Unequal Childhoods

by Annette Lareau

  When the founders of the country were raised, children were routinely disciplined by physical force. By the end of the twentieth century and beginning of the twenty-first, dominant child-rearing ideology suggests the importance of reasoning with children and giving children “appropriate choices.” Compared with earlier historical times, authoritarian child-rearing methods, particularly disciplining children through corporal punishment, have fallen out of favor.

  Yet compliance with professional standards varies systematically rather than randomly. Parents who use belts are at risk for being considered abusive much more than parents who engage in verbal abuse of children (i.e., a mother who tells a child “I don’t want to be your mother anymore”). Schools, as arms of the state, selectively enforce child-rearing standards. This has important consequences for the comfort, trust, and experience of family members in these institutions.

  In a white working-class neighborhood with narrow streets and narrow houses, “Little Billy” Yanelli lives with his mother and father (who are unmarried). They reside in a small two-bedroom brick house in the city. The front door is just a few steps from the curb and opens immediately into a small living room. The living room is dominated by a huge television with an extra-large screen that takes up most of the wall; the television is always on. With a sofa, recliner, love seat, and coffee table, space is at a premium. There is not really room for two people to walk through the room at the same time. The house (two bedrooms, one bathroom, one small living room, dining room, kitchen, and a finished basement) has a small yard where Mr. Yanelli, known to family members as “Big Billy,” grows tomatoes in the summer. The living room, as well as the entire house, is always immaculately kept. When field-workers comment on the orderliness, Ms. Yanelli replies: “Well this house is so small that if there’s one coat on a chair or a pair of shoes, it’s a mess.” Little Billy’s parents recently bought the house and renovated it. Mr. Yanelli did all of the work himself on nights and weekends.

  Linda Yanelli is thirty-six but looks younger, in part because at home she often is dressed in denim cutoffs and a cotton T-shirt; she has bare feet and her brown hair is pulled back into a ponytail. Ms. Yanelli cleans houses in the suburbs (off the books) for $12 an hour. Her job is tiring. In teams of four, she and her co-workers move from house to house in her bosses’ car; she does not get a regularly scheduled lunch break. On Thursdays, for example, she doesn’t get home until after 6:00 P.M. because her team cleans nine houses in one day. As a result of his job as a house painter, Mr. Yanelli, a thin, quiet, man in his late thirties, is often dressed in paint-splattered pants and shirts.1 Someone who has been working since he was fourteen, he dislikes his work intensely, particularly since he switched to a new job with a boss he sees as demanding and greedy. He is up and out at work early in the morning and is often home by 4:30 P.M. He enjoys his son, however, and takes an active role in driving him to his baseball games, assisting the coach, and chastising Billy to swing at the ball. (He will yell, “Swing!” Shaking his head ruefully, he says, “He is afraid of the ball.”) Mr. Yanelli also plays cards with Little Billy. As he passes through the house, Mr. Yanelli will affectionately ruffle the top of Billy’s head, calling him “Muke,” a favorite nickname. In accord with the traditional gender division of labor, however, he is not involved at all in Billy’s child care or schooling: “it is her department.” Ms. Yanelli also has a twenty-one-year-old son, Manny, from a previous marriage who works and lives at home (although he spends quite a bit of time at his girlfriend’s house). When he is working, everyone gets along fine; when he is not working there can be tension between Mr. Yanelli and Manny.

  Both of the Yanelli parents dropped out of high school. Neither of the adults has health insurance; the cost of getting sick is a constant cause of worry.2 When they are really sick, they go to the hospital emergency room, which can cost hundreds of dollars, and then pay off the bill, bit by bit. Money is always tight, although much less so than years ago when Ms. Yanelli was on welfare. Today, she is very proud of the fact that they have a credit card. They do not, however, have a checking account; all bills are paid with money orders. Both enjoy “playing the numbers” and regularly place small bets, as well as bets on the local football team. Occasionally they will “hit” a number; a $250 hit paid for their new dining room furniture.

  Both Mr. and Ms. Yanelli came from families in which their parents were struggling economically. Ms. Yanelli’s family, for example, moved frequently. Her parents divorced when she was very young, and her mother (Billy’s grandmother) married again when Ms. Yanelli was two. Her stepfather, whom she calls “Dad,” worked in factory jobs but never learned to read or write. Her biological father died when she was thirteen, allegedly of a suicide in the city prison. Ms. Yanelli is dubious:

  He always kept in contact. He always came to see us. He was always a good father. When he was thirty-three years old he hung himself in prison. And there was a lot of debate about—did the policeman do it? There was a lot of stuff with the police at the time. But he would never kill himself. He wasn’t that kind of man. He just bought a boat the day before.

  Ms. Yanelli is a worrier. In a life-defining event, the three-year old daughter of one of her good friends died of a brain tumor. For years, Ms. Yanelli restricted Little Billy’s movements even when he was with his father (e.g., forbidding them to go fishing at a local river) for fear that something might happen. She feels that her fear of losing him led her to be indulgent. She wonders if this is the source of his behavior problems at school.

  I’m having so many problems with him right now. I don’t know if he’s hyperactive. I mean, I’ve gone through years of trying to find out what’s wrong with him. We’re good to him. I thought at one point maybe that’s what it is; we’re too good to him. He’s got like a mean streak in him. The more you do for him, the more you love him—he’s just got this little mean streak in him and I can’t explain it. But . . . we love him to death. He’s interested in everything. He’s always willing to go, willing to do anything. He’s a fun kid. He loves sports. . . . He plays baseball. He wants to play hockey. See, I’m the kind of mother that—I feel like I’m the one that’s wrong.

  Ten-year-old Little Billy is short and pudgy and often wears long T-shirts that hang down over his pants. Still, with his closely cropped blond hair and a stud earring in his right earlobe he also has a stylish air to him. School is difficult, as he expressed when asked what he liked about his teacher, Mr. Tier:

  Nothing. Well, I like that he lets you have extra recess. We always go on walks . . . He’s a fun teacher. We learn songs that he makes up, like “The Map Rap.” You can learn a lot from having fun. We have a lot of animals in our classroom. Uh, we have nine fish in a humongous tank, three hamsters . . . (Mr. Tier) used big words . . . he used words like “technically,” “obstacle.” He would use giant words sometimes.

  But he also had objections:

  Well, when he gets mad . . . he’ll pull somebody by the hair or their ear or hit them in the head with his fingers but it hurts. And when he does that we all go, “OW.”

  When asked how Mr. Tier would describe him, he reported:

  That I’m intelligent. I’m not just saying that, because I heard him say it. He would say I’m always getting my homework done. And that I’m a really nice boy and he would say that I keep my grades up.

  But he also knew of his reputation:

  He would say—a lot of people think I’m trouble. He would describe me as trouble, like that . . . He would say—he thinks I have problems at home.

  He was aware of the tension between his parents and “the school,” noting that his mother “hates” the principal.

  Billy Yanelli’s home is in an all-white neighborhood, but the street demarcating the beginning of an all-Black neighborhood is only a few blocks away. His school, Lower Richmond, is racially integrated among the students and staff. For example, his third-grade teacher, Ms. Green, was African American, as was the school counselor
, Ms. Franklin, but his fourth-grade teacher, Mr. Tier, and the principal are white. At home, he mostly plays with white children (including white girls), although occasionally a Black boy from his classroom who lives only a few minutes away by foot will walk over to Billy’s house to see if he wants to play. His father had a best friend from childhood, Mitch, who is Black. Mitch is over several times per week. The stores his family frequents are overwhelmingly white; so is his baseball league.

  Similar to Tyrec Taylor, Katie Brindle, and other working-class and poor children, Billy’s daily life is primarily built around playing with neighborhood children, of whom there are quite a few. In the summer his one organized sport, baseball, makes the family feel that they are extremely busy, with practices in the evenings and a game on the weekend. He enjoys it.

  I like that I’m catching. I like when I get up to bat because I feel like, sometimes I feel nervous, like if there’s a really fast pitcher . . . I’m afraid I’m gonna strike out. But then, boom, boom, boom, I’m hitting one in the outfield.

  Mostly, however, Little Billy plays with children in the neighborhood in the street, watches television (including Saturday afternoon cooking shows), or rides along while his mother does errands. Like Tyrec Taylor, Billy has much more unstructured free time than did Garrett Tallinger and Alexander Williams. In addition, Billy’s parents are very close to their relatives; Little Billy’s uncle usually drops by every day and Ms. Yanelli talks to her mom daily.

  My brothers calls me every single day, “What are you doin’?” “Nothin’,” “See you later . . . “ My family talks every day. My other brother will call as soon as he thinks I’m available just to say what are you doin’ and how did you make out at the school this morning? My whole family has total contact every day.

  With family, “There’s always somebody there for them and somebody who cares about them no matter what kind of life they have. That’s important.”

  Still, the Yanellis are not close to all of their relatives. Mr. Yanelli was working a job with his younger brother, Charlie, and he suddenly saw his other brother, Ray, a drug addict, pushing a cart like an old man. Mr. Yanelli gave five dollars to Charlie to hand over to their brother Ray, but he did not go over himself to visit.

  At school, Little Billy usually gets B’s but is considered to be a behavior problem. His mother calls him the class clown. He often is in trouble at school, for example, for throwing rocks, pulling chairs out from underneath other students as they go to sit down, getting in fights with other children, and various other forms of “acting out.” Mr. Tier described him as follows:

  He’s a goofball. I’m sorry, but he is . . . You know what a goofball is like. He crosses his eyes. He sticks his tongue out and he makes weird sounds.

  Mr. Tier was also troubled by Billy’s difficulty getting along with his peers. The school counselor, Ms. Franklin, agreed:

  Billy’s a bright child;, he’s got good potential. [But] his mouth gets him into trouble. He says things to other children that set them off a lot of times. He’ll talk about kids’ mothers . . . He knows how to make other children angry and react . . . I really do feel a lot of his behaviors are inappropriate for a child his age . . . [they are more appropriate] for a much younger child . . . six, seven years old.

  Because of his behavioral difficulties at school, the teachers have strongly recommended that Billy see the school counselor on a weekly basis. They have also recommended counseling for the family, which the father considers outrageous. His mother believes it likely that she will ultimately have to acquiesce as she did for the school counseling for Billy, saying, “I feel pushed, I really do.” The school counselor, Ms. Franklin, was aware of her reluctance:

  The mom has had some real resistance to his being involved in group therapy . . . It’s taken a lot of work on our part to get her to permit him to be in these situations. I think she has the idea, as many parents have, that therapy means you’re saying your child is crazy. That’s not what we were saying.

  There were many ways that Ms. Yanelli complied with school standards. For example, it was important to Little Billy’s parents that he do well academically. His mother monitored his homework to make sure that it was done. When buying clothes for the fall, she was careful to comply with school guidelines. The mother attended all parent-teacher conferences and even, at times, contacted the school when concerned about a problem. At times, however, the parents were defiant of school regulations. Little Billy’s parents, for example, encouraged him to defend himself on the playground in direct opposition to school rules. During fourth grade, tired of hearing that Little Billy was being pummeled by another white boy in his classroom, Mr. Yanelli and his uncle taught him how to fight and instructed him to go to school the next day to “get the job done.” When Little Billy was suspended, the parents remained pleased by Little Billy’s hitting, although his actions were in direct violation of school rules. Ms. Franklin, the school counselor at Lower Richmond, to whom Ms. Yanelli reported this story, was infuriated, as she recounted:

  I felt he was being given the wrong message . . . that this was acceptable behavior. And I said that to her. That’s really giving him the wrong message . . . I tried to explain that even though I could appreciate the fact that she wanted him to stand up for himself, that this kind of behavior—fighting—is against school rules. There are people here, if he is having a problem, who will help him. By the same token, Billy has to take responsibility for how he triggers aggressive behaviors in other children.

  Ms. Franklin, while noting that Ms. Yanelli “was not unique in her attitude” felt that to “give a child permission to fight” gives him “carte blanche . . . anytime any minor thing happens.” The counselor also objected to the traditional division of labor, wherein Mr. Yanelli was not involved in child care for Billy (a very common pattern in earlier decades). She found the family to be deficient in this arena as well: “I certainly don’t think that it [his father’s lack of involvement] helps Billy at all. First of all, I think parents need to work together in terms of raising children. I think again it gives Billy the wrong message.”

  These differences in parents’ relationships to school—in other words, in the degree of continuity or distance between the culture of child rearing at home and the standards encoded in the school—appeared to surface regularly in family life. As with Wendy Driver’s parents, working-class parents such as the Yanellis experienced a sense of distance and distrust, of exclusion and risk, with schools. While both appeared relaxed, chatty, and friendly with other service providers, including the person from whom Ms. Yanelli got her money orders and lottery tickets on Saturday morning, restaurant personnel, and receptionists, they both appeared to be distrustful of the school. Indeed, Ms. Yanelli “hated it” and often felt bullied.

  I found a note in his school bag this morning and it said, I’m going to kill you because you didn’t give me what I wanted and, uh, you’re dead and mother-f-er and your mother is this and your father is that and your grandmom is this. So, I started shaking. I couldn’t even wait until 9:00. I just said, oh, my God, I don’t believe this. Now, Billy is always getting in trouble for doing things but when it comes to the other kids doing it to him, it’s a different story. And I was all ready to go over there prepared for the counselor and to say, yea, I’m tryin’ because I am and I got so upset I went over there and said, like, what about these other kids and what they do and they said the reason they do what they do to Billy is because Billy makes them do it. So they had an answer for everything.

  Compared to Ms. Marshall, or even Ms. Handlon, who felt relatively effectual in school interactions, Ms. Yanelli found herself completely powerless and frustrated:

  INTERVIEWER: So how did you feel about that answer?

  MS. YANELLI: I hate the school. I hate it. I tried to get him into Catholic. I have a girlfriend who has a little boy who has the same problems and she put him in Catholic School and his whole life turned around. But, Big Bill isn’t Catholic and t
hey said they didn’t have any room for him so it’s like, every day of my life I’m struggling to get this kid straightened out. It’s my life. It’s every day. I’m at work and I’m thinking, what’s going on? Uh, what can I do tomorrow to make things better? It’s just a constant thing.

  Ms. Yanelli keenly felt her lower social status, as she expressed after a parent-teacher conference with Mr. Tier, Billy’s fourth-grade teacher:

  I wanted to ask why he pulls Billy’s hair. Why does he pick up Billy’s book and throw it across the classroom and say, “You’re too slow.” . . . I didn’t get to talk about the things that I wanted to talk about . . . I’m not very professional. I can’t use the words I want to use. Just because they are professional doesn’t (voice drops) mean that they are so smart.3

  Mr. Yanelli shared her frustration, expressing the view that “they” would not give Billy a fair shake since they had decided he was a problematic student. Had the Yanellis reared Billy according to the logic of concerted cultivation, they may still have had problems with him at home and at school. But the strategies they used created more distance, distrust, and difficulty in their relationship with educators than occurred in the case of Ms. Marshall, for example, or other middle-class families. Ms. Yanelli did not feel that she had the “words” to “talk about” what she wanted to cover in conferences. Instead, she felt powerless and constrained.

  WORRYING ABOUT BEING TURNED IN

  This general feeling of unease with the school would, at times, explode into a crisis when the physical discipline practiced at home made them vulnerable for intervention by the school. In family life, the Yanellis gave directives: “Billy don’t do that” or “Billy cut it out.” They often did not provide reasons. Even when they did provide reasons, they were much briefer than in the Tallinger family. Parents did not, for example, draw out Billy and encourage him to think through the implications for himself. Instead, the parents stated the explanation in a brief fashion (if they provided one at all). Moreover, Ms. Yanelli (who did virtually all of the disciplining) found it helpful to pick up a belt when Billy was exasperating her. This fundamental strategy for child rearing—directives and physical punishment—was not in keeping with the standards promoted by professionals. For example, on this Wednesday in early May, Ms. Yanelli quarreled with her son over his homework. He was working (with the television on) in a slow-paced fashion at 8:00 P.M., although he had started much earlier.