Unequal Childhoods

by Annette Lareau

  Lower Richmond’s third-grade teacher, Ms. Green, generously welcomed me into her classroom and facilitated my integration and that of a Black woman undergraduate student who was assisting me. While in the classroom, I sometimes simply observed, but other times, I helped out with art projects and computer lessons and lent a hand shepherding children from place to place in the school. I brought in food on various occasions, including cookies for the class on Valentine’s Day.7 I got to know the students well; the girls would give me a hug when I got to school. Once I established a warm rapport with the children, the next step was to interview parents.

  Based on the classroom teacher’s knowledge of the children, I separated them into groups by race and class and selected every “nth” name. I wrote the parents a letter (the schools released the children’s addresses) explaining that I was writing a book on how children spend their time when they are out of school and, more generally, examining the work it takes parents to get children through the day. I mailed these requests for interviews at the end of the children’s third-grade year (Lower Richmond) and in the fall of the children’s fourth-grade year (Swan).8 I then called all of the parents to talk about the project and schedule an interview.

  Across the two sites, only one mother refused participation outright (some fathers eventually declined). In addition, two or three parents who had initially agreed to be interviewed were not interviewed because of scheduling difficulties. Overall, however, the response rate for families was more than 90 percent. I still did not have a sample with which I felt comfortable, however. Despite their racially diverse character, the two schools did not include enough middle-class Black and poor white children for the study. I broadened the sample to include third-graders at Swan and also recruited through fliers and informal networks.9 The bulk of the interviews with parents took place in 1993 and 1994, but some were not completed until 1997. An additional sixty interviews with educators and other adults working with children were also conducted. For example, the third-grade and fourth-grade teachers at the schools were interviewed (including in Lawrenceville), along with other school personnel (i.e., reading specialists, music and art teachers, the school nurse, bus drivers, and yard duty teachers) as well as numerous providers of children’s leisure services. Where possible, these interviews were focused on the children in our study. (A chronological overview of the study is presented in Table C9, Appendix C.)

  RECRUITING THE FAMILIES

  The classroom observations and interviews with parents were crucial in gaining access to families for the observation phase. Ms. Green’s third-grade classroom at Lower Richmond yielded seven of the twelve children: Brindle, Taylor, Irwin, Driver, Carroll, Yanelli, and McAllister. The fourth-grade classroom at Swan yielded two more: Tallinger and Handlon. Selecting the families involved a conscious, complicated calculus. The interview phase had helped identify certain kinds of experiences and family traits (especially the number of organized activities, the strength of kinship ties, and the depth of family-school relationships) as broadly characteristic of each social class. I wanted most of the families we observed to be as representative of these traits as possible. We tried to avoid selecting children whose parents were either unusually active in school or unusually quiet in their interactions with teachers. Among the middle-class families, we further limited the pool to only those with two parents in the home. Thus, in most cases, the research assistants and I had only three or four children per category to choose among.10

  In making the final choices for the observational phase, I wanted to balance the sample by gender, race, and class. I wanted, as well, to look at children who, although from different races and social classes, shared key characteristics. For example, despite different class locations, some children shared church involvement, extended family nearby, or participation in organized activities. Overall, the research team and I tried to “mix and match” the children we chose in order to lessen the chance that differences in the behavior we observed were connected to some unknown variable such as parental involvement in the school.

  I also sought “deviant cases.” In particular, I very much wanted to include a middle-class child who participated in no organized activities. I was unable to find a single such child among the families we interviewed, nor could Swan teachers or parents think of a possible candidate. I was more successful in finding deviant cases in terms of child-rearing strategies and family location, such as families with middle-class characteristics who live in working-class or poor neighborhoods. Two families offered this form of contrast. The Irwins, a deeply religious interracial family (white mother, Black father) whose household income and education levels put them between working class and middle class, lived in a working-class neighborhood. Their child-rearing strategies were dominated by the logic of the accomplishment of natural growth, but we also observed signs of concerted cultivation. The Greeleys were the other deviant case. Ms. Greeley, a white single mother with a live-in African American boyfriend, had been raised in a middle-class family. She developed a drug problem serious enough to cause her to temporarily lose custody of her children. At the time of the study, the Greeleys were living below the poverty level in a white working-class neighborhood. Despite her relatively privileged childhood, most of Ms. Greeley’s child-rearing strategies appeared to reflect her current class position: She followed the pattern of the accomplishment of natural growth. These two deviant cases suggest that social class may be more influential than neighborhood, but only a large representative sample could provide a solid basis for untangling these important issues.

  Of the list the research assistants and I originally drew up, nine out of twelve families agreed to participate: both white middle-class families, all four of the working-class families, and three of the four poor families.11 The Black middle-class category was empty. The mothers at Swan school that I approached declined, citing issues of privacy. Although I was reluctant to go outside the pool of children from Swan and Lower Richmond, I didn’t have much choice. I turned to a racially diverse private school where an acquaintance’s children were enrolled. There, I made contact with the Williams family. By the spring of 1995, I lacked only a white poor boy and a Black middle-class girl. For the boy, I went back to Lower Richmond school area. A social services agency director in the region (whose name I got out of the phone book) referred me to the Greeleys.12 For the Black middle-class girl category, I tapped into a wide range of informal contacts before I found a willing family who met the criteria I cared most about. The girl, Stacey Marshall, was an appropriate age (ten), but she had already completed fifth grade and was entering sixth grade in the fall (when she would turn eleven). Feeling that it was better to be flexible on the child’s grade level than on the family’s race and class, I recruited the Marshalls.13 So, the final sample of families consisted of nine drawn from either Lower Richmond or Swan elementary school and three from other sources. Given the intrusive nature of home-based observations, I was very pleased with the overall response rate of 63 percent (I asked nineteen families to get twelve).

  I found the process of recruiting the families very stressful. A number of people doubted that I would be able to do the field observations. They told me that families—especially families picked from schools rather than friends of friends—would never agree to participate. In most cases, my approach to recruitment was to send a letter and then follow up with a phone call. Before making the telephone calls, I would pace the floor anxiously and my heart would pound. Even when I had cleared that first hurdle, I continued to find the first encounters to secure written permission and to schedule the home visits scary. Nevertheless, I tried to appear upbeat, comfortable, and lighthearted in all of my conversations with the families. I stressed that unlike what television shows would have us believe, family life was quite difficult and that taking care of children was challenging. I explained that the research assistants and I were used to yelling and to messy rooms. I emphasized that I wanted to paint a realistic picture o
f family life, and I told stories of my own experiences growing up and fighting with my siblings.

  Of course, no matter how persuasively I made my case, not all families agreed to participate. Some, in turning me down, explained, “We are not the perfect family.” Those who did agree often told us (in response to a question we posed in interviews at the end of the study) that they wanted to “help us out” and that the $350 we offered to help offset the inconvenience of the visits made participating more attractive.14 I believe the money made a decisive difference for most, but not all, of the families. Indeed, two families on public assistance who were asked to be in the study declined. My own assessment is that especially among the working-class and poor families, the children were strong allies. At the interview stage, I believe the fact that the children knew me and seemed to like me was a tremendous help in gaining parents’ cooperation.15 In addition, the parents had an extended period of time to get to know us before we asked them to be in the observational study. The process of recruiting parents for interviews and then conducting the interviews involved multiple contacts, including a call to confirm the night before. The interviews lasted from 90 to 120 minutes, and almost all were conducted in the participating families’ homes. As a thank-you we brought along a bakery pie and then mailed a handwritten thank-you note. Since we interviewed parents separately, we repeated the whole process in families where we interviewed the fathers.16

  It is possible that among the families who agreed to be observed, the mothers were unusually secure in their roles, did not have drug problems, and were generally less concerned about the possibility of being “turned in” to the state for being “bad” or “abusive” parents. Although some of the families (the Brindles especially) had a larger share of life problems than others, they all fell within the range of families we observed across the school sites. Still, with a nonrandom sample, one cannot generalize from these results to the broader population.

  THE RESEARCHERS

  Although it would have been my preference, it was impossible for me to do all of the fieldwork and interviews. I needed help. The first year, four students—three white women and one African American woman—assisted me. With me, these students interviewed parents in the study of eighty-eight families and conducted observations for more than half of the families: Brindle, Carroll, Driver, Handlon, Irwin, Tallinger, and Yanelli. At the end of the school year, when these students departed, I hired two sociology graduate students, an African American man and a white woman. During the summer of 1994, they observed the Taylor, McAllister, and Williams families. The last summer, 1995, four graduate students helped: an African American woman from the anthropology department, two white women from the sociology department (including the one who had worked on the project the previous summer), and a white man from the psychology department. These research assistants observed the Greeley and Marshall families and finished the observations of the Williams family. (See Table C9.)

  As is a truism in ethnographic research, our own biographies influenced the research, especially my reasons for beginning the study and what we saw. At the time of the study, none of us had children. Frankly, part of my own motivation for undertaking the project was a long-standing desire to better understand the inner workings of families. As a child, I had longed to have a “normal” family. My parents’ unusual, even eccentric, characters made me attuned to variations in family life.17 Although my illusions regarding the existence of a normal family have since faded, my childhood experiences shaped the current study. In each of their children, my parents nurtured a love of reading, a sense of humor, a streak of unconventionality, and a pattern of persistence. I could not have persisted so doggedly with my efforts to recruit families for naturalistic observations without these qualities. The most important childhood legacy, however, was that I felt comfortable in families where there was yelling, drinking, emotional turmoil, and disciplining by hitting. This comfort with diverse family interactions turned out to be valuable.

  Similarly, for the research assistants, personal history was influential. For example, the disciplinary practices in the students’ childhood homes seemed to affect what each recorded in his or her field notes as noteworthy. Some field-workers with middle-class origins were upset by parents’ threats to “beat” children. A field-worker from a working-class family was not troubled by that, but he was shocked by the disrespect that many middle-class children used in routine interactions with their parents. A twenty-minute car ride with a whining middle-class four-year-old left this research assistant with a headache and a general feeling of disgust (“I wanted to kick his mother’s butt for letting him get away with that whining . . . Who’s the parent?”). Finally, over time, some researchers developed “favorite” families and some families developed “favorite” researchers.

  Overall, however, the field notes taken by the different researchers were quite similar. I believe this resulted in part from the fact that some things were “striking” to all members of the team. I was deliberately heavy-handed, however, in my efforts to achieve intellectual integration. There were weekly meetings for the whole group and team meetings every week for everyone who was actively observing a family. I also had extended telephone conversations with the research assistants after many field visits and discussed with them at that time what they should write up in their field notes.

  The field-workers found the study unusual and (usually) interesting. Like me, they enjoyed getting to know the families. Being in the field always involved a balancing act, though. We needed to be authentic, but we also needed to remain neutral. Sometimes little strategies helped. For example, when I was with families in which small children were often present (Brindle, Driver, McAllister, and Yanelli), I usually asked to hold the babies. I like to hold babies, but doing so in the field was also a way to help me blend into the setting. Other field-workers enjoyed playing basketball with the children or talking about music. Still, some aspects of the fieldwork necessarily required suppression of the self. I did not, for example, express my outrage over some parents’ political views; and I pretended to thoroughly enjoy all of the food I was offered, even things I intensely dislike. The research assistants were similarly self-monitoring.

  All of us found the fieldwork emotionally exhausting. One of the graduate students summed up how taxing the observations were:

  “I remember having this awful day during which I visited the McAllisters in the morning and the Tallingers in the afternoon; I got a horrible headache, was distraught for days, and was suddenly aware of how ambivalent I felt about class. . . . Every day there are poor people and comfortable people living in the same world, ignoring (or not seeing) each other and having wildly divergent experiences. But we generally don’t see this.”18

  THE VISITS

  The family observations all took place in 1994 and 1995. We learned to ritualize our entry into (and exit from) families. Often there were several telephone conversations and a face-to-face meeting with the parents before the family agreed. Then we would arrange a time to get together to sign consent forms and schedule home visits. For that meeting, two research assistants and I would go to the family’s home. We brought calendars (one for us and one, with refrigerator magnets, for the family) and a bakery cake along with us.

  In that first meeting, we would work out mutually acceptable times for the observations (the visits lasted two or three hours) and decide which member of the research team would be in the home at what time. In scheduling the visits, we tried to include a range of time slots so that we could observe a variety of common events, such as before-school preparations and afternoon or evening homework sessions, dinner, Saturday morning activities, church (if applicable), a visit with relatives, a health-care visit, a family party, organized activities, and miscellaneous errands.19 In addition, we tried to schedule one overnight stay with each family. A typical pattern of visits might start with the field-worker arriving shortly after the child got home from school, hanging out through din
ner, and then leaving. Other times, one of us might arrive at 6:30 in the morning to see what was involved in preparing a child for school; or we might meet the child at school to observe the family’s afternoon and evening schedule. We often carried tape recorders, especially after family members had gotten used to us.

  All of the families considered the request to observe them odd. Mr. Tallinger summed up the majority view. Following up on the field-worker’s description of the research project as “unusual,” he said:

  “Yeah, I know. It’s really unusual. The only people weirder than the people agreeing to be watched are the people who want to watch!”

  The first few visits were very awkward. No one seemed quite sure what to do (including us). Not surprisingly, families felt the need to socialize with us, particularly during the first few minutes after we arrived. They asked us about our journey and almost always offered us soft drinks. The children, however, usually had something that they were doing or wanted to do. So, we often plopped down on the floor to watch television with them, or went outside to play ball. We also rode along in the car as parents and children went on errands. Family members got used to us. We found that the tension eased, particularly on the third day, and again on the tenth day. The children were young, so it was hard for them to sustain “company manners” for a relatively long period of time. We had the sense that normal family rhythms resumed over the course of our visits. Moreover, the key purpose of the study was to compare how different families organized their lives. There was no particular evidence that some families relaxed more than others on a systematic basis by class or race.

  The children all seemed to like our visits, but their level of enthusiasm varied by class. Poor and working-class children were genuinely excited to see us. Having adults paying close attention to them at home was out of the ordinary. At the end of any given day of observing, it was common for these children, especially the girls, to plead with us to stay longer. As the Irwin’s daughter explained in an exit interview, “It was nice to have somebody different in the house.” Little Billy Yanelli said that having the field-workers in his home “felt good” to him. And Harold McAllister, when queried, smiled shyly and replied that he “liked it” when the fieldworkers were at his house. Middle-class children were more blasé; they were used to having adults pay close attention to them.20