Unequal Childhoods

The intersection of race and class in American life is an important but often vexing subject for sociologists. The power of social class is often obscured by the visibility of race. Unequal Childhoods: Class, Race, and Family Life, by Annette Lareau, was written in part because she wanted to make class real by showing how it works in everyday life. Lareau hoped that by capturing the day-to-day rhythms of life in different kinds of families—those of middle-class, working-class, and poor Whites and African Americans—she could help bring the seemingly intractable problem of inequality into clearer focus.

Most of the 88 families that Lareau and her research assistants interviewed during the first stage of research had children in the third or fourth grade in elementary schools in a large northeastern city and its suburbs. From this initial pool, they selected 12 families, 6 African American and 6 White, for more intensive study. Nearly every day for 3 weeks, they spent time, usually a few hours, with each family. They went to baseball games, church services, family reunions, grocery stores, beauty parlors, and barbershops. They even stayed overnight with most of the families. They saw siblings squabble and heard parents yell. They joined kids as they sat around watching TV and as they played outside in the yard or the street. By the standards of social science research, this was an unusually intensive study.

Lareau and her research assistants found that although all parents want their children to be happy and to thrive, social class makes a very substantial difference in how this universal goal is met. Middle-class parents promote what Lareau calls “concerted cultivation.” They actively foster their children's talents, opinions, and skills by enrolling the children in organized activities, reasoning with them, and closely monitoring their experiences in institutions such as schools. The focus is squarely on children's individual development. As a result of this pattern of concerted cultivation, children gain an emerging sense of entitlement. Most of the middle-class families in the study were extremely busy; this pattern held for White and African American middle-class families. Children attend soccer games, go on Girl Scout trips, do homework, and go to birthday parties; parents need to arrange these activities as well as get children there and back. Despite the busy schedule, most parents worked full-time and some had job-related overnight travel. In addition to meeting their workplace responsibilities, parents had to manage the details of family life: They had to go grocery shopping, prepare dinner, do laundry, monitor homework, oversee children's showers, and participate in bedtime rituals. Lareau details in the book what children's schedules mean for family life. In describing the middle class, Lareau use the term “the frenetic family.” Things are so hectic that the house sometimes seems to be little more than a holding space for the brief periods between activities.

The differences researchers observed between these middle-class families and those of working-class and poor families were striking. Parents in working-class and poor families promote what Lareau call the “accomplishment of natural growth.” These parents care for their children, love them, and set limits for them, but within these boundaries, they allow the children to grow spontaneously. Children do not have organized activities. Instead, they play outside with cousins and siblings; they watch television. Parents use directives rather than reasoning with children. And children generally negotiate institutional life, including their day-to-day school experiences, on their own. The working-class and poor parents in the study often were very distrustful of contacts with “the school” and health care facilities. They were fearful that professionals in these institutions might “come and take my kids away.” Rather than an emerging sense of entitlement, children in these families developed an emerging sense of constraint.

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