Unequal Childhoods - Annette Lareau [111]
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,