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UNEQUAL CHILDHOODS: CLASS, RACE AND

FAMILY LIFE

BY: ANNETTE LAREAU

Dishant Daipayan Das


GM2018SSA027

“America may be the land of opportunities, but it is also the land of inequalities”. With remarks
as straightforward and piercing like such, Annette Lareau, in her book, does an intensive
observational research, trying to examine the differences in the types of child rearing across the
social classes in American families. In an attempt to show how childhood across the various
social classes in America looks different, Annette argues how, “the key elements cohere to form
a cultural logic of child rearing”. The author draws contrasts between the lives of middle-class,
working class and poor families, trying to point out how does the parents’ and the family’s social
class affects their children’s life experiences. While the middle-class families adapt to the
constantly changing cultural repertories about child rearing, they engage in a process called
‘concerted cultivation’, making their children participate in a range of organized activities
outside of school to “develop” the child and “brace them for the competitive world”. This
‘concerted cultivation’, Annette argues, develops a robust sense of entitlement in the children,
which, in turn, affects their everyday actions and behavior in their family, and the outside world.
Most middle-class families adopt a cultural logic of child development, which stresses on the
concerted cultivation of the children, and the parents are heavily involved in the lives of their
children. Communication between the parents and the children is never a problem. However, the
working-class, and the poor families rely on the natural growth of the children, thereby
minimalising their involvement and interference in their children’s lives. Annette argues that
most of the middle-class families lived rather harried lives. While the parents are mostly busy in
the workspace, any leisure time of theirs is spent managing their children’s extra-curricular
activities. The children, too, spend most of their day outside, at school and at the various
activities they’ve opted for, or rather made to opt for. Organised activities control the lives of
middle-class families. Being busy with the schedules, they have little to no time to have any
contact with their extended family. However, the working-class and poor families pay very little
attention to their children’s organized activities. While there are economic constraints which
limit their children’s involvement in any activity outside of their school and their play time, the
parents also believe they shouldn’t be deciding activities for their children. Much of the time of
these families are spent at home, or around homes. This lack of concerted cultivation, however,
creates a boundary between the children and adults. These families also lack any sense of
reasoning with their children. Rather, they direct their children’s activities. This contrasting pair
of parenting leads to raising children with very different natures. While the children from
middle-class families feel like they’re entitled to things, the children from working-class and
poor families develop distance, constraint, and a sense of distrust. This emerging sense of
constraint, when dealing with authority figures, isn’t accepted very well by them. This emerging
sense of division between the authority figures and the children kept them from making any
demands. However, the children from middle-class families were quite vocal in making any
demands which they felt suited those best. They are taught things like ‘shaking hands’,
‘maintaining eye contact’ which would make them seem like they’re in charge of their own lives.
This independent behavior of theirs helps them grow their ‘cultural capital’. However, the same
can’t work for the poor and working-class, since they live in rather unsafe areas, and maintaining
eye contact with a stranger might lead to intimidation. The professionals, who deal with children,
agree on a set of ‘cultural repertories’, which include a set of “right” ways of child rearing, and
these advices change regularly. A small number of experts, thus, potentially shape the child
rearing skills of a large number of parents. The middle-class parents are the most vulnerable to
these advices, and thus, their ways of child rearing have also changed constantly. She examines
how, the show of a sense of constraint by the working class and the poor children are seen as
harmful for their development in the society.

Annette is critical of the “American dream” that people seem to have in their minds. She
problematises the individuality of one’s achievements. In claiming that one’s capital highly
dictates one’s living conditions in the present and in the future, she denounces the popular notion
of “only hard work leading to success”. In her book, she tries to “demonstrate the existence of a
cultural logic of child rearing that tends to differ according to families’ social class positions. To
prove her points, she conducts an observational research of 12 families comprising of white,
black and interracial families who belong to either middle-class, working-class, or are poor. They
observed the everyday lives of the families, sticking to the family members like their “family
dogs”, as Annette says. She also acknowledges a very important aspect of her study. In studying
the black families while being a white woman herself, she questions her critics questioning why
dominant groups can’t study the dominant groups. She says if we get into the paradigm of “who
can study whom”, at the end of that, the only person that we’ll be eligible to study is ourselves.
She says that the historical and cultural beliefs of the readers can only be questioned by making
“sharp cross-cultural and historical comparisions”.

In her study, she tries to study three ways in which differences in social classes lead to
differences in children’s lives and family life – “the organization of daily life, language use, and
interactions between families and institutions”.

Annette emphasizes on the ‘social structures’ in which people live their lives. Their lives are
affected by systems and structures they have no control upon. The norms and rule systems,
which guide individuals’ lives in groups, turn into institutions when they are legalized. The
children, thus, grow in highly stratified social systems, guided by various social norms and
playing various roles within various institutions. To dig deeper into how does social structure
affect the lives of the children, Annette shifts her focus on two target schools and the community
which surrounds them.

Lower Richmond School – Well-regarded for years now, Lower Richmond school is located in a
racially segregated, although mainly white working-class, densely packed residential area. The
closely packed houses make frequent contact between neighbours possible. Regardless of the
populated neighbourhood, crime is still a concern. There are almost equal numbers of black and
white children in the school. However, while the educational staff of the school consists of
mainly white people, most of the support staff members are black.
The school is said to have been providing the students with a variety of resources necessary for
learning. However, the school faces its fair share of problems too, with a shortage of teachers
being an alarming one. This unavailability of qualified teaches could be reasoned by their low
pay. The direct involvement of the district guidelines in academic matters is also seen as a
problem by many, since they make implementing any changes almost impossible, thereby
hampering the learning of the children. The onus of the better performance of the students
thereby befalls on the underpaid staff. While these are materialistic drawbacks of the school,
many black students and staff complain of unfair treatment. With that, it is also common for the
students of the school to be suffering from what Annette calls “serious issues”, which can often
be traced back to the uninvolved parents. This disruption to the students’ mental health in turn
affects their academic performance.

Swan School – The open and inviting campus of the Swan school is located in a middle-class
neighbourhood in the suburbs, filled with landscapes. With everything located at some distance
within the neighbourhood, the commute becomes a problem, and there’s a lot more usage of cars.
This limits communication with neighbours. Unlike the city, the suburbs are considerably safer
regardless of the lesser crowd. The families around the school are predominantly white, although
there are some black families. The black students, however, make for only 10 percent of the
school population. The entire staff in this school is white. With the coursework much more
elaborate, there also exists transparency between the governing bodies and the parents. This
leads to a far greater parent participation in the school. The school doesn’t run low on school
supplies, like the Lower Richmond. The level of parents’ involvement with their children’s
education and the institution is significantly higher in this school

The differences amongst the two schools resonates the differences of social classes. The schools
are built in a manner to cater to the needs of the parents, and the parents give back to the schools
in a similar fashion.

With the differences, however, what were similar amongst the schools were the ideas for
development of a child in the minds of the teachers. They all shared on what were appropriate
and desirable childhood experiences and rearing techniques. Generally, they all supported the
idea of ‘concerted cultivation’, and emphasized on the importance of organized activities for the
development of a child. The teachers followed the same pattern for rearing their own children.
All of this amounts to giving more importance to organized events over unorganized activities of
the children, like playing on the streets, or the yard, or watching television. The teachers from
both schools encouraged the parents to reason with, rather than direct, their children. While they
prescribe concerted cultivation, the teachers also complain that these organized outdoor activities
hamper the school experiences of the children. The teachers also complain that the students pick
up their parents’ habit of entitlement, and taking everything for granted, which again is a part of
concerted cultivation. However, when the child has educational problems, the teachers also
expect the parents to take assertive leadership. These are all very contradictory demands made by
them. The teachers are also liable to intervene when a parent physically assaults their child(ren).
As claimed by them, this intervention is more common with working-class and poor families.

All these ways of child rearing, which is prescribed by the teachers, is more favourable and
accessible to the middle-class families, thereby helping in keeping the status-quo of social
stratification intact. The differences in the two schools are part of a general pattern of inequality
in the society in general. In the United States, overall levels of educational attainment are far
lower for Black children. However, taking into consideration the social position of the parents,
Black youth are more likely to pursue higher education. For most people, the educational
attainment, the type of job they get, and the income, they’re all interwoven and interdependent.
The social structures of parents have profound implications on their children’s life chances. The
social class, thus, for most part, dictate the lives of children in the U.S. In contradicting the
research studies which show that show that class structures have long disappeared in the country,
Annette demands studies to be done in a “holistic picture that accurately reflects both, the
permeability, and the impermeability of the home-to-class forces”. The social categories in her
studies are done with accordance to the Western European tradition. While also pointing out
aspects that are not affected by social classes in the lives of the children, for the most part of the
study, she tries to show how social class differences the very pace and rhythm of daily life.

The difference in the pace of lives, the supply of resources, economic strength, these are all
aspects in the lives of the children that are segregated by social classes. While the lives and
activities of the members of a middle-class family are orchestrated by the children’s activities,
the lives of working-class and poor children were much more relaxed. They had more autonomy
from adults, unlike the middle-class families’ children, who spent a lot of time with their family
members.

For her first study, she arbitrarily selects a white middle-class boy, Garrett Tallinger, and makes
an attempt to show his life.

The Tallingers, like many other middle-class families, are committed to child rearing techniques
that focus on the individual development of each child, even at the expense of family’s needs and
time. The three children on the Tallinger house are all enrolled in a variety of activities. These
set of extra-curricular activities are said to develop a set of skills, which will help them at their
jobs. They develop dispositions that help them navigate the institutional world. However, all of
this comes at a cost. The Tallingers’ children are competitive and hostile towards each other.
This could be traced back to the difference in the ages of the boys, and also to not having spent
much time together as siblings. Since the parents are both working through the week, and
sometimes during weekends too, they make child-care arrangements for the children.

Garrett is both, a good student, and a good athlete. While he maintains his decorum around
adults, at the absence of his parents, he is said to get livelier. All of his interaction is however,
with white people. The Tallingers are white, and the support staff which they hire to help them
with their chores is white too. Their social interaction, thus, is mostly with just white people.
With Garrett being the oldest child, it’s his schedules which set the pace of life of the entire
family. The parents have enrolled him in various extracurricular activities, with his consent. The
multiple activities increase the possibility for overlapping of events. Their devotion towards
concerted cultivation is, at times, challenged when the activities conflict and it gets difficult to
manage. Thus, all events of the family had to be scheduled. “The centerpiece of the Tallinger
children’s lives is their organized activities”. The Tallinger family is orchestrated by a calendar.
Routine makes their lives synchronized. However, a downside is difficulty amongst the children
in adjusting to unstructured time. While all of these activities are coordinated and supervised by
the parents, the children have little to no leisure time to themselves. The parents have to do
substantial amount of work, trying to coordinate all the activities along with their work. This
exhausting number of activities takes a toll on the parents. The activities, which carry with them
the threat to topple the entire family’s schedule, amount to a lot of frustration and tension
amongst the parents. Although it is both, the father, and the mother, who have to bear the brunt
of the hectic schedule, the women have to perform, what Arlie Hochschild calls, their “second
shift”, where they take care of their home. Pressures related to family life aren’t borne equally by
the husband and the wife. The fathers are normally in-charge when the mother is travelling for
work. There was gendered division of labour, both inside and outside of home. Due to the
multiple numbers of activities that Garrett is a part of, he fails to give each activity the same
amount of importance and interest. Garrett’s activities also seemed to affect his siblings. His
activities outweigh his siblings’ routine. However, Garrett has to take the responsibility of setting
a “standard” for his siblings. This leads to friction between the siblings quite a few times.
There’s this feeling of inferiority that lingers in the minds of the younger siblings. The siblings
share a feeling of competition amongst themselves. But, the set of skills that these organized
activities are known to develop are completely contradictory. They are taught to be “team
players”, to be “able to perform in public”, to “take up scrutiny”. These athletes are said to have
a head start of maturity. The skills acquired in these activities are known to continue to be useful
for the children when they take up jobs. The middle-class children are exposed to adult-like
responsibilities, and thus, develop qualities, which are known to be mature. The children are also
taught at home how to maintain themselves amongst others, especially adults.

While most days in the life of a Tallinger there are activities lined up one after the other,
socializing becomes a problem, and thus, making contact with family is rare. Although they
respect their kinship ties, the Tallingers prioritise their extracurricular activities over their
extended family. The activities, with being hectic, are also expensive. Since the parents make no
mention to the children about their economic status or constraints, the children develop this sense
of entitlement, and feel that they are entitled to all the large expenditures.

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