Like the Tallingers, Marshalls, and Williamses, the Handlons have important forms of social, economic, and cultural capital. They are well positioned to intervene in their children’s institutional lives. Some of the strategies Mr. and Ms. Handlon pursue are familiar components of concerted cultivation. For example, much like Ms. Marshall, Ms. Handlon tries to ensure the academic success of her daughter, Melanie, by tailoring Melanie’s classroom experiences. Unlike Ms. Marshall, though, Ms. Handlon makes only intermittent contact with school staff and is only partly successful in achieving the accommodations she seeks. What is most striking about the Handlons’ approach to child rearing is the emphasis they put on activating their resources inside the home. Ms. Handlon makes sustained, intense efforts in the area of homework. She expends large quantities of time and energy each weekday afternoon, trying to help Melanie complete her assignments. Ironically, this strategy yields few positive results. It pits mother against daughter, emotionally exhausting both, yet seems to yield few institutional profits.
THE HANDLON FAMILY
June Handlon, a thin, middle-aged woman with wavy red hair, has a relaxed way about her. Her husband, Harold, is a tall, friendly man with a boyish grin. Although he is an enthusiastic golfer, Mr. Handlon nevertheless is about fifty pounds overweight. He has an M.A. in credit and financial management and works as a credit manager in a major corporation. Ms. Handlon completed two years of junior college and is employed as a secretary by the Sylvan Presbyterian Church. She works thirty hours per week.
The Handlons have three children: Harry, an eighth-grader; Tommy, a sixth-grader at the nearby middle school; and Melanie, the focal child, a fourth-grader at the neighborhood elementary school. Harry is tall and thin, with longish brown hair that is mostly hidden under a nearly ever-present baseball cap (worn backward); he loves country music, street hockey, and, most of all, auto racing. Tommy, by contrast, prefers theater and plays to sports. Melanie resembles neither of her brothers. Field notes from the first visit to the Handlon home describe Melanie this way:
Melanie answers the door with a shy smile. She is young and maybe 4’ 4” tall. Her hair is long and blond. . . . She has a thin white plastic headband on her head, which pulls her hair back from her face. Her face is pudgy; she has chubby cheeks, which make her eyes seem very small and squinted. She wears a purple turtleneck and matching purple knit pants. The clothes fit her tightly and reveal that she has a young potbelly.
At school, Melanie is more often tentative than assertive. Although she is not especially popular, neither is she a social isolate. She misses school frequently for minor illnesses such as sore throat, sore foot, or cold (but in an interview, Melanie confesses to a field-worker that sometimes she feigns illness deliberately to avoid having to go to school). One teacher worries about her being in the “shadow” of her older brothers. Certainly at meals, where both her brothers jabber nonstop, she has little opportunity to talk.
Still, at times, she can be outgoing and engagingly uninhibited. For example, one day at school she learns how to sing the song “Happy Birthday” in Spanish. That afternoon, pleased with her new accomplishment, Melanie sings the song over and over and over. She sings in the car and while doing her homework. She sings at dinner. In fact, she sings all through the evening. The lack of an appreciative audience for her newest skill does not seem to diminish Melanie’s enthusiasm. She also enjoys playful interactions with her father, including pitching a paper airplane at his belly. Thus, while accurately described as shy, Melanie can and does change her behavior as she moves from context to context.
In the Handlon family, most household tasks, as well as scheduling and coordinating family members’ activities and providing transportation to and from events and appointments are Ms. Handlon’s responsibility. Despite the regularity of Mr. Handlon’s work routine (he leaves the house each weekday at 7:30 A.M. and returns home at 6:00 P.M.), he does very little child-related labor. Instead, he handles such matters as videotaping the church pageant and putting up the family’s Christmas tree lights.
THE HANDLONS’ WORLD
The Handlons, and Melanie in particular, live in a white world. Among the sixty or so children in the two fourth grades at Melanie’s elementary school, only five are nonwhite. Similarly, both Melanie’s Girl Scout troop and her family’s church congregation are overwhelmingly white. The Handlons’ nearly all white social world is coupled with a physical environment that is, if anything, even less integrated. The family’s four-bedroom home (a two-story, red brick house built in the late 1940s and worth about $245,000) is located in a homogenous suburban neighborhood.
With a family income of between $85,000 and $95,000 per year, the Handlons are solidly middle class and appear to take many elements of middle-class status for granted. They own an array of electronics (TVs, stereo, VCR, electronic keyboard) and each adult has a car. All three children participate in at least some activities organized by adults. The cost of these activities is dismissed as “minimal” and inconsequential. There is no indication that the Handlons feel the need to “pinch pennies.” They live in cluttered comfort. On our first visit, Ms. Handlon remarks apologetically and with some embarrassment that “housework isn’t my strong suit.” Indeed, the dining room table is piled with all sorts of items—coupons, socks, used cups, a laundry basket of clean but unfolded clothes, and piles of papers. In the kitchen, dirty dishes sometimes pile up in the sink and are left unheeded on the table. In the living room, several half-opened boxes of Christmas ornaments rest on the couch for over a week while the Christmas tree is being decorated. This level of untidiness is not common among middle-class families, but it does not appear to cause trouble for the Handlons.
Unlike most middle-class families, the Handlons have many relatives who live close by. Melanie’s parents describe themselves as feeling emotionally close to these members of their extended family. They report seeing their relatives about once a week and note that they also spend major holidays with them, including Thanksgiving, at which time they had twenty people at the house. The Handlons’ interactions with kin are much more frequent than is typical among the middle class, but they do not approach the kinds of connections that are common among working-class and poor families. Among these groups, as previous chapters have shown, informal play and visits with cousins are not restricted to once a week or special occasions. Instead, they dominate everyday family life.
COMPETING VALUES: THE IMPORTANCE OF ORGANIZED
ACTIVITIES AND UNSTRUCTURED TIME
Compared to other middle-class children, Melanie does not have a “heavy” schedule of organized activities. She is by no means idle outside of school, however. During December, she juggles several regularly scheduled commitments with assorted holiday events. Every Sunday includes an early church service, Sunday school, and youth choir practice. Mondays she has a piano lesson; Thursdays she goes to Girl Scouts. In addition to these standing events, Melanie also takes part in a special Girl Scouts “cookies for the homeless” holiday event on a Monday night and a school holiday musical performance on a Tuesday night. In between her two orthodontist appointments and five special rehearsals for the Christmas pageant at her church, she manages to Christmas shop.
Melanie does not complain about her schedule, nor do her parents seem to consider her activities overly taxing. In fact, Ms. Handlon perceives all three of her children as spending less time in organized activities than other children in the neighborhood. Both Mr. and Ms. Handlon believe that children should have free, unstructured time. Mr. Handlon explicitly criticizes the tendency of parents to “overschedule” children. Nevertheless, both Handlons hope Melanie will take on another commitment—they want her to join a swim team in the spring. When tryouts took place the previous year, Melanie had declined to participate. Her parents continue to bring the topic up from time to time, including around Christmastime. Mr. and Ms. Handlon’s belief that Melanie’s involvement in swimming would be an objectively good thing for her apparently t
rumps their resistance to the “overscheduling” of children. It can be a difficult trade-off. Middle-class parents (especially mothers) worry that if their children do not enroll in organized activities, they will have no one to play with after school and/or during spring and summer breaks. This kind of concern is clearly present with the Handlons. In addition to their desire to see Melanie enroll in swimming, they would like her to give softball a try. One winter evening, as the family is sitting around watching television, Melanie’s mother mentions softball three times. Although on each occasion she frames the decision to play softball as Melanie’s, Ms. Handlon urges the activity upon her daughter and explicitly mentions her concern that Melanie not be “left out.” Eventually, Melanie says, “Okay, I’ll play,” and the subject is dropped.
One striking though unintended result of Mr. and Ms. Handlon’s tendency to actively encourage Melanie to take activities she does not seek out herself is the speed and frequency with which she will complain, “Mom, I’m bored!” Ironically, although we observed this same pattern of self-proclaimed boredom among other seemingly very busy middle-class children in the study, we did not find it among the comparatively “underscheduled” working-class and poor children.
CULTIVATING ACADEMIC SUCCESS:
INTERVENING AT SCHOOL
Like other middle-class mothers, Ms. Handlon plays an active role in monitoring, criticizing, and intervening in Melanie’s schooling. She tries to work closely with Melanie’s teachers. At the beginning of the school year, for example, she brings Melanie, who is sick, to school for a brief visit so that her daughter can meet her teacher. Once Melanie is feeling better, Ms. Handlon inquires about the work missed, queries the teacher about items she did not understand, and works to facilitate her daughter’s transition into fourth grade.
She kind of felt lost because kids had already gone over a lot of the things and Melanie didn’t understand what was going on. So I went in, basically, every morning and talked with the teacher and asked questions.1
Melanie’s minor illnesses persist and so too do her mother’s interventions. Hoping to keep Melanie from falling behind, Ms. Handlon requests that the teacher send home spelling lists in advance. She photocopies each new list when it arrives and then cuts it up to make flashcards, gluing each word to an index card. She brings the cards along when she and Melanie go out on errands; as they drive around in the car, they practice spelling the words. Melanie consistently ranks at the bottom of her class academically. The Handlons have hired a private tutor for Melanie, but Ms. Handlon worries that her daughter is “intimidated” and that school is a “negative” experience for her. She believes that Melanie lacks self-confidence and that “she needs something that [gives] her a positive feeling.” She makes these opinions very clear to Melanie’s teacher during a conference. In a parent-teacher conference with Ms. Nettles, Ms. Handlon makes a pointed comment that Melanie’s social study teacher has placed too much emphasis on the negative in grading a test:
With the social studies test that she brought home with the big N (Needs Improvement—this is the lowest grade possible) on the top of the paper. I looked at it and I counted all the ones she got right. I said, “Melanie, compared to the last social studies test, you got like eighteen right on this one.” I said, “That’s a lot more than you got right on the last test so you have improved.” Now, looking at the paper she couldn’t see that. It was just a negative, an N . . . So, I’m trying to get her to start recognizing her positives.
Ms. Handlon’s comments during the parent-teacher conference demonstrate her belief that she is entitled to point out what she sees as the teacher’s failings with respect to the conduct of Melanie’s education. This is a perspective widely shared by middle-class parents, including the many mothers with whom Ms. Handlon interacts when she brings Melanie to and from school or other events. Ms. Handlon’s role as the local Girl Scout leader also provides her with informal opportunities to exchange information about routine and unusual happenings at the elementary school.2 Ms. Handlon knows that many mothers have complaints of one kind or another and that many are engaged in specialized pursuits for their children.
Being embedded in a social network of middle-class mothers shapes Ms. Handlon’s sense of her rights and her responsibilities with regard to Melanie’s education.3 She and the other mothers seem comfortable passing judgment on all aspects of their children’s schooling, critiquing everything from teachers’ pedagogical style to the content of their classroom bulletin boards.
Mr. Ickes (Melanie’s fourth-grade social studies teacher). I had a negative opinion [about him] from parents. They don’t like his teaching methods. They don’t like his gruffness. People didn’t like Ms. Hortense (Melanie’s third-grade teacher) a lot because she was very old-school and had not changed or adapted her teaching. Her classroom was very boring. There was nothing bright or exciting. Her bulletin boards were not exciting and not conducive to exciting kids about education. At the beginning of the year, I wasn’t one [of the parents who disliked Ms. Hortense] but Melanie would get a lot right on the paper, and the only thing acknowledged was what was wrong.
Ms. Handlon’s network also provides her with information about what steps other parents are taking as they try to resolve school-related problems, such as how to ensure that homework gets done correctly and on time. Her conversations with other mothers help her develop strategies for interacting with educators.
[Some of us mothers] were talking about the conferences that are coming up, and what points are going to be brought up, and what we are going to talk about. And the biggest concern I hear from parents is the amount of homework. It’s every night. It’s on weekends. It’s constant.
Despite her belief that Melanie’s teacher assigns too much homework, and her awareness that other parents are concerned about this issue, Ms. Handlon does not raise the topic of homework directly with any of the educators or administrators at the school. Instead, as the rest of this chapter describes, she tries to help Melanie herself, going over her daughter’s schoolwork with her at home, each afternoon.
CULTIVATING ACADEMIC SUCCESS:
INTERVENING AT HOME
In separate interviews, Mr. and Ms. Handlon each define homework as a major problem within the family. Ms. Handlon is frank and succinct: “Our biggest conflict is homework,” she tells the interviewer. Mr. Handlon focuses on the volume of homework the children face. He estimates that Melanie does “two to three hours [of homework] every night.” He describes the family routine this way:
That’s all we do with them at night is homework. They come home from school, get a snack, and they’ll start working on homework. And they’re still working on homework, and they’re still working on it when I get home. It’s entirely too much homework. I don’t think I did that much homework in college.
Ms. Handlon voices similar concerns during her interview, and she returns to the topic informally with a field-worker one afternoon as they sit in the family minivan, waiting to pick up Melanie after school,
[Melanie] worked on her homework [Sunday] for four hours with her father. From three until seven. I can’t believe that the teachers assign so much on the weekends. Don’t they have a life?
Neither Mr. nor Ms. Handlon seems to believe that all homework is bad and both appear to accept the view widely held among middle-class parents that children must do homework in order to succeed academically. What the Handlons object to is the quantity of work, the amount of their children’s time spent doing school assignments, the amount of their time given over to their children’s homework, and the useless nature of much of the work. These elements, alone and in combination, result in a further problem, namely the constant presence of tension and conflict in the home. Homework sets off painful, protracted battles. Ms. Handlon and Melanie appear to have different ideas about how much help with school-work Ms. Handlon should provide, in what areas, and in what ways.
Melanie contends that her homework often is too difficult for her
to complete, even with help. Her mother seems to believe that Melanie needs to concentrate more. Especially in math, Ms. Handlon tries to help by taking Melanie step by step through each problem. Thus, even when the questions are not mentally challenging for Melanie, homework can be very time consuming for both mother and daughter. For assignments in which comprehension is also an issue, much more than time is at stake: a general sense of failure and frustration on both sides are regular hallmarks of these mother-daughter homework sessions.
Not surprisingly, neither Melanie nor her mother looks forward to doing homework. Melanie’s first line of defense is to take the offense, as the following excerpt from a field note shows. Climbing into the family’s minivan after school, Melanie immediately mentions—and simultaneously downplays—the fact that she has homework:
MS. HANDLON (in a cheery voice): How are you?
MELANIE: Okay. (pause) I only have math homework today.
MS. HANDLON: How many problems?
MELANIE: Ten. Well, maybe twenty.
MS. HANDLON: That’s not too bad. Only math?
MELANIE: Yeah.
Her mother is not ready to drop the topic, however. Probing, she inquires about other subjects. Reluctantly, Melanie discloses the rest of her homework load. She is hesitant but truthful:
MS. HANDLON: You don’t have any social studies?
MELANIE: Well, maybe a little.
MS. HANDLON: What about spelling?
MELANIE: Oh, yeah. I have a spelling test tomorrow.
Once home, Melanie takes time to snack and relax before beginning her homework. She asks permission to put on music. Gleefully, she selects “The Nutcracker” and turns the volume up loud on the stereo. With mother and daughter sitting together at the dining room table, the homework session begins.
Unequal Childhoods Page 25