little bit. I think they have it a lot more easier. They have it a lot more easier in terms of life.

  Billy’s comments show his awareness of middle-class pathways, and of the difference between his life and the lives of middle-class young adults. Working-class and poor young adults appeared to have absorbed some of the “hidden injuries of class,” including feelings of a lack of dignity and respect associated with their social position.33 (Note that Billy has internalized the idea that middle-class people are “better people than us.”) Put differently, while there is ample evidence that the rules of institutions are not neutral and that they create important advantages for some groups and not others, the ways in which cultural practices comply with institutional rules is often obscured. The ideology of individual accomplishment leads middle-class young adults to see their actions as tied to their own accomplishments. (As Alexander Williams put it, “I know that I worked really hard.”) Although they were vaguely aware of their resource-rich family backgrounds, the middle-class young adults in this study did not attribute any of their success to the pure luck of having been born into an advantaged class. Instead, they focused on their own hard work and individual achievement.34 They could not see the social class privileges that were facilitating their success, every step of the way. Not surprisingly, they mistakenly thought that what was hidden did not exist.

  SECTION 4. HOW CLASS CONTINUED TO MATTER:

  NEGOTIATING WITH INSTITUTIONS—SUPERFICIALLY

  SIMILAR, DEEPLY DIVERGENT

  At a superficial level there were similarities in the approaches the middle-class, working-class, and poor parents took as they tried to help their children. Like all parents, the working-class and poor parents wanted their children to be successful in life, which now often requires getting a college education. These parents saw themselves as being helpful and as providing their children with assistance and intervention, including in school affairs. They were affronted by any suggestion that they typically do not “fight for their children” with respect to education. Like the middle-class parents, they were concerned with their children’s progress and success in school.

  At a deeper level, however, there was a class divergence in informal information about how institutions, including schools, function. For instance, what parents knew about the schedule and timing of institutional deadlines, what skills they had for achieving the goal of a given intervention, and what resources they could draw on to make sure their children’s interests were best served were all shaped by class position.35 These and other important class differences in how families negotiate with institutions have not been sufficiently examined in the social science literature.

  Middle-class parents, especially the mothers, appeared to embrace the idea that it was their responsibility to carefully manage every step of their children’s transition to college. They gathered information, reminded their adolescents to sign up for tests, and watched for potential problems. By contrast, although working-class parents considered themselves as being involved and helpful, what they meant by being helpful seems different from what middle-class parents meant. Working-class and poor parents did not appear to see continuous monitoring as critically important. They gathered information, but they did so on an ad hoc basis. This is reasonable, given that they perceived their children’s fate as being tied much less to their actions as parents and much more to the expertise of the professionals who staff institutions such as schools. With the exception of the financial costs involved, these parents generally knew little about the transition from high school to college. Their awareness of their child’s SAT scores, the names of colleges the child visited, and the relative ranking of colleges was strikingly vague compared to that of middle-class parents. Finally, there were differences across the families in how the young people were perceived. Both parents and children in working-class and poor families considered post-adolescent children “grown.” By contrast, in middle-class families, the young adults seemed to still rely heavily on their parents and, in crucial ways, the parents often continued to treat them as children.36

  Informal Knowledge: Middle-Class Families

  High schools encourage college prepar
ation, applications, and enrollment, yet they vary in how much help they provide students with these tasks. Private schools and elite suburban schools that enroll upper-middle-class youth often give intensive assistance with college applications; at large urban high schools, assistance is far more limited.37 Even at elite suburban schools with strong counseling programs, however, the information and assistance provided concerning higher education options is incomplete. Schools invite and expect parent involvement in many important areas of their children’s schooling. In this institutional context, parents who have more information and who presume that they should intervene in schooling are able to transmit important advantages to their children.

  The follow-up interviews revealed that the families had very different levels of informal information about higher education systems. In the middle-class families, the college application process was a major life event for the youth and for the parents, a time filled with excitement, anxiety, uncertainty, and (often) conflict.38 The drama unfolded over many months and had many components: gathering information about colleges, visiting colleges, narrowing the list of schools to which the youth would apply, writing essays, submitting applications, waiting for the decisions, receiving the decisions, processing disappointments, and deciding where to go. Alexander, for instance, visited Brown, Columbia, Haverford, Washington University, Cornell, and Dartmouth before he settled on applying for an “early decision” at Columbia. Garrett had to adjust to the major disappointment of not being recruited for Stanford’s basketball team; Stacey struggled to accept her parents’ decision that she could not attend her first-choice college. In the follow-up interviews, middle-class parents and kids made it clear how intensively parents had been involved in helping their children find, apply to, and enroll in college. Parents were acutely aware of differences between community colleges and four-year schools, as well as the rankings of various colleges. By contrast, in the interviews with working-class and poor parents and young adults who considered but did not go to college, these details seemed elusive.

  Middle-class parents’ informal knowledge also included a detailed awareness of how middle and secondary schools were supposed to work. For example, when Melanie was in middle school, her parents were aware of the expectation of regular communication for students with learning disabilities through the development of an Individualized Educational Plan (IEP). Melanie’s father critically assessed the actions of educators in light of his detailed knowledge of middle-school functioning:

  Her grades were getting worse and worse, she was struggling more and more. The harder the work got the more we saw her struggling. . . . First we got a letter in the mail that Melanie was going to be held back [after seventh grade]. I said wait a second, I haven’t heard anything on an IEP, I haven’t heard anything. We went through this whole song and dance. Why is this the first I’ve heard about anything? You are not going to devastate this girl. . . . You already broke her, you are not going to devastate her, [it is] not going to happen. . . . These folks are paid to be professionals . . . to recognize learning disabilities. Where the heck were they?

  Note that Mr. Handlon does not say that the teachers are biased against his daughter or that they do not like her. Rather, he frames his concern in terms of the failure of trained educators to meet their professional obligation.

  The middle-class youths’ parents had been to college themselves. They had more extensive experience with the higher education system as well as access to an array of information through their informal networks with friends, relatives, and co-workers who had also been to college. Ms. Tallinger reported a tip she learned from “a very good friend” who worked in an Ivy League admissions office:

  One of the things I did know was that the more competitive colleges look at what is available in a high school, and if you’re not taking the most rigorous of what’s available, that’s a strike against you in terms of their evaluating your transcript. And so I wanted Garrett . . . to take the most rigorous that [he’s] possibly capable of taking.

  She also noted that other parents sometimes supplied helpful information:

  And then [I was] talking to some other parents that had taken their daughter on a tour of Yale and Duke. He told a funny story of visiting Duke and [a] question to the person guiding the admissions discussions. The question from the student was “Well, is it better to take Honors Calculus and get a B? Or take regular calculus and get an A?” He says, “It’s better to take Honors Calculus and get an A.”

  Still, U.S. high schools offer a bewildering array of courses and hazy and incomplete information about higher education. They encourage parent involvement, but rather than rewarding parents who defer to professionals (as many working-class and poor parents do), schools legitimate and reward parents who aggressively monitor and intervene in their children’s schooling (as many middle-class parents do). Consider the following actions Ms. Tallinger described to me during her interview. Armed with the information about honors calculus and understanding her role as a parent to involve intervening in school when her child’s interests were at stake, she talked to the school counselors about Garrett taking honors courses. Moreover, when it appeared that a scheduling conflict would eliminate Garrett’s access to an advanced course, Ms. Tallinger went to the school and “fought” with educators, insisting that AP calculus and AP literature not be offered during the same period, thus ensuring that her son (and other high-achievers) would not be prevented from “maximizing their opportunities.” When Garrett applied to college, he had AP classes in three fields and honors classes in two other areas.

  Middle-class parents’ knowledge of the higher education system, including courses, grades, and financial aid, combined with their own real-world experiences as degree-holders, also affected the guidance they gave their children. The Marshalls, for instance, knew that Stacey longed to go to an Ivy League college where she had been recruited by the basketball coach. Still, they said no when the school accepted her. Ms. Marshall explained the decision as an effort to help her daughter avoid accumulating debt at a young age. Stacey planned to be a doctor, so her education would necessarily include medical school, a huge expense. Why add undergraduate costs to that burden, her parents reasoned, when a well-regarded public university was offering Stacey a full scholarship? The Marshalls were “happy” with Stacey’s decision to attend University of Maryland; its academic program was strong and the women’s basketball team had a solid reputation. As Ms. Marshall said, “It is a challenging school; she is being challenged.” She also confided that she was very worried when Stacey received two C’s in biology during her freshman year (“I feel that she has a tough road ahead of her”). This concern indicates that she knew that such grades could impede Stacey’s acceptance to medical school. Hence, in guiding her daughter’s educational career, Ms. Marshall drew on extensive informal information about the financial aid systems at the undergraduate and graduate level, academic challenges at different kinds of colleges, colleges’ national rankings, and admissions criteria for medical school.39 Public high schools provide only part of this information to parents and students. The middle-class parents were able to supplement the school-supplied information with their own experience, the knowledge of people in their social network, and knowledge they acquired by aggressively collecting it through interactions with educators.40

  Like their parents, the middle-class youth had very detailed information about higher education institutions. For example, Garrett knew that despite his high GPA, he would not get into Stanford without being recruited by the basketball team; Alexander understood the intricacies of the early-decision application process; and Stacey knew what expenses her financial aid package covered and what amount remained that her parents would need to pay. By contrast, although Wendy aspired to attend college, she seemed to have trouble keeping the names of various colleges straight; she also did not know the name of her learning disability. (She said, “It is L.D. [for] learning disability.”) Nor could the worki
ng-class and poor youth rattle off their SAT scores (if they had ever taken them) and GPAs with the speed and ease of the middle-class youth.

  Informal Knowledge: Working-Class and Poor Families

  Parents in working-class and poor families saw themselves as having an active role in their children’s school careers. In addition, the mothers of young people in the study who dropped out of high school were deeply upset and agitated by their children’s actions. Thus, there was a superficial similarity across families in the parents’ concern about school and “involvement” in schooling. But the follow-up study also revealed that the working-class and middle-class parents appeared to have different visions of what it means to be “informed” and “helpful.” For many working-class and poor youth, including Billy, Katie, Harold, and others, going to college was never a serious consideration. Their focus was on graduating from high school (or earning a GED). Among those who did pursue higher education, informal knowledge about schooling options was limited. Working-class parents and youth, for example, used the term “college” to include both proprietary vocational training programs and research universities. Unlike middle-class parents and kids, these families had a vague understanding of the complexities of higher-education systems. Among educators, a GED is widely seen as inferior to a high school diploma, particularly in a competitive labor market; some consider it more of a certificate than a diploma. Similarly, a bachelor’s degree is accorded much higher status than a high school degree. The working-class and poor families did not have this kind of hierarchical notion of the value of a diploma. For them, all diplomas were equal. Mr. Yanelli had been disappointed when his son dropped out of high school, but the arrival of Billy’s GED was met with tears of joy. Ms. Yanelli recalled: