The second edition of Unequal Childhoods presents three new chapters. First, in Chapter 13, there is an analysis of the ways in which social class shaped the young people’s transitions to adulthood. This chapter provides a brief overview of the research methodology for the follow-up and a short update on the life of each child featured in the original book. Then there is an analysis of the ways in which the trajectories begun when the children were ten persisted over time. The discussion takes up continuing class differences in parents’ relationships with institutions, particularly in the information the parents had and the interventions they made in the lives of the young people.
Around the time I was conducting the interviews, I gave each of the families a copy of the book. Some of the families were comfortable with how they were portrayed in Unequal Childhoods, but others were not. Chapter 14 addresses this issue, sharing each family’s reactions to the book. The chapter also offers a frank assessment of some of the challenges of doing longitudinal research using ethnographic methods. In the period after the first edition was published, I worked with colleagues skilled in quantitative methods to analyze how the patterns in this book meshed with data from a nationally representative sample. There is a short summary of this research in Chapter 15.1
Finally, as the second edition was going to press, when the youths were twenty-five and twenty-six years old, I made contact again with most (but not all) of them. In a brief Afterword I provide an update on their current life circumstances and my reflections on the project as a whole.
CHAPTER 13
Class Differences in
Parents’ Information
and Intervention in the
Lives of Young Adults
The children in Unequal Childhoods came of age in unsettled economic times. Had they been born decades earlier, when the United States had a strong manufacturing economy, job prospects for those with a high school diploma (especially young men) would have been much brighter.1 As economies have become global, the United States has lost many relatively high-paying manufacturing jobs to workers in other countries.2 Overall, the supply of “good jobs”—ones with high wages, health benefits, vacation time, and pensions—in the American labor market is dwindling; meanwhile, the number of “bad jobs”—those with low wages and no benefits or other “perks”—continues to grow.3 Good jobs are closely tied to high levels of education. Indeed, almost like a staircase, each additional year of education is associated with higher income.4 For every $1,000 earned by an individual with a B.A., someone with a high school diploma or GED earns about $600.5 Thus, if the key to success in the nineteenth century was to “Go West, young man,” in the twenty-first century it is to “Go to college, everyone.”6
Competition for good jobs is fierce, and it is widely agreed that access to a good job is now dependent on a college degree. As a result, schools are a critical sorting agent for the competitive workforce. Yet, as the original research for Unequal Childhoods suggested, social class provides families with differential resources for complying with school standards. The first edition of this book ended with the children’s fifth-grade graduation. What happened in the ensuing years, as the children progressed through middle school and high school? Did the class differences shrink? It seems a reasonable possibility. After all, American ideals suggest that schools are the “great equalizer.”7 Also, as they grew older, all the children were likely to have become more autonomous from their parents and more determined to make their own decisions. Interventions they would not object to as ten-year-olds might no longer be welcomed when they were young adults.
In this chapter, I answer the “what happened?” question. I take another look at the effects of social class on the youth in my study, this time focusing on their transition to adulthood. I show that in certain areas, class standing did not seem crucial. Being middle-class did not shield youths from bumps in the road such as broken hearts or dashed athletic dreams. And all of the kids expressed pleasure over their movement into adulthood. Overall, though, I find that the importance of social class did persist.8 Differences in the types and amounts of information the parents possessed continued to affect their actions. Applying to college was a family affair among the middle class. When working-class or poor youth applied to college, they depended on school personnel to help them. Hence, as I explain below, working-class and poor parents’ relationships to educators were fundamentally different from those of middle-class parents. Although all parents wanted their children to succeed, the working-class and poor families experienced more heartbreak. They were generally unable to prevent their children from being derailed from the higher education trajectory. The middle-class parents’ interventions, although often insignificant as individual acts, yielded cumulative advantages.
As their children grew older, middle-class parents continued the pattern of concerted cultivation. They actively monitored, gathered information, and intervened in their children’s academic careers. Parents of the youth raised under the accomplishment of natural growth also continued their pattern of being watchful and concerned. These parents desperately wanted their children to do well in life, and they too paid attention to their children’s schooling. They asked questions and sometimes attempted to intervene but, compared to the middle-class parents in the study, had much more limited success. Beyond primary school, educational institutions grow increasingly complex. There are many decisions to be made. Parents’ interventions are crucial for managing various aspects of secondary school experience, from high school course selection to college applications.9 As when the children were ten years old, middle-class parents had much more detailed knowledge of how schools work, and especially how higher education systems operate, than did their working-class and poor counterparts.
As discussed in Chapter 12, the benefits middle-class kids accrue do not result directly from their parents’ child-rearing methods.10 Class advantages are linked to the fact that as schools sort children, these institutions (and other institutions, as well) prioritize and reward particular cultural traits and resources. Many of these traits and resources are tied to social class standing. Differences by class in the development of language skills, highlighted in the first edition of the book, is one example. But social class also gives parents a different set of economic resources and, crucially, a different set of cultural repertoires for managing the experiences of their children as they interact with institutions such as schools, courts, hospitals, and government agencies.
Since education is legally required in the United States, and since school success is a key criterion in sorting youth for the labor market, schools are an “800-pound gorilla” in American society in the sense that they are a powerful organization with which families must interact. Schools play a powerful, sometimes overwhelming role in shaping students’ life chances. Schools vary tremendously in the quality of their curricula, pace of instruction, extent of teacher preparation, degree of safety, size of student body, and level of physical upkeep. Middle-class kids tend to go to different, and more academically, socially, and physically desirable, schools than do working-class and poor kids. In addition, at the secondary level, school personnel manage only part of students’ educational program and transition to college. Schools repeatedly request parent involvement, and even if the number of requests by educators is somewhat lower in high school than in elementary school, the stakes are higher. In fact, educators expect parents to be involved in bringing about a child’s successful educational experience in high school and transition to college. But middle-class parents are much more likely to be aware of and able to comply with these institutional expectations than are less privileged parents. Putting this into more general terms, institutional contexts build unevenly on family practices. These institutional advantages then are reproduced and expanded over time, thereby transforming individual actions into well-worn social pathways. Some individuals do deviate from these pathways. We see the evidence in the form of upward mobility and downward mobility. W
e should not, however, allow these deviations to distract us from the more important reality of the socially powerful, but typically invisible, ways that families’ practices translate into differential advantages for their children.
This chapter is another contribution to the broader, ongoing process of making invisible inequality more visible.11 I divide the discussion into five sections. In Section 1, I present a very brief summary of the methodology I used as I followed up on the lives of the children who participated in Unequal Childhoods. In Section 2, I provide a short update on each of the nine youth who were featured in the book. (A longer version of these portraits can be found at the web page for Unequal Childhoods at www.ucpress.edu. In Appendix D, I also summarize the situation of the young adults, as well as their families, for all twelve of the original intensive study participants.)12 In Section 3, I describe aspects of the social context in which the young people transitioned to adulthood, particularly the schools they attended and the neighborhoods in which they lived. I also share the youths’ reflections on the importance of the organized activities they took part in as children, as well as their awareness of the circumstances of young adults in social classes different from their own. The effects of class standing I report in this section are highly consistent with findings in existing literature on social inequality in the transition to adulthood.13 In Section 4, I turn to a theme largely absent from social science literature: the role social class plays in shaping interactions between families and institutions that sort youth into the labor market. Here I highlight the continuance of concerted cultivation and the accomplishment of natural growth in young adulthood. I show how—particularly in terms of relationships between families and schools—social class differences in family life remain important over time. Working-class and poor parents (and their kids) tended to have very general and often vague information about institutions; middle-class parents had more, and much more detailed, information. Middle-class parents also engaged in active interventions in their children’s institutional lives. Working-class and poor parents, although they loved their children very much, relied on professionals to shepherd the children through institutions. As a result, although all the young people were nearly the same age, in middle-class families, they frequently were treated as if they were still children, while in working-class and poor families they were treated as if they were grown. Lastly, in Section 5, I sum up what the follow-up study tells us about the far-reaching effects of social class differences that began long ago, in childhood.
SECTION 1. METHODOLOGY OF THE FOLLOW-UP STUDY
Beginning in 2003 and continuing over the next year, I recontacted each of the twelve families in the original study.14 I conducted two-hour interviews with each target young person (by then, they were between nineteen and twenty-one years old), as well as separate interviews with their mothers and fathers and one sibling. In all, I completed thirty-eight interviews. The interviews with the twelve young adults focused on key events in their lives in the preceding ten years, including their experiences in middle school and high school, interactions with the higher education system, and work experience. Questions also probed their future goals and their views of their current situations.15 The separate interviews with the parents and one sibling asked for their assessment of how the young adult was doing; I also asked them about their roles in the young adult’s educational experiences and jobs. The interviews also gathered information about the whole family’s situation. These interviews took place mostly in the youths’ parents’ homes.16
The interviews were audiotaped and transcribed. To analyze these data, I created a series of codes on key themes (e.g., education decisions, work, perceptions of parent role, disappointments, college applications, independence) and, with the assistance of two researchers, coded the interview responses accordingly. As has been the case throughout this study, all names are pseudonyms. To further protect the young adults’ privacy, when I refer to the colleges they attended, I use the names of colleges with comparable rankings, not those of the schools they actually attended.
Longitudinal studies using qualitative methods are rare.17 I was pleased that, after considerable effort, I was able to reach all twelve young people, as well as to triangulate their information with separate interviews with other family members. Yet, as I elaborate in Chapter 14, the data set for the follow-up study has important limitations, particularly compared to the original study: there are no observational data; there are no interviews with key educators; there are no independent confirmations of the reports provided by the family members; and the reports of all interviewees are retrospective. These data constraints shape the results. For instance, it was not possible during a two-hour interview to assess how the youths used language in their daily lives. Since class differences in language use is a key theme in the original study, the inability to study it during the follow-up interviews is a limitation. Also, although I briefly discuss the young adults’ reflections on their organized activities, this topic commands considerably less space than in the original study.
SECTION 2. A DECADE LATER:
PORTRAITS OF THE YOUNG ADULTS
Youths from Middle-Class Families
Melanie Handlon (white, middle-class) and I talk in the conference room at the church where her mother still works as secretary. Melanie wears a crisp shirt and blue jeans. Her blond hair is swept into a pony tail, her fingernail polish is a brilliant red, and her full makeup is skillfully applied. She smiles broadly and although her manner is shy, she seems confident.
Schoolwork, a torment for Melanie as a fourth-grader, continued to challenge her in middle and high school. She recalls seventh grade as “horrible.” The year ended with an official recommendation that she be retained (a proposal Melanie’s parents rejected). As an eighth-grader, she was diagnosed as having an Attention Deficit Disorder (ADD) learning disability. In high school, she took special education classes but still found academic work quite difficult. At various points, she wanted to drop out. During the years she was a cheerleader, though, Melanie flourished. She says she “loved” cheerleading; she eventually became the squad captain.
Despite her mother’s urging, Melanie refused to enroll in an SAT preparation course; when she took the exam, she received a combined score of 1060 [1575].18 She applied to two state colleges. Although she was turned down by her first-choice school, she was accepted at Millersville, a four-year state university her older brother had attended. Melanie declined to go. She says this school is too far away (a five-hour drive from home); also, she thinks it is a social wasteland. “There’s really nothing to do there,” she explains. “Like, the biggest thing is a Wal-Mart.” She decided to work rather than go to college. She is living at home. She says she enjoys “the closeness that we [family members] have,” adding, “I mean, I can talk to them about anything.” Her first job, at a coffee shop, lasted two weeks. She did not like the hours (her workday started at 5 A.M.), and she had no coworkers for company. She quit, electing to try community college. Her mother helped her register. Problems arose when Melanie learned that she was required to take non-credit remedial courses in English and math. The classes were “boring,” she says. She stopped attending but failed to formally withdraw despite repeated reminders from her mother on the subject, so she received failing grades in her record.
At the time that I interview her, her plans are in flux. A few months later, however, her father tells me that she has begun a cosmetology program which she “loves.” Regarding the future, what she “honestly” wants is “to be a stay-at-home mom until my kids are in school.” In this realm, her hopes and dreams are clear. She would like to have four children and she would like to marry sooner rather than later. “I don’t want to wait till I’m thirty to get married. So hopefully, I’ll find that one guy.” She has had some boyfriends, but so far no serious contenders.
Stacey Marshall (African American, middle-class) and I meet at her family home the summer after her freshman year at University
of Maryland, College Park. Stacey’s nearly six-foot (5 feet 11 inches) body is thin, but athletic looking. Dressed casually in shorts and a T-shirt, and wearing no makeup, she appears younger than her nineteen years. She is busy, juggling basketball practice with two summer jobs (camp counselor and part-time waitress at a local diner). She is still sociable, confirming her mother’s description of her as a “people-person,” an upbeat, “everything’s fine” person.
Stacey’s love of gymnastics continued beyond elementary school. But a sudden growth spurt made her, at age twelve, taller than the sixteen-year-old gymnasts. That, combined with her relatively late start in gymnastics, prompted her coach to counsel strongly against any further involvement in competitive gymnastics. This left Stacey deeply discouraged. Initially resistant, she gradually began playing basketball, a sport her older sister, Fern, enjoyed. Stacey discovered that her gymnastics training made her unusually adept at weaving around players to make a shot. “Even to this day,” she tells me, “people say that you can see my gymnastics background [in my game].” She and Fern played together on their high school’s basketball team, which won a state championship.
In high school, with her mother continuing to carefully oversee her education, Stacey took some honors-level courses but resisted Advanced Placement classes. Her grades were “A’s and B’s.” She took an SAT preparation course and sat for the exam once, earning a (combined) score of 1060 [1590].19 As a senior, Stacey was recruited by the basketball coach at Columbia University. Although the coach expressed some concern about Stacey’s relatively low (for an Ivy League school) SAT score, she was admitted to Columbia. Given the Marshalls’ six-figure annual income, however, she qualified for little financial aid. Her parents ruled Columbia out when they learned that the family’s contribution would be at least $15,000 per year. Since this school was Stacey’s heart’s desire, she was deeply disappointed by her parents’ decision. She says she is still “bitter” about it.
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