For the past two decades, Annette Lareau has embedded herself in American
families. She and her researchers have sat on living room floors as families
went about their business, ridden in back seats as families drove hither and
yon.
Lareau's work is well known among sociologists, but neglected by the popular
media. And that's a shame because through her close observations and careful
writings in books like "Unequal Childhoods" Lareau has been able to capture
the texture of inequality in America. She's described how radically
child-rearing techniques in upper-middle-class homes differ from those in
working-class and poor homes, and what this means for the prospects of the kids
inside.
The thing you learn from her work is that it's wrong to say good parents
raise successful kids and bad parents raise unsuccessful ones. The story is more
complicated than that.
Looking at upper-middle-class homes, Lareau describes a parenting style that
many of us ridicule but do not renounce. This involves enrolling kids in large
numbers of adult-supervised activities and driving them from place to place.
Parents are deeply involved in all aspects of their children's lives. They make
concerted efforts to provide learning experiences.
Home life involves a lot of talk and verbal jousting. Parents tend to reason
with their children, not give them orders. They present "choices" and then
subtly influence the decisions their kids make. Kids feel free to pass judgment
on adults, express themselves and even tell their siblings they hate them when
they're angry.
The pace is exhausting. Fights about homework can be titanic. But children
raised in this way know how to navigate the world of organized institutions.
They know how to talk casually with adults, how to use words to shape how people
view them, how to perform before audiences and look people in the eye to make a
good first impression.
Working-class child-rearing is different, Lareau writes. In these homes,
there tends to be a much starker boundary between the adult world and the
children's world. Parents think that the cares of adulthood will come soon
enough and that children should be left alone to organize their own playtime.
When a girl asks her mother to help her build a dollhouse out of boxes, the
mother says no, "casually and without guilt," because playtime is deemed to be
inconsequential a child's sphere, not an adult's.
Lareau says working-class children seem more relaxed and vibrant, and have
more intimate contact with their extended families. "Whining, which was
pervasive in middle-class homes, was rare in working-class and poor ones," she
writes.
But these children were not as well prepared for the world of organizations
and adulthood. There was much less talk in the working-class homes. Parents were
more likely to issue brusque orders, not give explanations. Children, like their
parents, were easily intimidated by and pushed around by verbally dexterous
teachers and doctors. Middle-class kids felt entitled to individual treatment
when entering the wider world, but working-class kids felt constrained and
tongue-tied.
The children Lareau describes in her book were playful 10-year-olds. Now
they're in their early 20's, and their destinies are as you'd have predicted.
The perhaps overprogrammed middle-class kids got into good colleges and are
heading for careers as doctors and other professionals. The working-class kids
are not doing well. The little girl who built dollhouses had a severe drug
problem from ages 12 to 17. She had a child outside wedlock, a baby she gave
away because she was afraid she would hurt the child. She now cleans houses with
her mother.
Lareau told me that when she was doing the book, the working-class kids
seemed younger; they got more excited by things like going out for pizza. Now
the working-class kids seem older; they've seen and suffered more.
But the point is that the working-class parents were not bad parents. In a
perhaps more old-fashioned manner, they were attentive. They taught right from
wrong. In some ways they raised their kids in a healthier atmosphere. (When
presented with the schedules of the more affluent families, they thought such a
life would just make kids sad.)
But they did not prepare their kids for a world in which verbal skills and
the ability to thrive in organizations are so important. To help the worse-off
parents, we should raise the earned-income tax credit to lessen their economic
stress. But the core issue is that today's rich don't exploit the poor; they
just outcompete them.
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