Unequal Childhoods

by Annette Lareau

  47. Ms. Yanelli’s story went further:

  MS. YANELLI: He [the principal] said to me, “You and your son get out.” And he walked up, and he opened the door for us to leave, and there were like five other people sitting there who he had called down. See he was allowed to call in who he wanted to call in, but we weren’t allowed to call who we wanted to call. And he opened the door, and as we were walking by, he said to me, “I hope you and your fucking son croak”—or die, or something, one of them. And when he said it, my whole body started shaking. And my knees shaking. And I was like, “I don’t believe this man just said this to me.” And people heard him say it. They heard him say it. And they didn’t care. Like the secretaries that were working there.

  ANNETTE: Did they look up at all?

  MS. YANELLI: Yeah, they looked up and they looked away. And we went storming out. So then I came home and I called the school and I said, “I had a tape recorder and I just want you to know that what that principal said to me, I know he said. It’s on tape.” Which was really stupid of me because . . . I was trying to bluff him, but I forgot I went through that metal detector.

  48. This district employee also raised the possibility of Billy quitting school. Ms. Yanelli recalled, “She said, ‘Would you like your son to quit school?’ And he was almost at the sixteen-year-old point at that time, and I said, ‘Yeah. Yeah. I would rather him be done at that point.’ ” See Michelle Fine, Framing Dropouts, on how educators “push out” some youth, encouraging them to drop out.

  49. Quantitative studies are unable to differentiate the level of detail that would illuminate this pattern, but there is evidence that parents with more education are more likely to initiate contact with schools and be more active in school matters. See Kathleen Hoover-Dempsey and Howard M. Sandler, “Why Do Parents Become Involved?” Ethnographic research also shows considerably less involvement by working-class and poor parents than middle-class parents. See Amanda Lewis and Tyrone Forman, “Contestation or Collaboration?”; Annette Lareau, Home Advantage; Fiona Devine, Class Practices; Val Gillies, “Teaching and Learning Guide for Childrearing, Class, and the New Politics of Parenting.” See also Gill Crozier and Jane Davies, “Hard to Reach Parents or Hard to Reach Schools?” Note that in addition to class differences in parents’ actions, educators may differ in the degree to which they perceive parents are powerful; educators’ perceptions of parents may shape how responsive educators feel that they need to be. I am grateful to Lisa Smulyan for this point.

  50. Mr. Taylor suspected that Tyrec might have been selling marijuana at this point.

  51. Put differently, it was not Ms. Taylor’s aspirations that impeded her involvement, but her class position. If she had had more knowledge about how to intervene more in high school to facilitate college enrollment, it is likely that she would have done so. Paul Attewell and David Lavin show, in Passing the Torch, that child-rearing practices change among women who are the first in their families to graduate from college (particularly compared to comparable women who do not attend college). They show that college graduates are more likely to read to their children and become more involved in schooling. Thus, there appears to be something transformative about a college degree in altering the contours of motherhood. In my study, all of the middle-class mothers continued their pattern of heavy involvement even as their children became young adults. The inexhaustible demands on mothers to help their children are beyond the scope of this piece, but see Sharon Hays, Cultural Contradictions of Motherhood; Alison I. Griffith and Dorothy E. Smith, Mothering for Schooling; Margaret Nelson, Parenting Out of Control; Demie Kurz, “I Trust Them but I Don’t Trust Them”; Diane Reay, “Doing the Dirty Work of Social Class?”; Margaret Nelson and Anita Ilta Garey, Who’s Watching? There are growing signs of efforts to have middle-class parents “let go” of such high levels of involvement. Some colleges, for example, attempt to restrict parent involvement in the higher education process. See Jennifer Jacobson, “Help Not Wanted”; Eric Wills, “Parent Trap.”

  52. Among the working-class and poor parents whose children dropped out of high school or did not persist in college, only Ms. Brindle did not display signs of heartbreak during the interview. Katie had a serious drug problem, had a baby at a young age, and had difficulty bonding with that child. In this context, dropping out of high school was only one of a host of very pressing problems. Also, in both the original and follow-up studies, during interviews, Ms. Brindle often shared very painful experiences, but her affect was more flat than that of other parents. In the follow-up interview, though, she made it very clear that she fervently hoped Katie would go back to school to get her GED.

  53. Ms. Handlon and I spoke in August. At the beginning of the interview, I said that I was trying to catch the students in the summer. Ms. Handlon, blushing and looking embarrassed, said, “before they go back to college.” She appeared to be profoundly distressed that Melanie was not in college. Children’s failure to enroll and persist in college is likely to be disappointing to all parents, but it is especially stressful for parents living in middle-class communities where college attendance is so common that children who do not attend college are stigmatized. Since college enrollment remains relatively unusual for working-class and poor young adults, parents in these families were disappointed, but, unlike Ms. Handlon, they did not appear to feel humiliated. A national study found that dropout rates vary by family income: of the children who dropped out of high school, the distribution was 2% of high-income students, 4% of middle-income students, and 8% of low-income students. U.S. Department of Education, “Event Dropout Rates.”

  54. Although Mr. Handlon had a master’s degree and Ms. Handlon had only two years at a community college, she was the one who took a leadership role in managing Melanie’s schooling. It is possible that, as Melissa Wilde pointed out (personal communication, October 25, 2010), Ms. Handlon was “the least middle class of all of the middle-class parents” and lacked the requisite knowledge, dispositions, and other forms of cultural capital to manage successfully Melanie’s school career. Also, regardless of social class, as the sociology of motherhood literature has pointed out, mothers are often blamed for their children’s behaviors. See Anita Garey and Terry Arendell, “Children, Work, and Family.”

  55. A National Center for Education Statistics report, for example, shows that among youth who aspired to a college degree when they were high school sophomores, only one-third of those with at least one parent with a college degree were deemed “highly qualified” for college, and a significant number did not end up attending a four-year institution. See U.S. Department of Education, “Access to Post-Secondary Education for 1992 High School Graduates.” Some critics place the figure much lower.

  56. The literature is filled with debates on the genetic contribution to intelligence, the role of “nature and nurture” in development, the proper definition and measurement of intelligence, and the contribution of schools and families to outcomes. A discussion of these factors is beyond the scope of this chapter. See Judith Rich Harris, Nurture Assumption.

  57. See Kathryn M. Neckerman, Social Inequality; Grusky and Szelényi, The Inequality Reader; Aaron M. Pallas and Jennifer L. Jennings, “Cumulative Knowledge about Cumulative Advantage”; Lareau and Conley, Social Class; Bill Keller and the New York Times, Class Matters; Future of Children, Opportunity in America.

  58. See, for example, the influential work of Michèle Lamont, Money, Morals, and Manners; Dignity of Working Men; Lamont and Marcel Fournier, eds., Cultivating Differences; David J. Harding, Lamont, and Mario Luis Small, eds., Reconsidering Culture and Poverty. See also Pierre Bourdieu, Distinction.

  59. See Pallas and Jennings, “Cumulative Knowledge about Cumulative Advantage.”

  60. Stacey’s success also could be associated with her family background, but the concrete actions her parents took would remain unclear. There are methodological constraints associated with using fixed-response surveys to study the type and timing of interv
entions middle-class parents undertake. These constraints account for why social scientists so often try to understand a variety of social outcomes by conducting studies of grade point averages, verbal test scores, hours watching television, time parents spend reading to a child, and parents’ attendance at parent-teacher conferences. The problem, however, as we have seen, is that many of the things that middle-class parents do are difficult to capture on surveys.

  61. See pictures of art work in Peter Demerath’s Producing Success, which provide haunting images of alienation. Some elite high schools have been shaken by suicides, including in Palo Alto, Calif., where five high-achieving students committed suicide in six months. See Christina Farr, “After Five Suicides, Palo Alto High School Students Change Culture,” www.sfgate.com/cgi-bin/blogs/inthepeninsula/detail?entry_id=80342; accessed March 22, 2011. College Unranked, edited by Lloyd Thacker, discusses the “arms race” of preparation for college applications. See also Nelson, Parenting Out of Control; Suniya Luthar, “The Culture of Affluence.”

  62. See Wills, “Parent Trap”; Jacobson, “Help Not Wanted.”

  63. As Katherine McClelland noted, the “concerted cultivation metaphor itself suggests an explanation of middle-class parents’ shame at their children’s failures: if cultivation is what we’re engaged in, then I am a poor gardener if your flowers bloom while mine do not” (personal communication, September 17, 2010). There are many other drawbacks to middle-class life that draw only limited scholarly attention. For instance, middle-class families, including the Tallingers, often must relocate (sometimes moving great distances) in order to meet one or both parents’ career demands. Middle-class parents, including Mr. and Ms. Williams, also work very long hours and spend a great deal of time in airports and hotels, away from home, for their careers. Numerous studies have studied the number of hours spent at work, but the implications for the social class differences in the quality of family life have been harder to unpack (but see Marianne Cooper, “Being the ‘Go-To Guy’”; Pamela Stone, Opting Out; Mary Blair-Loy, Competing Devotions for studies of middle-class families). For discussions of the class divide in time spent at work, see Jerry A. Jacobs and Kathleen Gerson, The Time Divide.

  64. Bruce Tulgan’s Not Everyone Gets a Trophy was published in 2009. There is an older popular literature on the downside of what I term concerted cultivation, including David Elkind’s 1981 book The Hurried Child. See also Suniya Luthar, “The Culture of Affluence.”

  65. See chapter 8, “The Dark Side of Parent Involvement,” in Lareau, Home Advantage.

  66. It is likely that middle-class parents would try to manage as many elements of a surgical intervention as possible, e.g., learning the names and side effects of the medications, asking about alternative courses of treatment, and researching their child’s medical condition enough to formulate informed questions. But they would turn over responsibility for the surgery itself to the surgeon, just as working-class and poor parents turn over responsibility for teaching to educators.

  67. Peggy C. Giordano, “Relationships in Adolescence”; Jennifer Lee and Frank D. Bean, “America’s Changing Color Lines.”

  68. For a review, see Kathleen V. Hoover-Dempsey and Howard M. Sandler, “Why Do Parents Become Involved in Their Children’s Education?” See also John B. Diamond and Kimberly Williams Gomez, “African-American Parents’ Educational Orientations.”

  69. I have a very small sample. In the working-class and poor families, all the parents were interviewed. But, among the middle-class, Alexander Williams’s parents declined to be interviewed. This limits the conclusions that can be drawn. I looked closely across the sample for signs of racial differences in the character, frequency, and type of interventions parents made in institutions. Class differences were quite striking, but racial differences did not emerge. For discussions of the power of race in family life, see Linda Burton et al., “Critical Race Theories, Colorism, and the Decade’s Research on Families of Color.” Of course, there are countless studies of race and ethnicity, and there is compelling evidence of continued discrimination in daily life against African Americans. For discussion of race and employment, see Pager, Marked. For race and incarceration, see Western, Punishment. For a review of race and residential segregation, see Douglas Massey, Categorically Unequal. For wealth gaps, see Melvin L. Oliver and Thomas M. Shapiro, Black Wealth/White Wealth. For race and public space, see Joseph Feagin and Melvin P. Sikes, Living with Racism. See also, among others, the work by Michèle Lamont, Elijah Anderson, Alford Young, and Mica Pollock.

  70. See Emily Beller and Michael Hout, “Intergenerational Social Mobility.”

  71. I am grateful to Katherine Mooney for suggesting this phrase.

  CHAPTER 14: REFLECTIONS

  1. See William Foote Whyte, Street Corner Society.

  2. See Annette Lareau, “Common Problems in Fieldwork: A Personal Essay,” in Home Advantage. See also Annette Lareau and Jeffrey Shultz, eds., Journeys through Ethnography, as well as Appendix A in this book.

  3. Michael Burawoy, “Revisits”; Linda M. Burton, Diane Purvin, and Raymond Garrett-Peters, “Longitudinal Ethnography”; Nancy Scheper-Hughes, “Ire in Ireland”; Jay MacLeod, Ain’t No Making It. See also Michael Burawoy, “Public Ethnography as Film.”

  4. See Norman K. Denzin and Yvonna S. Lincoln, The SAGE Handbook of Qualitative Research; Caroline Ramazanoglu and Joan Holland, Feminist Methodology; Diane L. Wolf, ed., Feminist Dilemmas in Fieldwork; Martyn Hammersley and Paul Atkinson, Ethnography; Dorothy Smith, Institutional Ethnography; Paul ten Have, Understanding Qualitative Research and Ethnomethodology; Joan Cassell, “Risks and Benefits to Subjects of Fieldwork.” For a vigorous defense of the position that ethnographers should collaborate and “co-construct” ethnographies with research participants, see Luke Eric Lassiter, The Chicago Guide to Collaborative Ethnography.

  5. Whyte, Street Corner Society; Scheper-Hughes, “Ire in Ireland”; Arthur J. Vidich and Joseph Bensman, Small Town and Mass Society; Carolyn Ellis, “Emotional and Ethical Quagmires in Returning to the Field”; Arlene Stein, “Sex, Truths, and Audiotape.”

  6. The original research was done in 1993–95. Some families had kept in touch with me over the years since then. I attended Wendy Driver’s high school graduation party, for example; I got a prom picture and graduation notice for Tyrec Taylor. I also received announcements of high school graduation and college enrollment for Garrett Tallinger and Stacey Marshall.

  7. Williams, Marshall, Handlon (mother and Melanie), Irwin, Greeley, Carroll, Brindle, Tallinger (Garrett), and Yanelli family-member interviews were completed before they received the book. The interviews with Ms. McAllister and the Tallinger parents took place on the day I delivered the book. The Driver, Taylor, and Handlon (father) interviews occurred after they had read the book. Some of the interviews took place as late as 2005. Then, in 2009 and 2010, I began contacting the families to share my summary of their reaction; as I note elsewhere, I invited them to submit their own reactions. In 2010, as the second edition was going to press, I confirmed the employment status of all the young adults except Alex Williams and Harold McAllister. Although I did not ask them directly, most people appeared to have read only the chapter about their family. Conversations with the Tallingers, Ms. Yanelli, and Ms. Marshall, however, revealed that they had read the entire book.

  8. Indeed, the follow-up does not meet the definition Michael Burawoy gave to ethnographic revisits: “An ethnographic revisit occurs when an ethnographer undertakes participant observation, that is, studying others in their space and time, with a view to comparing his or her site with the same one studied at an earlier point in time, whether by him or herself or by someone else.” “Revisits,” p. 646.

  9. Mitchell Duneier, “Transparency in Ethnography.”

  10. At the time, I was at Temple University, where I regularly taught a class of 110 students, with the equivalent of one 20-hour per week teaching assistant. I taught one weekly discussion section, and I did one-thi
rd of the grading of essay midterms, papers, and finals. At the University of Pennsylvania, where I teach the same kind of course, I have two teaching assistants, each working twenty hours per week, and a smaller enrollment (100 students).

  11. See Mario Luis Small, “How Many Cases Do I Need?,” on the size of projects.

  12. Although beyond the scope of this chapter, there have been new calls for “scientific standards” in qualitative research. See reports by the Sociology Program of the National Science Foundation: Charles Ragin, Joane Nagel, and Patricia White, Workshop on Scientific Foundations of Qualitative Research; and Michèle Lamont and Patricia White, Workshop on Interdisciplinary Standards for Systematic Qualitative Research; as well as the critical essay by Howard Becker, “How to Find Out How to Do Qualitative Research,” on these NSF reports. Some researchers have responded to this pressure for standards by assembling very large-scale qualitative interview studies (e.g., 300 cases) where the principal investigator herself or himself does proportionally little interviewing. In addition, many of these studies do not include any participant-observation. With this approach, qualitative researchers are seeking to avoid the limitations of qualitative research (i.e., small, purposive samples). But, too often, the results of these kinds of large-scale studies are unsatisfying; they do not provide the “thick description” that is a hallmark of ethnographic work; see Clifford Geertz, Interpretations of Cultures. Nor do they provide sufficient attention to the meaning of events. For a critical assessment of these issues, see Annette Lareau, Doing Ethnography in the Real World. Of course, there are many different types of qualitative work; see the review of various approaches in Denzin and Lincoln, SAGE Handbook of Qualitative Research, as well as discussions of ethnography in Smith, Institutional Ethnography; Shulamit Reinharz and Lynn Davidman, Feminist Methods in Social Research; Hammersly and Atkinson, Ethnography; Iddo Tavory and Stefan Timmermans, “Two Cases of Ethnography”; Michael Burawoy, The Extended Case Method. See also Elinor Ochs et al., “Video Ethnography and Ethnoarchaeological Tracking”; Stephen A. Matthews, Linda M. Burton, and James Detwiler, “Geo-ethnography.”