44. Indeed, when I went by the house to share my summary of their reaction to the book (included above), both Mr. and Ms. Yanelli noted that their views had changed. Mr. Yanelli said the summary was “on the money,” an accurate statement of their feelings “at that time.” When I told Ms. Yanelli on the telephone that I had a draft of their reaction to the book, she asked, “When? At first or now?” In addition, Ms. Yanelli was aware that others had different views. (Ms. Yanelli had given the book to a relative to read; the relative liked the portrait.) Still, the portrait of the family clashes with Ms. Yanelli’s view of herself and her family and thus remains a source of pain. During our visit, over six years after the book appeared, Ms. Yanelli became tearful as she discussed it.
45. William Foote Whyte, “On the Evolution of Street Corner Society,” p. 66. Paul ten Have makes a similar point in Understanding Qualitative Research and Ethnomethodology. He notes that “Doc” read “every page” of Whyte’s book before it was published, but that it can be difficult to predict how research participants will feel later. As ten Have writes, “The feeling of being ‘used’ by the researcher may be hard to avoid” (p. 116).
CHAPTER 15: IN CONTEXT
1. See Daniel Kindlon, Too Much of a Good Thing; KidsHealth.org, “Is Your Child Too Busy?”; Madeline Levine, The Price of Privilege. For earlier works, see David Elkind, The Hurried Child; Alvin Rosenfeld and Nicole Wise, The Over-Scheduled Child. For a vigorous defense of the virtues of hectic schedules (as well as a defense of blending of parenting directives with the cultivation of children’s talents), see Amy Chua, Battle Hymn of the Tiger Mother. Despite her emphasis on the virtues of issuing directives, the rebellion of Chua’s daughter led Chua to retreat from her style of blending parental directives with the cultivation of her daughter’s musical talent. In the end, Chua adopted a more traditional style of concerted cultivation. For historical accounts of changes in child rearing, see Steven Mintz, Huck’s Raft; Ann Hulbert, Raising America.
2. I received a grant from the Spencer Foundation to conduct the follow-up study and to examine the results of Unequal Childhoods using a large, quantitative data set. As a result of that grant, Elliot Weininger collaborated with me; later Dalton Conley and Melissa Velez at New York University also were involved in a more limited fashion. See Lareau and Weininger, “Time, Work, and Family Life.” See also Weininger and Lareau, “Cultivating the Religious Child”; and Weininger, Lareau, Conley, and Velez, “Concerted Cultivation and Natural Growth among American Children.”
3. The PSID is a nationally representative longitudinal survey begun in 1968 with a focus on issues relating to household finances and employment. Annual or bi-annual waves of the survey have followed both the original sample families and the “breakaway” families formed by children of initial sample members. A weighting system has been devised to account for the effects of both the initial probability of being sampled and attrition (which is generally low) over time. Each wave of the PSID collects detailed information on the employment status, income, and finances of household members, as well as on related matters such as housing.
The CDS was first administered in 1997 to a subsample of PSID families with children between the ages of 0 and 12 years old. Data were collected on 3,563 children in 2,380 families. (Thus, two-thirds of these children are siblings of another child in the subsample, but no one family has more than two children in the study.) A set of child-level weights was created for use with these data by modifying the PSID weights to account for each child’s within-family probability of being sampled. These weights are used in our study. In order to maintain as much comparability as possible to the ethnography while simultaneously maximizing the number of cases available for analysis, we have restricted the subsample to children who were between the ages of 6 and 12 years old at the time of the data collection.
The PSID and CDS are collected and disseminated by the Survey Research Center, part of the Institute for Social Research at the University of Michigan.
4. Sandra L. Hofferth, “Response Bias in a Popular Indicator of Reading to Children,” for example, finds that in survey responses, highly educated parents (but not those with less education) appear to exaggerate the amount of time that their children spend reading, compared to time diary data on children’s reading patterns.
5. For the full results of these analyses, see the page for Unequal Childhoods at www.ucpress.edu.
6. These analyses include controls for the presence of relatives who reside in the focal child’s household and in his or her neighborhood.
AFTERWORD
1. Although I was able to contact most of the young adults, I did not connect with them all. For Harold, the information is based on my last contact in 2005. I did not attempt to reach Alexander; I confirmed his status via a website. As for the three young people in the intensive study but not featured in the book, Jessica Irwin graduated from college, married a policeman, and is now going to college to become an art therapist. Tara Carroll still hopes to return to community college, but she is working full-time as a caregiver in a home for disabled adults. I was unable to reach Karl Greeley; last I heard, he was working in a grocery store. He hoped to get his GED one day.
APPENDIX A
1. In retrospect, the decision to forgo interviewing the children was a serious mistake. I did, however, carry out “exit interviews” with children in the observation study.
2. See the work of Erik Olin Wright, especially his essay in the edited collection by John Hall, Reworking Class, as well as the work of Robert Erikson and John Goldthorpe, including The Constant Flux. Without artificially minimizing the divergences between Goldthorpe and Wright (the foremost of which is undoubtedly the latter’s insistence on retaining a capitalist class within his schema), it can be said that both use similar criteria (skills or credentials and authority) in drawing distinctions between categories of employees. For assistance with this discussion, I am grateful to Elliot Weininger.
3. See Frances Goldscheider and Linda Waite, New Families, No Families?
4. See Elliot Weininger and Annette Lareau, “Children’s Participation in Organized Activities and the Gender Dynamics of the ‘Time Bind.’”
5. Douglas Massey and Nancy Denton, American Apartheid.
6. Although I still see this choice as reasonable, it has drawbacks. It is hard to know whether poor or working-class families living in middle-class neighborhoods would adopt the same cultural logic of child rearing had they been living in poor or working-class neighborhoods. This problem is compounded by the small samples necessitated by intensive field research.
7. In addition, I made a donation of $100 to the school. In Lower Richmond the principal directed it to Ms. Green; at Swan it went to the Parent Association.
8. I began with Lower Richmond, but the method I used for selecting and recruiting interviewees was the same at both school sites. The content of the letters sent to parents at the two sites differed somewhat; for Lower Richmond parents, for example, I enclosed a photograph of their child taken (by me) during third grade.
9. Ten white poor families were recruited from welfare offices and other community programs. I paid these participants $25 per interview; none of the other families was paid.
10. We resisted the temptation to ask only those families who we thought, on the basis of the rapport established during the interview phase, would agree to be observed. We stuck by our first priority of recruiting the most representative families.
11. One white working-class and two Black poor families on welfare declined. The mother in the white family explained, “We’re not the perfect family.” One of the Black families objected to my request to have access to welfare records and declined for that reason. (I dropped the request after that.) The other Black family agreed but then dropped out after only a couple of days. The mother’s schedule changed frequently and there were indications of a possible problem with drugs within the family.
12. In some respects the Greeleys were
not a typical poor family. They owned a car, for example. Still, they met enough of my basic criteria (e.g., they received various forms of public assistance, including medical coverage) to be included. Although the family lived in the same Lower Richmond neighborhood, they lived across a school boundary line and the son attended a different school.
13. This decision turned out to be problematic, however. A grade level can make a significant difference; Stacey seemed much more preteen than the other children we observed.
14. The payment was a lump sum (in cash), usually at the very end, when the intensive three weeks of field visits had been completed. In addition to offsetting some of the inconvenience to the families, the money was intended to compensate for expenses such as feeding the field-workers dinner. The amount offered meant something different to each family, depending on their income level.
15. A drawback to my having made friends with the children in their classroom was that some working-class and poor parents then assumed that I was affiliated with the school district. I worried this would increase their sense of distrust. In addition to assuring parents that all information was confidential, I made repeated efforts to clarify the fact that I worked at a college and was not in any way associated with the school district.
16. See Annette Lareau, “My Wife Can Tell Me Who I Know” for a discussion of problems in interviewing fathers.
17. My parents’ marriage was loving but cantankerous; there was a lot of yelling. There were other quirks, as well. My father worked for many years as a tutor, but there were also years when he did not work. This left my mother, who was a teacher, as the sole source of support for the family of four children. There were other ways that my family was seen as unusual: both my parents were atheists, my mother swore like a sailor, and my father had an unending series of broken-down cars he was always trying to fix.
18. I recorded similar feelings in my journal, noting that “. . . A two-site day is too much; it wears you out and doubles your field notes and makes your head spin with the contrast of [lack of] safety and opulence . . . [but to sustain the comparative character of the study] you need to have a two site (or really three site) day all of the time . . .”
19. We weren’t able to observe each of these events for every child. We observed a doctor or dentist visit for each of the four middle-class children (Tallinger, Williams, Marshall, and Handlon), three of the four working-class children (Driver, Taylor, and Yanelli but not Irwin), and two of the four poor children (Greeley and McAllister but not Carroll or Brindle). Thus, there are healthcare visits for nine of the twelve children. All of these visits were tape-recorded. For parent-teacher conferences, we have nine of the twelve (i.e., everyone except Greeley, Marshall, and Williams). These were also tape-recorded. For the overnights, we have nine of the twelve (all except Carroll, Taylor, and Williams).
20. Alexander Williams was an exception. Despite his upper-middle-class position, he was clearly excited to be part of the study and happy to spend time with the field-workers.
21. See, among others, Guadalupe Valdes, Con Respeto.
22. I believed it was my responsibility as principal investigator to take over in any situation that a graduate student identified as prohibitively difficult emotionally.
23. I found the question of intellectual ownership troublesome with regard to writing this book. I had encouraged the research assistants to use the data in their own work, and I had presented papers with some of them in conferences. But since I find writing a book manuscript difficult at best, involving coauthors seemed like an invitation to disaster. I also felt that although the data collection was crucial, it was a part of the study, not the whole. I had done the Lawrenceville field-work, written the grant, and organized and run the project. In the end, I settled on a public recognition of the research assistants’ role (in the beginning of the book) and private thank-yous to them rather than coauthorship of the book.
24. Folio Views for Windows 4.2, Open Market, Inc.
25. See Arlie Hochschild’s The Second Shift.
APPENDIX B
1. For an excellent summary and analysis, see David Swartz’s book, Culture and Power. See also Pierre Bourdieu, “Cultural Reproduction and Social Reproduction,” Outline of the Theory of Practice, and Distinction, as well as Bourdieu and Wacquant, An Invitation to Reflexive Sociology. Marlis Buchmann’s book, The Script of Life, also has a lucid summary of Bourdieu’s model (see pp. 31–38).
2. Bourdieu, Outline of the Theory of Practice.
3. Rogers Brubaker, “Rethinking Classical Theory”; Craig Calhoun et al., Bourdieu: Critical Perspectives.
4. As he writes: The habitus “is a general, transposable disposition which carries out a systematic, universal application—beyond the limits of what has been directly learnt—of the necessity inherent in the learning conditions.” Bourdieu, Distinction, p. 170. See also pp. 172–73 in Distinction.
5. When Bourdieu discusses the habitus, as in Distinction, he often focuses on cultural consumption and taste rather than child-rearing strategies per se. He makes clear, however, that he sees disparate elements of a habitus to share a common principle. Thus, for example, choices in food and in child rearing will not be unconnected. In other words, habitus is a principle that connects these preferences in diverse arenas. Additionally, Bourdieu talks about the existence of different habitus by social class. It is not generally the case that each individual’s habitus is powerfully unique; instead there is a class habitus, but there are variations within this category. As he writes:
The singular habitus of members of the same class are united in a relationship of homology, that is, of diversity within homogeneity reflecting the diversity within homogeneity characteristic of their social conditions of production. Each individual system of dispositions is a structural variant of the others, expressing the singularity of its position within the class and its trajectory. ‘Personal’ style, the particular stamp marking all of the products of the same habitus, whether practices or works, is never more than a deviation in relation to the style of a period or class. (Pierre Bourdieu, The Logic of Practice, p. 60)
6. Social scientists and others have tended to focus only on certain elements of Bourdieu’s model, especially the idea of cultural capital. Bourdieu’s very important concept of field, which captures these standards, generally has been neglected. As a result, the “double vision” offered by Bourdieu’s model—the simultaneous focus on biography and social structure that is achieved through the study of fields and the practices of individuals—is often absent in empirical work.
7. Swartz, Culture and Power, p. 120.
8. Bourdieu, “Marriage Strategies as Strategies of Social Reproduction,” and Outline of the Theory of Practice.
9. Annette Lareau and Erin McNamara Horvat, “Moments of Social Inclusion and Exclusion.”
Revised Bibliography
Adler, Patricia A., and Peter Adler. “Social Reproduction and the Corporate Other: The Institutionalization of Afterschool Activities.” The Sociological Quarterly 35, 3 (1994): 309–28.
Adler, Patricia A., Peter Adler, and John M. Johnson. “Street Corner Society Revisited: New Questions about Old Issues.” Journal of Contemporary Ethnography 21, 1 (1992): 3–10.
Alwin, Duane F. “Trends in Parental Socialization Values: Detroit, 1958–1983.” American Journal of Sociology 90, 2 (1984): 359–82.
Anderson, Elijah. Code of the Street: Decency, Violence, and the Moral Life of the Inner City. New York: W. W. Norton and Company, 1999.
———. Streetwise: Race, Class, and Change in an Urban Community. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1990.
Anyon, Jean. Ghetto Schooling: A Political Economy of Urban Educational Reform. New York: Teachers College Press, 1997.
Archer-Banks, Diane A. M., and Linda S. Behar-Horenstein. “African American Parental Involvement in Their Children’s Middle School Experiences.” Journal of Negro Education 77, 2 (2008): 143–56.
Arendell, Teresa. “
Soccer Moms and the New Care Work.” Working paper. Center for Working Families, University of California, Berkeley, 2000. Published as: “The New Care Work of Middle Class Mothers: Managing Childrearing, Employment, and Time.” Pp. 163–204 in Minding the Time in Family Experience: Emerging Perspectives and Issues, edited by Kerry J. Daly. Oxford: Elsevier Science, 2001.
Ariès, Philippe. Centuries of Childhood: A Social History of the Family. Translated by Robert Baldick. New York: Basic Books, 1962.
Attewell, Paul, and David E. Lavin. Passing the Torch: Does Higher Education for the Disadvantaged Pay Off across the Generations? New York: Russell Sage Foundation, 2007.
Averill, Patricia M., and Thomas G. Power. “Parental Attitudes and Children’s Experiences in Soccer: Correlates of Effort and Enjoyment.” International Journal of Behavioral Development 18, 2 (1995): 263–76.
Bagley, Carl. “Educational Ethnography as Performance Art: Towards a Sensuous Feeling and Knowing.” Qualitative Research 8, 1 (2008): 53–72.
Barlett, Donald L., and James B. Steele. America: What Went Wrong? Kansas City: Andrews and McMeel Publishers, 1992.
Becker, Howard S. “How to Find Out How to Do Qualitative Research.” International Journal of Communication 3 (2009): 545–53.
Bellah, Robert N., Richard Madsen, William M. Sullivan, Ann Swidler, and Steven M. Tipton. Habits of the Heart: Individualism and Commitment in American Life. 2nd ed. Berkeley: University of California Press, 1996.
Beller, Emily, and Michael Hout. “Intergenerational Social Mobility: The United States in Comparative Perspective.” The Future of Children 16, 2 (2006): 19–36.
Belluck, Pam. “Parents Try to Reclaim Their Children’s Time.” In New York Times on the Web, 2000. www.nytimes.com/library/national/061300family-practices.html. Accessed February 24, 2011.
Unequal Childhoods Page 55
