Week Nine
Annette Lareau
Unequal Chidhoods
Research Basis
• Intensive observation of 12 families, half black
and half white, each racial category also
divided by social class. All families had a child
in third grade. Lareau and her research
assistants spent about 20 hours with each
family, including an overnight… The families
got used to having them around.
Upper and Middle class kids
• “Discussions between parents and children
are the hallmark of middle-class childrearing.
Like many middle class parents, Ms. Williams
and her husband see themselves as
“developing” Alexander to cultivate his talents
in a concerted manner. Organized activities,
established and controlled by mothers and
fathers, are the hallmark of middle class
childraising.
Poor and working class kids
• Parents see a clear boundary between parents
and children.... For them the crucial
responsibilities of parenthood do no lie in
eliciting their children’s feelings, opinions, and
thoughts. Parents tend to use directives; they
tell their children what to do rather than
persuading them with reasoning. Most
children are free to go out and play with
friends and relatives who live nearby.
Advantage and power
• The central institutions in American society,
including the schools, firmly and decisively
promote strategies of concerted cultivation in
childrearing…. As a result, middle class
children appear to gain a sense of entitlement
while working class children appear to gain an
emerging sense of distance, distrusts, and
constraint in their institutional experiences.
• Differential advantages (pp. 5-6)
Two Schools
• Lower Richmond: old building, few windows, chainlink
fence, asphalt playground…Security guard just inside
the entrance… Nevertheless rated a “very nice place”
by one teacher and termed a “pretty place” by
another..some grass and trees and a clean building…
unlike some other schools in the district where beer
bottles and broken glass litter the school yard…
• Salary levels and teacher qualifications less than in the
suburbs About ½ of kids read below grade level, and
teachers estimate that half the kids have a parent who
is absent or incapacitated.
More AboutLower Richmond
• Racially segregated neighborhood, with
bussing. About ½ of kids read below grade
level, and ¼ of the third grade cohort is a full
year behind. Teachers estimate that half the
kids have a parent who is absent or
incapacitated. One third grade class had
substitutes for their whole year.
Swan School
• One-story buildings that are spread over the
school grounds, an entire wall of windows for
each classroom, a grassy hill , swing set, bars,
shredded wood underneath. Middle class
neighborhood where houses sell for twice the
cost of houses in Lower Richmond. Parent
participation. “Swan PTA meetings attract ten
times as many parents as Little Richmond.”
Swan School parents
• At Swan, “parents watch teachers closely and
do not hesitate to intervene on their children’s
behalf (Instructor: status differences between
teachers and parents). “It is not unusual for
parents who children do not qualify for the
gifted program at Swan to have them tested
privately.”
• …”daily life is not always smooth…”(see p. 23)
“Unequal Education”
• Youtube:
http://www.myspace.com/video/educationalvideo-center/unequal-education-failing-ourchildren/2080264
• Or check bookmarks
“The Hectic Pace of Concerted
Cultivation: Garrett Tallinger
• In May: baseball, private soccer club, all-star
soccer, swim practice, piano lessons,
saxophone(sports: Nic interviewing at Bain)
• Mrs. Tallinger: career change to facilitate all this
activity
• Exhausting pace for Garrett and they saw the
same thing with other u-m-c kids, p. 53
• Brother Spencer: gifted program, sibling rivalry,
open hostility at times (saw no equivalent in
working class homes)
A Child’s Pace: Tyrec Taylor
• “For nine-year-old Tyrec Taylor organized
activities were an interruption.” Informal,
impromptu outdoor play the norm.
• Less quarrels with siblings, less competition
for adult involvement(rides) p. 76
• Comparing upper middle class and working
class: p. 68
“Trying out for football”: p. 77-79
Children’s Play is for Children: Katie
Brindle
• On the phone: “I’m making a doll house; My Grandmom
brought me some boxes.” When I arrived, I asked her about
the doll house. “I don’t know how to make it. Will you help
me,” Mom?” “Nah,” says CiCi. Interpretation, p. 83
Most poor parents did not consider children’s activities
consequential or as something that ought to involve adult
time…
• The family survives on public assistance, food stamps, and
medical assistance.
• Family, neighborhood, home: pp. 84-5
• “The Brindles had more numerous and deeper
psychological problems…”p. 96
Unequal Childhoods, 2nd edition, 2011,
with an update ten years later
• Limits: “The follow-up of an ethnography is likely
to rely much more on interviews than on
observations.”
• Relations with participants: “Participants seem
frequently to feel angry and betrayed when they
read research results.”
• “You slurred us Annette. You made us look like
poor white trash.” (see p. 313-314)
• “What I wish I could have done.” (p. 315, 325)
• “In my view, for better or worse, a research
project is controlled by the researcher.” (330,331)
Results from a quantitative analsysis
• “After the book was published, I carried out a
research project with quantitatively skilled
collaborators.”
• Analyzed a nationally representative, longitudinal
data set, the Child Development Survey, that is
part of the Panel Study of Income Dynamics
• Key element: time diaries that list all the activities
carried out by each child for a 24-hour period on
a randomly chosen weekday and a randomly
chosen weekend day.”
Key Findings
• Participation in organized activites closely
linked to class but not to race.
• Time “hanging out” also strongly linked to
class
• Time spent with extended kin: linked to class
as her study showed, but “black children are
considerably more likely than their white
counterparts to have contact with extended
kin.”
What the PSID-CDS data couldn’t show
• “It turned out to be virtually impossible to test
some of the most important findings of
Unequal Childhoods by analyzing survey data.”
• See p. 341
• Afterward, with more confirmation of the
generational effects of social class: p. 342