Unequal Childhoods

by Annette Lareau

  The kind of team-participation skills Mr. Tallinger notes that Garrett is gaining are directly applicable to a wide range of work environments, from fast-food service to high-tech design projects. Again, it is middle-class, not working-class or poor, children who consistently gain access to these lessons in formal teamwork. Similarly, involvement in multiple organized activities is common among middle-class children. Thus, they frequently need to choose one activity over another.6 Knowing how to prioritize is a workplace skill that employers actively seek in prospective employees.

  Other real-world advantages also bear noting. Unlike the working-class and poor children we observed, Garrett and his peers have broad horizons and are exposed to typically adult experiences, such as being issued photo identification cards. The cards require the holder’s signature, and this increases the boys’ excitement and sense of power:

  Garrett is the fourth boy to sign. The man [in charge of the photo IDs] calls him up, “Garrett!” and then demonstrates with his finger and says, “Sign here, where it says ‘player’s signature.’ ” Other boys are crowded around watching. One boy is saying, “Sign Donald” (Garrett’s full name is Donald Garrett Tallinger, after his father), but Garrett ignores him. He signs “Garrett Tallinger.”

  The Intercounty soccer team travels to out-of-state tournaments; players stay in hotels and eat in restaurants; during the games, they compete against children they have never met before. Garrett’s friends and acquaintances are similarly mobile. The school’s select chorus performs in the Midwest, the middle school’s arts group goes to Europe, and classmates fly on commercial airlines to attend specialized summer camps. Overall, ten-year-old Garrett and his middle-class peers travel more frequently and cover more distance than do most working-class and poor adults.

  The experiences and skills that Garrett and others gain from their participation in activities are reinforced by their parents’ child-rearing strategies at home. Garrett’s parents have taught him and his brothers to shake hands with adult men when they are being introduced. They explicitly coach Sam to “look him in the eye” as he shakes a man’s hand. The Tallingers themselves usually make eye contact with their sons when they are speaking to them, and they expect reciprocal behavior from each of the boys. They also reinforce notions of responsibility to others. When Garrett toys with the idea of quitting saxophone, Ms. Tallinger urges him to weigh that desire against his obligations to the rest of the members of his band. Garrett decides not to quit.

  Mr. and Ms. Tallinger also teach by example—both read. They regularly read the newspaper (which is often spread out over the kitchen table) and Ms. Tallinger, in particular, often has a novel in progress. Both parents use reasoning as their key mechanism of social control.7 They frequently answer questions with more questions and whenever possible guide the children through situations rather than issue directives.

  Like the organizational aspects of children’s activities, these home-based practices contribute to the development of skills that have a particularly smooth fit with the behaviors and expectations of occupations and other social institutions. Thus, in their everyday experiences, middle-class children not only acquire a variety of important life skills, but they also have repeated opportunities to practice those skills. Their working-class and poor counterparts, on the other hand, typically neither participate in organized activities nor grow up in homes where the preferred approach to child rearing meshes seamlessly with the practices and values of society’s dominant institutions.

  THE FRENETIC FAMILY

  In the nineteenth century, families gathered around the hearth. Today, the center of the middle-class home is the calendar—the middle-class homes we visited typically had a large, white paper monthly calendar, hung on the wall above or next to the kitchen telephone. Scheduled, paid, and organized activities for children are noted (sometimes in a colored pen) in the two-inch-square open spaces beneath each day of the month. Month after month, children are busy participating in sports, music, scouts, and play groups. And, before and after going to work, their parents are busy getting them to and from these activities. At times, middle-class houses seem to be little more than holding places for the occupants during the brief periods when they are between activities.

  The pattern we observed among middle-class families like the Tallingers of involving children in many organized activities and adjusting family life to accommodate those activities does not fit neatly into existing sociological approaches. Social scientists interested in determining the dominant factors shaping children’s lives are often preoccupied with a hunt for single determinants—they hope to be able to point to, for example, the overriding importance of income or education. We looked diligently for key causal elements, but across the twelve families we observed closely, what we found was a pattern of practices or strategies attached in various ways to class cultures. Among the middle class, the hectic schedule of children’s activities is not directly attributable to any single dimension of their lives, such as family income, parents’ educational levels or occupational conditions, neighborhood type, family size or gender composition, or parents’ leisure preferences. And, at least in the Tallingers’ case, the family’s emphasis on organized activities was not an effort on the parents’ part to reproduce their own childhood experiences. Mr. Tallinger’s mother was a single parent from the time he was four. As a boy, he played outside for long periods, often in “pick-up” games with other boys in the neighborhood. Ms. Tallinger, too, grew up in a single-parent family. As a child, she had long stretches of unstructured time, which did not give way to organized activities until she was older.

  Moreover, neither the benefits nor the costs of the strategies I term concerted cultivation seem to be fully understood by parents. For example, the close fit between skills children learn in soccer games or at piano recitals and those they will eventually need in white-collar professional or technical positions goes unnoted. Similarly, that middle-class children have trouble adjusting to unstructured time and that they often find it difficult to forge deep, positive bonds with siblings are largely unrecognized costs of concerted cultivation. So too are the ways that one child’s schedule dominates family time, particularly at the expense of the schedules of younger siblings. Of course, sometimes parents grumble over the hectic schedules. Parents also note that they did not place similar demands on their own parents. But middle-class parents take for granted their obligation to develop their children’s talents through means including organized activities.

  Perhaps there is little understanding of the ways in which the middle-class approach to child rearing intertwines with the dominant ideology of our society, making the idea that a middle-class childhood might not be the optimal approach literally unthinkable. But, as the next chapters explain, the approach to child rearing favored by working-class parents does have real advantages for children.

  CHAPTER 4

  A Child’s Pace:

  Tyrec Taylor

  He would come running in because either he just remembered he had [football] practice or . . . one of us went and found him or sent word for him to come home. And [his friends] would all come with him, running in. Then it was just hard for him to stop playing with them, to say, well, I have to go to practice now . . . I would have to say, “Come on, Tyrec, we’re gonna be late!” And he’d be saying, “OK, I’m coming,” but he’d still be out chatting. (Interview with Ms. Taylor)

  For nine-year-old Tyrec Taylor, organized activities were an interruption. In contrast to Garrett Tallinger, Tyrec centered his life on informal play with a group of boys from his Black, working-class neighborhood. Aside from going to school and to summer day camp, Tyrec took part in only two organized activities: he went to Sunday school periodically throughout the year and to Vacation Bible School in the summer. In fourth grade, he pleaded with his mother for permission to play on a community football team that he learned about through a friend. Eventually, Ms. Taylor relented and agreed that he could join the team.
Once committed, she was determined to meet both the time and money demands posed by Tyrec’s activity. But, as the quote above suggests, Ms. Taylor found the experience taxing and she “pray[ed] that we don’t have to do it again.”

  In focusing on the organization of daily life in Tyrec Taylor’s working-class family, this chapter highlights some aspects of the child-rearing strategy I have termed the accomplishment of natural growth. The limited economic resources available to working-class and poor families make getting children fed, clothed, sheltered and transported time-consuming, arduous labor. Parents tend to direct their efforts toward keeping children safe, enforcing discipline, and, when they deem it necessary, regulating their behavior in specific areas. Within these boundaries, working-class and poor children are allowed to grow and to thrive. They are given the flexibility to choose activities and playmates and to decide how active or inactive to be as they engage in these activities. Thus, whereas middle-class children often are treated as a project to be developed, working-class and poor children are given boundaries for their behavior and then allowed to grow.

  The greater emphasis on kinship in working-class and poor families means that children spend much more time interacting with family members and providing important goods and services to kin than do their middle-class counterparts. Despite occasional quarrels, siblings offer each other more companionship and support than seemed common in the middle-class families we observed. The cultural logic of the accomplishment of natural growth grants children an autonomous world, apart from adults, in which they are free to try out new experiences and develop important social competencies. Tyrec and other working-class and poor children learn how to be members of informal peer groups. They learn how to manage their own time. They learn how to strategize. Children, especially boys, learn how to negotiate open conflict during play, including how to defend themselves physically. Boys are also given more latitude to play farther away from home than are girls.

  These social competencies are as real as those acquired by middle-class children. The two sets of competencies are not the same, however; and they are not equally valued in the institutional worlds with which all children must come in contact (e.g., schools, health-care facilities, stores, workplaces). Unlike Garrett Tallinger, Tyrec Taylor and his peers do not have opportunities to start developing the kinds of skills that reap the greatest benefits in institutional settings. For example, children from working-class and poor families typically do not learn how to choose among conflicting organizational commitments, read trip itineraries, sign identification cards, travel out of state or work on an adult-led team with formal, established rules. Nor do they have the same experience as Garrett and his friends of thinking of themselves as entitled to receive customized attention from adults in institutional settings. In fact, working-class and poor children are regularly instructed to defer to adults.1

  Along with these significant class differences between middle-class children, on the one hand, and working-class and poor children, on the other, there are some important differences between the lives of children in working-class families and those in poor families. Compared to poor children, working-class children have greater stability; their lives are less contingent, especially in terms of the availability of food, transportation, money for treats, and other economic resources. There are also differences by race and by gender. Although working-class and poor children pursue the same or similar activities and organized their daily lives in much the same way, they generally do so in racially segregated groups. This pattern held even among children who lived only a few blocks from one another and who went to the same school and were in the same class. And, as other studies have shown, we found gender a very powerful force in shaping the organization of daily life. Despite some active moments, girls are more sedentary, play closer to home, and have their physical bodies more actively scrutinized and shaped by others than do boys. Nevertheless, the greatest gulf we observed is one that has not been fully recognized in the existing literature: a class-rooted difference in the organization of daily life whereby middle and upper-middle-class children pursue a hectic schedule of adult-organized activities while working-class and poor children follow a more open-ended agenda that is not as heavily controlled by adults. Some important aspects of this difference can be seen in the way in which Tyrec Taylor’s involvement in football reverberates through his family members’ lives.

  THE TAYLOR FAMILY

  Tyrec Taylor; his mother, Celeste; thirteen-year-old sister, Anisha; and eighteen-year-old stepbrother, Malcolm, live in a rented four-bedroom house located near major bus lines in a small, stable, working-class Black neighborhood. Houses in the area sell for about $50,000. The neighborhood is “pretty quiet” according to Ms. Taylor, but she adds that “crime is everywhere, so I still have to be careful.” All of the residents on the streets immediately surrounding the Taylors’ house are African American, but a larger white neighborhood is within easy walking distance. When Tyrec and his friends have money for treats, they head for the white neighborhood to buy ice cream or drinks. Thus, for Tyrec, when compared to Black housing project residents, whites are a far more visible part of his life.

  The Taylors’ house has three stories, with narrow, steep stairs. All the bedrooms are on the upper floors; there is one bathroom, which has darkly colored, exotic-looking fans opened out and hung on the walls, next to gold butterflies. On the first floor, there is a living room, a dining area, and a kitchen. The kitchen is large with metal cabinets, florescent lights, and a low table for food preparation. The living room, which is always tidy, has a multicolored shag rug on the floor, a dark blue velour couch with printed flowers wound across it, a large television angled in a corner of the room, and a bookshelf that holds a wooden giraffe, a clock, and framed pictures of the children when they were babies. In the middle of the table sits a round glass bowl filled with decorative pebbles that hold up several large, bright pink cloth flowers. The entire effect is of a carefully decorated home. Ms. Taylor, however, complains that the house is decrepit and, indeed, there are signs that it needs repair: there are rips in the screen door and rough, unfinished wood showing on the doors inside the house.

  Tyrec’s parents live apart. Together fifteen years, and married for nine, they separated four years ago. Tyrec Senior lives in an apartment in the central city, about fifteen minutes away from his wife and children’s house. Ms. Taylor does not like the area where he lives; she calls it a “ghetto.” While virtually all Black, Mr. Taylor’s working-class neighborhood has many thriving stores, small gardens, inhabited old houses, and families. Generally, the area is seen as more desirable than numerous poor Black neighborhoods in the city. Tyrec Senior, a thin, wiry man with a serious, intense air, talks to the children on the telephone most days of the week and usually sees them once a week. He once had a substance abuse problem; he is proud of the fact that it is no longer an issue. He dropped out of school when he was young, and reading seems difficult for him. He has opinions on many issues, including the state of the world, which he offers freely to anyone who will listen. When the children protest that they cannot do something, he insists that they can. He also weighs in on decisions related to the children; for example, citing safety issues, he objected to Tyrec playing football (his opinion was overridden). He is currently unemployed; in the past, he has worked in social services, including in counseling for drug-related issues.

  Ms. Taylor is a high school graduate; she works as a secretary. She is responsible for managing the company’s fleet of cars, and she answers the phone when the regular operator takes her lunch break. She is a woman of medium height with springy, corkscrew curls that cascade around her face. She smiles often and often seems harried. Although she is only slightly overweight, she worries about her figure. When I remark that she is wearing a “cute outfit,” she responds, “Oh, thanks, but I’m too fat. I can’t fit into anything cute.” The field-worker described Ms. Taylor this way:

  At about 6:45 Celeste w
alks in. She is a slightly overweight woman with . . . a cute face. She smiles often. Later, in the dining room, where we sit at the dining room table, she often looks into a wall mirror hung near the table as she is talking (occasionally touching her hair). There are remnants of red lipstick on her lips, her nails are painted (bright) red, and she wears large earrings hidden by her hair and a thick silver bracelet. She comes in with a whoosh; she seems harried but glad to be home.

  When her car is running, Ms. Taylor drives to work; when it is not (which is often), she takes the bus. Her job does include health insurance, but the annual salary for her position (approximately $20,000) is hard to stretch far enough to cover all the family’s needs. Paying the monthly rent of $650, going out for fast food (often weekly), and having dinner in a restaurant such as “Sizzler” (once a month) leaves little for expenses such as fixing the car. The family usually takes a one-week vacation at the beach, but Ms. Taylor plans for this in advance and does overtime to cover the costs (which she does not normally do). In the Taylor family, there are frequent conversations about money. The children’s lives are constrained by the shortage of funds. Mr. Taylor buys clothes for Tyrec and his sister, Anisha (in the last year, for example, he bought four pairs of sneakers, at $70 each, for them), but he does not pay child support. Although Tyrec would like many video games, his mother says, “I can’t afford them.” He only gets them as “big gifts” for a birthday, usually from a grandmother. On the other hand, Ms. Taylor is willing to absorb the $50 football registration fee and the cost of spikes and a protective cup and strap for Tyrec. She feels that on balance “it didn’t cost a lot of money” for her son to be involved in this organized activity. She is struck, instead, by the fact that “it cost more of your time than anything.”