Unequal Childhoods

by Annette Lareau

  Jenna, seeking to reassure her mother, says, “Don’t worry. You don’t have to feed me.” Nine-year-old Katie is keenly aware of her family’s limited resources. She rejects Jenna’s logic, saying, “Well, it’s still forty dollars.”

  Doing laundry, a tedious but straightforward chore in middle class homes, is cumbersome, expensive, and frustrating for Ms. Brindle. She finds it difficult to keep a sufficient supply of quarters available. Banks often refuse to sell rolled coins to noncustomers; she does not have a bank account (using money orders when necessary). The grocery store, which does provide quarters, is a twenty-minute bus ride away. Of much greater significance, however, is the fact that the three washers and two dryers at the apartment complex are routinely out of order:

  CiCi says, “I wish I had a car to drive. I’m almost out of clothes.” (She looks at her pile of dirty clothes next to the love seat.) I ask, “Is the washing machine broken?” She replies, “When I first went down, I was freakin’ out. I went down and the water was coming out of the washers. Today the washers were still full of water. And I went to the ones up [at a nearby complex]. They were locked, so I think they’re messed up too. . . . The heat isn’t on [in the laundry room]. It’s ridiculous . . . that’s why the pipes broke. It’s forty below and stuff.”

  For Katie, broken washing machines sometimes mean no school. In rare cases when she is completely out of clean clothes, she has to stay at home until the laundry can be done.

  Having to rely on public transportation, particularly with young children, also makes life more difficult. Little things like handing the fare to the bus driver can be challenging if you are juggling a toddler, a diaper bag, and packages. Similarly, once on the bus, even seated it can be tiring to hold or watch over young children on long rides. Buses often are late, sometimes don’t come, and always are much slower than traveling by car. Finally, taking public transportation can be hazardous. Mothers and children stand out in the heat in summer, in the cold in winter, and in rainstorms many months of the year. Buses travel along busy streets, so as they wait at bus stops, parents must watch children very closely to make certain that they keep away from oncoming traffic. Melmel likes buses; he seems to relish the sensation of movement. And Ms. Brindle sometimes uses bus rides as an opportunity for one-on-one time with her son. For example, while riding to a municipal court session (to contest her eviction notice), she smiles at Melmel and says warmly, “Melmel, I love you!”7 A ride in a car is always preferable, if it can be arranged. In Ms. Brindle’s case this is difficult because her brother’s car is sometimes not running and even when it is, her schedule and his are hard to coordinate. The same is true for her mother’s car. In addition, child car seats are required by law, but they are expensive, heavy, and difficult to move from car to car. When Melmel rides in his grandmother’s car, which has no car seat, she keeps an eye out for the police. If she sees a police officer, she pushes her grandson down below the level of the car windows, trying to hide him from view. She says she feels “like a criminal.” She can’t afford to be caught: “The ticket is a thousand dollars!”

  Much as with transportation, poor families have few choices about where they live. Thus, Katie’s family makes do with roaches in their apartment, a poorly maintained building, snow and ice on the steps, chronically broken appliances, and leaky plumbing. So far, though, they have been “lucky” with their neighbors, meaning that no serious threats have materialized in this apartment building. Ms. Brindle’s former sister-in-law and close friend, Mary, was not so fortunate. Drug dealers moved into the complex.

  Despite its many problems, the Brindles’ apartment at least provides the family with an autonomous, private living space. Midway into the observation period, however, even that was threatened. Ms. Brindle began falling behind in her rent payments. When she first moved into the apartment, she had expected to split the $600 monthly fee with Jenna. Jenna became sick and then was diagnosed as HIV positive. She could not contribute her share of the rent, and her mother could not afford it by herself. The waiting list for public housing is years long. Moving in with Katie’s grandmother was a possibility, but only as a last resort. The house is already crowded: Ms. Brindle’s brothers John (the schizophrenic) and Ryan live there. The Brindle family would have to live in the basement. In addition, the wood-burning stove and kerosene heaters Ms. Brindle’s mother uses to heat her house would aggravate Jenna’s allergies. But most important, Jenna and Grandmom do not get along. They have had many years of bitter conflicts, including a low point when Jenna was ten and her grandmother called her a “whore.”

  Stymied and unsure of what to do next, Ms. Brindle waited, first using up her last month’s rent, and then hoping to move any day. But as the days dragged on, her landlord decided to begin eviction proceedings. On a cold day in February, Ms. Brindle, Melmel, and a field-worker go to municipal court. After waiting hours, they are finally called to the bench. During the brief interaction, the court official tells Ms. Brindle that she has thirty days to move out. The next week, however, she receives a “failure to appear” notice from the court. According to court records, Ms. Brindle had not appeared, and thus her landlord had the right to lock her out of the apartment immediately. Trying to contact the court is an exercise in frustration:

  CiCi says, “I called that number that they gave me and they kept telling me I had to call back. I got tired of calling back. I asked who was I supposed to talk to. I got tired of calling back. Then I got this notice in the mail and I was mad.”

  In the meantime, Jenna decides to move to Florida to live with her father, and to avoid the cold northeastern winter. After she gets there, things do not work out as planned. Jenna’s father proves to be less helpful than she had expected, other arrangements fall through, her health worsens, and she is briefly hospitalized. Frantic with worry, Ms. Brindle decides to move to Florida when Jenna asks her to come. To get money for a ticket, Ms. Brindle sells her living room and bedroom sets. But, the buyers of the bedroom furniture are late in bringing their payment. The delay is excruciating. Ms. Brindle worries that the deal will fall through, leaving her without the money she needs to finance the trip:

  She says, “I need to get the bedroom set sold. It was supposed to be gone but because of the snow they couldn’t come get it. They had the money, but who knows if they have the money now? I need the money to get the tickets and I am supposed to go down to pay for the tickets tomorrow. (Her voice is rising with anxiety.) I am waiting for a fifty-dollar check. That will give me enough for the tickets and then anything extra is money to go down there with.”

  Ms. Brindle is desperate to go to Florida. Having already lost one child, she is distraught beyond words by Jenna’s illness. In the fall, when Jenna was first diagnosed, Ms. Brindle attempted suicide. Depressed and overwhelmed, she swallowed a large number of pills with alcohol (in the apartment, with the three children in other rooms). She was rushed to the hospital, had her stomach pumped, and survived. She is determined to take care of Jenna, but the logistics of getting to Florida overwhelm her. She toys with the possibility of leaving Katie behind until the end of the school year. She begins by suggesting that Katie stay with Grandmom until June, but Katie says, “No, I’ll go.” Later, Katie even more firmly rejects the idea of living with Aunt Mary while her mother is in Florida:

  CiCi says, “You could stay here.” A minute passes by and CiCi says, “You could stay with Mary.”

  Mary who is walking toward the kitchen at this point says, “Eh-eh. If she stayed with me, I would hit her.” Mary looks at Katie and says, “Your mom doesn’t hit you cuz she’s afraid she’ll hurt you. But I would hit you so you stop acting like a brat.”

  CiCi says under her breath, “That’s right.” Katie does not say anything.

  Aunt Mary volunteers, “I would hit her like my father hit me,” and then tells a story of how he beat her so badly she bled, but she altered her behavior thereafter.

  Katie says to CiCi, “You did punch me in the face
once.” CiCi says, “I slapped your face. Don’t exaggerate.” Katie says, “I went to school with a black eye.”

  The afternoon wears on; most of the time, everyone is watching soap operas and Oprah. With her mother and aunt only a few feet away, Katie begins to hit herself. There is no mistaking that they have heard and seen her, but there is no reaction on their part:

  Katie starts hitting her forehead with her fist. She is sitting on the bed and falls backwards as she beats her forehead. She is hitting with her right hand. She continues for about three minutes, which seems to me like a very long time.

  Moreover, Melmel begins to mimic her:

  Melmel climbs up on the bed between her and myself and imitates Katie. He does this for about a minute. CiCi and Mary watch without saying anything. Katie says to me, “That’s why I was in the hospital.” I ask, “Why?” She says, “For hurting myself.” I ask, “What did they do to you?” She says, “They locked me up.” I ask, “And then what did they do?” Katie says, “They taught me about self-esteem and told me not to hurt myself.” I looked over once and CiCi and Mary were watching Oprah.

  Clearly, Katie does not want to stay behind, either with her grandmother or her aunt. Knowing her daughter’s flair for being dramatic, Ms. Brindle may think that Katie is deliberately exaggerating her feelings and thus ignores her. Perhaps, though, she simply cannot allow herself to acknowledge her youngest daughter’s feelings, regardless of their validity. Ms. Brindle has a history of depression, and she seems to be haunted by the death of her first child. She feels she must go to Florida to help Jenna. Leaving Katie in someone else’s care would simplify several aspects of the move. (When the move finally happened, Ms. Brindle took both Melmel and Katie with her.)

  All of the families in the study—all families everywhere—face problems. Differences arise in terms of the specific kinds and amounts of difficulties, the ways in which individuals’ temperaments shape their responses to the challenges they face, and the structural resources available to families. The Brindles had more numerous and deeper psychological problems than other poor families we visited. Many of the other challenges they faced, though, were common among poor families and arose from the same basic dilemma: insufficient resources for getting children through the day and meeting their needs. The sorts of difficulties we observed Ms. Brindle trying to cope with—going to get food stamps, finding working laundry machines, dealing with landlords and problematic neighbors, and sorting out errors on the part of powerful bureaucracies—are all routine problems for families below the poverty level.

  These everyday sorts of dilemmas fit the definition of social structural problems: they are created by the way the social structural system is organized. Mixed into these social structural problems are the difficulties that arise from the individual biographies of family members. Thus, in observing real families as they move through their days, what we see are the outcomes of an ongoing interaction between structure and biography. Within the sample of working-class and poor families, the structural problems were the most oppressive ingredient in the structure-biography mixture. Insufficient resources shaped where families lived, what jobs parents held (or didn’t hold), how individuals traveled from place to place, and how much and what kind of care parents could provide for young children.

  In this context, it is not surprising to find that children’s leisure activities are given a lower priority. As the next section shows, however, it is not simply the press of everyday life that prompts poor (and working-class) parents to remain relatively uninvolved in their children’s play and not inclined to follow up on children’s budding interests in music, art, drama, or sports by enrolling them in organized activities. The sense of an obligation to cultivate their children that is so apparent among middle-class parents is uncommon among their poor and working-class counterparts. Likewise, the sense of being entitled to adult attention that is so prevalent among middle-class children is absent in their poor and working-class peers.

  LEAVING CHILD’S PLAY TO CHILDREN

  Middle-class parents often are busy, even at home. They certainly do not always stop to watch every time one or more of their children is engaged in some sort of performance, be it playing the piano, putting on a skit, or doing a dance. Still, these parents appeared to feel an obligation to cultivate their children’s talents. Often, they would meet that obligation by watching, evaluating, and encouraging their children’s at-home performances.8 At times, parents would also voluntarily participate in children’s activities, playing board and word games with them, engaging in backyard sports and helping with projects.

  Working-class and poor parents also sometimes join their children in play. For example, in the white working-class Yanelli family (see Chapter 11), Billy, the focal child, and his father would sit outside on the sidewalk in front of their house and play cards while Mr. Yanelli smoked a cigarette. In Katie’s family, too, adults sometimes participate. Ms. Brindle periodically agrees to watch Katie and her cousin, Amy, perform little skits. Katie’s mother also occasionally plays Monopoly with her.

  Although in all the families we studied, adults seemed willing to take time occasionally to observe a child’s activity or to join a child in a game, adults in working-class and poor families make relatively few interventions in children’s leisure activities, especially compared to the level of involvement we observed in middle-class homes. Most working-class and poor parents did not consider children’s activities as consequential or, more specifically, as something that ought to involve adult time or energy. In their view, children’s activities are something they do with one another, not with adults. Therefore, there was a separation between adults’ and children’s worlds. When working-class and poor children ask for adult participation, their requests may be seen as unnecessary and possibly annoying as well:

  Amy says out of the blue, “Katie is good at dying. She is good at dying and crying.” Katie turns and tells us, “Shoot me.” . . . Without affect or enthusiasm, Gmom (Grandmom) makes a play gun out of her fingers and aims at Katie’s chest and says (in a monotone), “Bang.” . . . Katie has backed up . . . [She] begins a slow, dramatic performance of dying, clutching her heart with both hands, then stretching both hands and arms completely outward [and then] leaning back and falling onto the day bed. She slowly slides off the day bed and onto the floor, and—as a final touch—lets her head drop and rest against her left shoulder. She lies still.

  Amy is hopping up and down with excitement . . . I smile and say, “Great.” Grandmom says nothing; she looks bored. Katie scrambles up and says, “Shoot me again.” This time I shoot her with my right hand. She repeats the performance. Grandmom is [not paying attention to Katie at all but is] watching TV.

  By the third time Katie asks to be shot, Grandmom looks quite annoyed, but she does not say anything. There is no fourth request because, in a move typical of young children playing informally, Katie and Amy suddenly shift gears. They retreat to the kitchen to plot a Christmas skit and then come out to the living room to perform. In middle-class homes, parents routinely praise their children’s displays of creativity. At Grandmom’s house, the skit is assiduously ignored by the adults:

  Amy says to us, “I’m Santa and you (to Katie) are a spoiled brat.” Amy puts on her hat and Katie puts on her hat, and Amy says, “Watch us! Watch us! I’m a Santa and you are a child. First you’re a spoiled brat and then you aren’t.”

  I am watching them, but no one else is watching. Grandmom is watching TV. (She’s looking straight ahead; Amy’s father is there, but he ignores the girls’ performance; Uncle John is also present, sitting on the couch, seemingly oblivious to everything around him.)9

  When the girls escalate their demands for attention, Grandmom complies, but with a notable lack of enthusiasm:

  Katie pretends to be a child coming to Santa. Amy [Santa] sits in the chair and receives her . . . Grandmom is not paying attention but is watching “Roseanne” [on TV]. Amy—indignant—reaches over and turns
off the television as she says, “Grandmom! You aren’t watching!” Grandmom doesn’t say anything but focuses her attention on Amy for a little bit.10 Katie is standing next to her cousin. Katie makes little hops up and down. Amy repeats the drama: (holding up a bright red, furry Christmas stocking) she says, “This elf has a stocking with rocks in it because he has been given coal.” (She takes the rocks out and pours them from hand to hand.) Amy and Katie abruptly leave and go into [the next] room and huddle together. Grandmom does not seem at all interested in the skit.

  The girls come back to the living room. In a louder, stage projection, voice they announce, “This is the first part.” Wearing Christmas stockings on their heads, they perform a short skit where Katie explains that she is “an orphan. (pause) My parents are deceased.” The orphan comes, beseechingly, to see Santa (Amy). Just as the skit is beginning to gather momentum, Amy’s father comes into the room.

  [Ryan] does not look up to see what the girls are doing. Instead, he pulls out an older upright vacuum cleaner. He plugs it in and . . . begins to vacuum up the tinsel, which is underneath the girls’ feet and underneath the tree. Without looking up, he vacuums steadily . . . Amy is forced to move up the stairs to get out of the way of her father. She and Katie do not acknowledge this interruption.

  Turning to the audience (which at this point consists only of me), Amy announces firmly, “That is the end of part one.” I smile and say, “Good job!” The girls regroup, plot out part two, come into the living room, and present that installment. Again, their grandmother offers the girls only the slightest acknowledgment, and Ryan continues to completely ignore his niece and daughter.