'Unequal' Children, All Grown Up
All children are not created equal. A book about the effects of socio-economic inequities on families is updated in its second edition.
By Peter Monaghan
The notion that people are born unequal is as un-American as nationalized health care.
And yet social scientists have long known not only that Americans start life with varying degrees of privilege but also that socioeconomic differences tend to persist throughout life.
Hauling oneself up by one's bootstraps is, after all, impossible, according to Newton's laws of motion.
Even in scholarly circles, though, awareness of class dynamics in the United States has glimmered only faintly. From the 1970s to the 1990s, American social theorists concentrated on issues of race and gender.
Those emphases redressed a "perhaps mechanistic 1930s definition of class, where only white men were working class," says Stephanie Coontz, a noted historian of American social life, and a faculty member in history and family studies at Evergreen State College. But the race-and-gender emphases "crowded out class in a lot of discussion of contemporary issues and in a lot of teaching," she says.
Then came Annette Lareau, and her acclaimed 2003 book, Unequal Childhoods: Class, Race, and Family Life (University of California Press), which has now been reissued with additional chapters updating her research.
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In the new edition, Lareau gauges whether the subjects of her original study continued on the life courses that their childhoods seemed to have laid out for them. Her key earlier finding, based on rich ethnographic observation, was that in the United States, socioeconomic status closely predicts how parents will raise children and what they will prize in them, what skills children will take into adult life, and what socioeconomic conditions they will enjoy—or endure.
Her findings made a splash in American intellectual and social-policy circles that academics rarely accomplish. And yet Lareau, as much as many colleagues, is quick to state that her findings were not really anything new. Rather, she says, "the goal of the book was to provide rich details on processes that social scientists had presumed existed but hadn't been able to spell out in sufficient detail."
Coontz says the book achieved that goal. She recalls, she says, that Unequal Childhoods captured the social-science imagination just as Betty Friedan's 1963 best seller, The Feminine Mystique, had captured the public imagination in restating the arguments for feminism.
After conducting a study of the lives of 88 children from across the socioeconomic and racial spectrums, Lareau homed in on 12 families—black, white, middle class, working class, poor.
She described stark class differences. Middle-class families, white and black, practiced "concerted cultivation"—shuttling their children from one organized activity to another and striving to keep them from vegetating at video-game consoles. The goal was to nurture children's skills and talents in ways deemed useful for later socioeconomic success. Parents took for granted that the approach would provide children know-how and even a sense of privilege in dealing with such institutions as schools, government agencies, and workplaces.
Children could emerge from that process bratty and bored because they lacked the skill to direct their own activities; and it could exhaust parents. By contrast, parents of poor and working-class families—often the one parent—lacked the wherewithal or the time off work to teach middle-class skills to their children, and instead practiced a doctrine of "the accomplishment of natural growth," wrote Lareau. That term—preferable to "benign neglect" and its whiff of class condescension—described an approach that left children to find their own pastimes, often clear of parental observation.
But the approach also accomplished family cohesion where concerted cultivation sought to breed individuation. Lareau found that poorer children enjoyed closer, friendlier family ties than did wealthier children, each with a bedroom retreat.
Why an updated second edition? Lareau, now a professor of sociology at the University of Pennsylvania, says she was motivated in part by affection for her subjects, with whom she and her research assistants spent many hours for the original study
"We encouraged families not to worry about entertaining us," Lareau wrote in the first edition, "we told children to feel free to curse in front of us if they would do so normally, and we asked that other normal 'guest' rules be dissolved."
But the research protocols did not prevent getting to know the subjects well. "At some level, the families all felt comfy and cozy and loving and all felt like home," she says by phone. (Not, she adds, that the fieldwork was painless: "I remember that if I went to two families in one day, I'd get a headache, they were so different. It was almost like you got the bends.")
In the intervening years, she kept in touch with many families, but not all—and there's one rub of ethnographic research. "The book hurt some people's feelings on issues where they were vulnerable or where they had feelings about how people saw them," Lareau says. She spoke with one mother six years after the book appeared, and even at that stage, the woman wept.
That was not Lareau's only disappointment. "When the children were 10, the middle-class kids seemed old and blasé and hard to impress, and the working-class kids seemed younger and more bouncy and more youthful. Ten years later, that pattern had been reversed: The working-class kids are worn down and they have car payments and kids and boring jobs, while the middle-class kids are young, dependent on their parents, and plan to travel. They're all hopeful."
In fact, she says, she found that the class expectations, high and low, had played out as if by some inexorable algorithm. "Of course, I knew all the statistics going into it, so I wasn't surprised. But I felt it was like watching a car accident. You know that car accidents happen every day, but it's another thing to have one happen right in front of you, where you see someone get severely injured."
What life's course had done to her poorer subjects, "I had theoretically anticipated," she says, "but when it happened, it was quite powerful."
Like so many social-science instructors, Lareau reports that her students have little conception of such dynamics. She notes that surveys show that only one in five Americans believes that race and class are barriers to advancement, and her experience during 25 years of teaching sociology bears that out: "Students really clearly and deeply believe in the American dream. They take it very seriously. And when you try to suggest that there are other factors, that there are social structures that influence life chances, my experience is that students resist this information."
Coontz agrees. Lareau's book, and now its second edition, will remain valued tools in the social scientist's teaching kit, Coontz says. "She provided a very accessible, detailed, personalized way of talking about class issues that sometimes seemed very abstract to students."
— Peter Monaghan
The Chronicle Review
2011-09-12
http://chronicle.com/article/Unequal-Children-All-Grown/128906/?sid=cr&utm_source=cr&utm_medium=en
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