Unequal Childhoods

by Annette Lareau

  The multivariate analysis of hanging out also shows a pattern consistent with the findings of Unequal Childhoods. Children’s participation in non-organized leisure is closely associated with their mother’s level of education. Here, as in the first edition, the relationship is negative, meaning that children whose mothers have higher amounts of education tend to spend less time hanging out than children whose mothers have lower levels of education. Thus, it would appear that in middle-class families, organized activities substitute for hanging out. And, again, we found no evidence of a difference between Black and white children.

  Note: Based on coefficients from a tobit regression. These computations assume a reference child who is Black and male; whose family wealth is in the second quartile; whose father works and whose mother does not; who has the sample mean values of age and number of siblings; and whose time diaries were collected on Wednesday and Saturday. For the education charts, income is set to the second quartile; for the income calculations, education is set to high school. Source: Based on author’s analysis of PSID-CDS data.

  Figure 1. The effects of maternal education and family income on children’s participation in organized activities, for a reference child who is Black and male.

  Note: Based on coefficients from a tobit regression. These computations assume a reference child who is white and female; whose family wealth is in the second quartile; whose father works and whose mother does not; who has the sample mean values of age and number of siblings; and whose time diaries were collected on Wednesday and Saturday. For the education charts, income is set to the second quartile; for the income calculations, education is set to high school. Source: Based on author’s analysis of PSID-CDS data.

  Figure 2. The effects of maternal education and family income on children’s participation in organized activities, for a reference child who is white and female.

  In addition to the core argument concerning class differences in time use, language use, and parents’ intervention in institutions, a number of other findings are threaded through Unequal Childhoods. One is that the middle-class children have less contact with their relatives than do working-class and poor children. The ethnographic research suggests that this finding is true for both whites and Blacks. In the case of time spent with extended kin, however, the multivariate results proved somewhat surprising.6 To be sure, the level of a mother’s education is a powerful predictor: consistent with the ethnographic data, we found that as maternal education increases, contact with relatives decreases. Thus, in a representative sample of U.S. children, middle-class children spend less time with their relatives than do working-class children. However, race is also significant here: Black children are considerably more likely than their white counterparts to have contact with extended kin. Indeed, the difference between Black and white children is roughly comparable in magnitude to the difference between children whose mothers dropped out of high school, on the one hand, and those whose mothers completed a bachelor’s degree, on the other. So, although the social class pattern is sustained, the PSID-CDS data reveal a race-related difference in the amount of time white and Black children spend with their relatives, a difference that did not show up in the ethnography.

  Overall, the PSID-CDS analyses indicate that at a national level, differences between families exist that generally accord with the results of Unequal Childhoods. Children of highly educated parents and of high-income parents exhibit substantially greater involvement in organized activities than their peers whose parents are less well-educated and have lower income. Conversely, the children of less educated parents spend far more time hanging out than their counterparts with highly educated parents. These results are broadly consistent with the premise of an American middle class that tends to engage in concerted cultivation and of a working class and a poor group that tend to engage in the accomplishment of natural growth. The quantitative research also showed an interesting departure from the ethnographic work: the class pattern of time spent with relatives holds, but a significant race difference is also apparent.

  Finally, it turned out to be virtually impossible to test some of the most important findings of Unequal Childhoods by analyzing survey data. The PSID-CDS data include test scores of reading ability (for children and parents), but this is not a meaningful measure of linguistic interaction. To capture that would require regularly recording snippets of conversation as talk took place within participating families—something well beyond the capacity of even high-quality data collection efforts such as the PSID-CDS. Most important, surveys are designed to be standardized. One of the key points of Unequal Childhoods, however, is that middle-class parents customize their children’s lives via individually insignificant but cumulatively crucial interventions. And, if these interventions are successful, the children’s problems that prompted the interventions vanish. Thus, a large, representative sample of American families highlights important cultural patterns, but the mechanisms of how social class shapes daily life can remain hidden from view.

  Afterword

  The children of Unequal Childhoods have grown up. They are scattered, not only to different cities, but to different positions within our country’s system of social stratification.1 In the five years since I followed up with the study participants, the gaps between them have continued to widen. Garrett Tallinger has recently started a career as an account executive. Alexander Williams is now in medical school. Stacey Marshall has left behind her plan to become a physician and is getting a doctorate in the humanities. Not all of the middle-class youth are professionals: Melanie Handlon is a hair stylist. But in most cases, the educational training of middle-class children has steered them toward spots in the top third of the income distribution. By contrast, none of the working-class and poor youth are employed in the professional sector. Billy Yanelli is a unionized painter, though he is currently jobless. Wendy Driver is a stay-at-home mom, supported by her husband, who is in the Navy. Harold McAllister is a waiter at a chain restaurant. Tyrec Taylor is looking for work. Katie Brindle, who had moved from cleaning rooms to working at the front desk of a hotel, was laid off with the recession. Her kids are with her ex-husband’s parents, and she is now in Florida, working in a nightclub. Some of the working-class and poor youth are content and happy in their lives, but all of them face considerable economic strain. Unlike many youth from middle-class families, their opportunities for advancement are limited.

  All parents want the very best for their children. Yet parents do not have the same resources, gifts, or opportunities to give to the children they hold so close to their hearts. As much as the working-class and poor parents loved their children, not one of them was able to set their child firmly on the road to a college degree, the foundation of stable and lucrative employment. These parents were swimming against the tide. Among the girls and boys I studied, crucial pieces of the puzzle were already in place by the time they were ten years old, making it likely that they would end up in situations similar to those of their parents—and most did so. It is not impossible for individuals to significantly change their life position, but it is not common.

  In America’s meritocratic culture, the idea of a competition implies both fair play and deserved outcomes. The culture suggests that people like Alexander and Garrett study hard in college and are rewarded with good jobs, where they continue to conscientiously apply themselves and, thus, accrue more and bigger rewards. But the fact that many middle-class youth work hard should not blind us to the underlying reality that the system is not fair. It is not neutral. It does not give all children equal opportunities. Not only do schools vary, but in schools and other institutions that sort children into positions in the stratification system, some cultural practices are simply privileged more than others. Our culture’s nearly exclusive focus on individual choices renders invisible the key role of institutions. In America, social class backgrounds frame and transform individual actions. The life paths we pursue, thus, are neither equal nor freely chosen.


  APPENDIX A

  Methodology: Enduring

  Dilemmas in Fieldwork

  It is very unusual to study families in a “naturalistic fashion,” observing them within their own homes. Many people are deeply curious about the process. Space considerations preclude a detailed description, but in this appendix I describe some of the difficulties and dilemmas that arose during the study.

  DRAWING THE SAMPLE

  The family observations that form the core of the book were only one aspect of a multidimensional study that also included observations in elementary school classrooms and interviews with a large number of parents. The earliest phase of the project began in 1990, when I interviewed (with the help of an African American woman undergraduate) the parents of thirty-one children from a third-grade classroom in a public school in Lawrenceville (pseudonym), a smaller university community (population 25,000) in the Midwest. The remaining fifty-seven children were drawn from elementary schools located in a large northeastern metropolitan area. I decided to focus on third-graders because I wanted children who were young enough for their parents to still be heavily involved in managing their lives (and thus transmitting social class influences to them) and yet old enough to have some autonomy regarding their free time. I also hoped to catch children before peer-group influences became decisive factors in their lives. Initially, I had hoped to interview children and parents; but I gave up on interviewing children when normally chatty children fell silent in front of a tape recorder.1

  The decision to include both white and African American children and to define social class categories using a combination of parents’ educational levels and occupations grew out of empirical realities I encountered in Lawrenceville. Although I was originally planning to study whites across different social classes, the schools were about half white and half Black. Moreover, there had been a parental boycott by Black parents in recent years to protest insensitivity on the part of the district toward the needs of Black children. In this context, it did not make sense to study the impact of parental involvement on schooling and exclude the Black parents. Table C1, Appendix C, shows the distribution of the total sample (eighty-eight children) by race.

  MEASURING SOCIAL CLASS IN A SMALL SAMPLE

  Social scientists disagree over the proper way to measure inequality in the real world. Some take a gradational approach: on the basis of the key elements of inequality—especially occupational prestige, education, and income—they rank individuals or families in a relatively seamless hierarchy. Yet occupations differ greatly, particularly in the amount of autonomy workers enjoy, the degree to which some people supervise others, the pay, the cleanliness or dirtiness of the work performed, and the amount of prestige that the job commands. I think of these differences in nongradational terms.

  There is also disagreement over how to conceptualize classes (i.e., whether to use a Marxian and Weberian approach).2 Regardless of approach, however, most current conceptualizations deploy a relatively large number of class categories in order to attain a fine-grained differentiation of economic positions. It was impossible for me to approximate such an approach in this study. Since my purpose was to develop an intensive, realistic portrait of family life, I was able to analyze only a small number of families. Indeed, with a small sample, and with a desire to compare children across gender and race lines, adopting the fine-grained differentiation of categories characteristic of neo-Marxist and neo-Weberian studies was untenable and unreasonable.

  Initially, I settled on two class categories, guided by the populations represented in the town where I was observing. Since employers or self-employed workers were less common than others in the population as a whole, I decided to concentrate exclusively on parents who were employees rather than employers or self-employed. The question then became how to differentiate within this heterogeneous group. Various criteria have been proposed for this purpose, but authority in the workplace and “credential barriers” are the two most commonly used. The former entails the differentiation of those with supervisory or managerial authority over other workers from those with neither. The latter criterion entails separating occupations with stringent educational requirements from those with less demanding ones. On the basis of these considerations, coupled with a pragmatic assessment of what was realistically feasible, I settled on an approach that differentiated a working class and a middle class, each broadly construed. I planned to assign the families to one of these categories on the basis of discussions with each of the employed adults in which they would provide extensive information about the work they did, the nature of the organization that employed them (if there was one), and their place in it. If a family included two full-time workers with divergent class designations, I would assign the family to the higher category (i.e., “middle class”), irrespective of which family member had the defining job.

  This plan was adjusted when I discovered that in Lawrenceville schools a substantial number of children were from households supported by public assistance. To ignore them would have been to restrict the scope of the study in a somewhat arbitrary fashion. As a result, I added a group of poor families not involved in the labor market—families that are traditionally excluded in social class groupings. In the end, I worked with three categories: middle-class families, working-class families, and poor families (see Table C1 for criteria for inclusion).

  These social class categories conceal important internal variations. Both the Williams family (Black) and the Tallinger family (white) have very high incomes (i.e., annual incomes of more than $175,000). The differences in income among middle-class families, while real, did not appear to be linked to differences in child-rearing methods among middle-class parents (including the more wealthy ones) in my limited sample. Moreover, no other available data show compelling intraclass divisions. Thus, using one term—middle class—to cover the middle-class families of varying wealth seemed reasonable.

  In a somewhat different vein, Table C3 makes it clear that these differences in social class are heavily interwoven with different forms of family structure, a pattern that is also found nationally.3 Thus, the Black and white middle-class children we observed all reside with both of their biological parents. Although some of the poor children have regular contact with their fathers, none of the Black or white poor children in the intensive observations had their biological fathers at home. The working-class families were in between. This pattern raises questions of whether the pattern of concerted cultivation depends on the presence of a two-parent marriage. The scope of the sample cannot provide a satisfactory answer to this question. Still, indications are that family structure, while it may influence aspects of the cultural logic of child rearing, does not determine it. For example, in the sample of thirty-six middle-class families, there were three single parents. These single-parent families clearly used the cultural logic of concerted cultivation. The parents did complain in interviews, however, that being a single parent hampered their ability to enroll their children into as many organized activities as they wished. National data reveal that children in two-parent homes spend more time in organized activities than do children in single-parent homes.4

  CHOOSING THE SCHOOLS

  In an ideal world, I would have found schools and neighborhoods that were racially integrated and integrated by social class. In reality, of course, American children live in settings that tend to be homogenous by race and, to a lesser extent, by social class, and they typically go to schools that are similarly homogenous.5 In the end, I opted for schools that were racially integrated but were relatively homogenous by social class.6 After I had identified a group of schools that met my basic criteria, I used informal networks to meet with high-level administrators in the relevant school districts. These administrators selected the final sites from the list of choices I presented, and, on my behalf, they also made the first overtures to the principals involved. Detailed descriptions of Lower Richmond public elementary school and Swan public elementary school (
the sources for almost all the children discussed at length in the book), are presented in Chapter 2.

  From December 1993 to June 1994, I observed at least twice a week (frequently more often) in a third-grade classroom at Lower Richmond. I began similar observations in a third-grade classroom at Swan in April 1994. A research assistant continued at Swan weekly, observing the now fourth-grade children from September through December. In addition, I went back to each school occasionally when the children were in fourth grade; in fifth grade the research assistants and I attended graduation.