Unequal Childhoods - Annette Lareau [148]
These potential benefits for middle-class children, and costs for working-class and poor children, are necessarily speculative, since at the end of the study, the children were still in elementary school. Still, there are important signs of hidden advantages being sown at early ages. The middle-class children have extensive experience with adults in their lives with whom they have a relatively contained, bureaucratically regulated, and somewhat superficial relationship. As children spend eight weeks playing soccer, baseball, basketball, and other activities, they meet and interact with adults acting as coaches, assistant coaches, car pool drivers, and so on. This contact with relative strangers, although of a different quality than contact with cousins, aunts, and uncles, provides work-related skills. For instance, as Garrett shakes the hand of a stranger and looks him or her in the eye, he is being groomed, in an effortless fashion, for job interviews he will have as an adult (employment experts stress the importance of good eye contact). In the McAllister home, family members have great affection and warmth toward one another, but they do not generally look each other in the eye when they speak; this training is likely to be a liability in job interviews. In settings as varied as health care and gymnastics, middle-class children learn at a young age to be assertive and demanding. They expect, as did Stacey Marshall, for institutions to be responsive to them and to accommodate their individual needs. By contrast, when Wendy Driver is told to hit the boy who is pestering her (when the teacher isn’t looking) or Billy Yanelli is told to physically defend himself, despite school rules, they are not learning how to make bureaucratic institutions work to their advantage. Instead, they are being given lessons in frustration and powerlessness.
WHY? THE SEARCH FOR EXPLANATIONS14
As I discuss shortly, some commentators today decry the “overscheduled” lives of children; they long for the days when most children had unstructured lives, filled with informal play. But this is a romanticized view of the family in the past. Although there have always been important social class differences in childhood, for much of U.S. history, children played an important economic role in family life. For example, in colonial America, a boy of six or seven was expected to move out of his parents’ home to live with a skilled craftsman as an apprentice. As the country gradually industrialized, children’s small, “nimble fingers” were useful in factory work.15 Children also were economic assets on family farms. According to a 1920 study in North Dakota children helped herd cattle and dig holes for fence posts. They also had daily responsibilities, as this description of a nine-year-old boy’s chores shows: “Built the fires in the morning, swept the floor of a two-room house, and brought in fuel and water; in addition, before he made a two-mile trip to school, he helped feed stock (five horses and twelve cows) and chopped wood; in the evening he did the chores and washed dishes.”16 Children, especially working-class and poor children, also helped with the informal paid labor their mothers did, such as laundry and “sewing, embroidering, flower making, and tag tying”; most older siblings looked after younger siblings, as well. Children did have some time for unstructured leisure, but it was limited.
Viviana Zelizer shows that through the end of the nineteenth century and into the early decades of the twentieth century, these practices were accompanied by beliefs supporting the importance of children working hard. If anything, the concern was that without specific training in “useful work,” children might grow up to be “paupers and thieves.”17 In children’s books and magazines, in which stories stressed “the virtues of work, duty, and discipline,” Zelizer notes, “The standard villain . . . was an idle child.”18 The period after 1920 saw a dramatic decline in children’s economic contributions, however, as child labor laws were put into place and a new vision