Unequal Childhoods - Annette Lareau [139]
To return to the ideas discussed in Chapter 2, the school selectively validated certain cultural practices as legitimate. Other practices, such as hitting children, while virtually universal in other historical periods, were deemed unacceptable. Adherence to the practices of the accomplishment of natural growth, rather than concerted cultivation, had important consequences when the families interacted with the school. The Yanelli family keenly felt the school to be a threatening force. In other words, their failure to use elaborate reasoning (a cultural practice) was transformed into a lack of resources when they confronted school authorities. They felt worried, powerless, and scared.
For example, Little Billy’s mother was worried that the school might turn her in to the state. Because of behavior problems at school, the educators stridently insisted that the school therapist who regularly visited the school see Little Billy. Once Billy’s mother met with the school counselor, however, he warned her, as noted at the beginning of the chapter, that he was legally required to turn her in to government officials if he found that she was engaging in child abuse. Ms. Yanelli felt rightfully threatened, since she felt that, as noted above, “Billy gets so out of control that maybe he does need it once in a while.”
I said to the therapist, you know, we’ll be in [the grocery store] once in a while and Billy will slide down the aisle on his stomach and I’ll take him by the hair and I’ll pull him down the aisle. Is that child abuse? . . . So, am I going to have people over here saying I abuse my child if Billy sits in a class with him and says my mom pulled my hair? . . . I don’t know. I guess I’ll just have to take it as it comes. But there are times when I chase him up the stairs with a belt in my hand. I do.
This clash, between the parents’ ideas of what Billy needs and the school standards for child rearing, created small crises in the home. One day in May, for example, I stopped by for a visit (after the formal observations were over) to find Ms. Yanelli deeply upset. She had been disciplining him, and Billy had raised his arm to block the impact of his mother’s belt, ending up with three very distinct red marks on his forearm from where it had landed. His mother was frantic that “he had to go school that way.” She was agitated, pacing around the kitchen smoking a cigarette, trying to figure out what to do.6
In short, Ms. Yanelli’s failure to use reasoning and her adoption of a belt made her vulnerable, since she moved in a “field” (the school) that privileged reasoning. If she had lived a century earlier, the use of a belt would not have been so problematic. Today, however, it carries a potentially catastrophic risk: that her son could show the teacher his marks on his arm, she could be arrested for child abuse, and her son could be put in foster care temporarily or permanently. Regardless of the likelihood of this sequence occurring, Ms. Yanelli was worried about the actions of the school.
Thus, different family backgrounds engender different levels of benefit in educational fields. In this instance, the cost to working-class families for their lack of capital takes the form of an ongoing feeling of the threat of a looming catastrophe. This gap in the connections between working-class and poor families and schools is important. It undermines their feeling of trust or comfort at school, a feeling that other researchers have argued is pivotal in the formation of effective and productive family-school relationships.7
TAKING STOCK
Middle-class parents (including wealthier members of the middle class) such