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By Root 1522 0

priority (by, for example, not scheduling events on Sundays or not penalizing children who miss games while on family vacations). Ridgewood, New Jersey, gained national attention when citizens declared a community-wide (voluntary) “Family Night” and arranged for children’s organized activities (and homework) to be canceled for the evening. These incipient movements have in common an explicit recognition that children’s schedules are absurd, that family life is in thrall to a frenzy of “hyper-scheduling.”39 Decrying the development of children’s appointment books, professionals call for children to have more opportunities for unstructured play.40 At the individual level, parents are encouraged to set strict limits on children’s activities. Some parents proudly announce on websites that they require their children to limit themselves to only one activity at a time.

A systematic critique of parents’ role in supervising and intervening in institutions has not yet emerged. Indeed, many professionals actively recruit and encourage parental involvement in schooling. Doubts about the value of extensive reasoning with children, on the other hand, are mounting. Problems stemming from the blurring of boundaries between parents and children are especially well covered by professionals and the media. With titles such as Parents in Charge: Setting Healthy, Loving Boundaries for You and Your Child and I’ll Be the Parent, You Be the Child, professionals are signaling the need for parents to provide directives to children. The books provide cautionary tales of rude, obnoxious, and ungrateful children who refuse to be polite to guests, who feel that they, as children, may decide when they will or will not join the family for dinner, and who are unable to convey appreciation for the gifts they receive. Describing these children as out of control and craving adult intervention, the authors call for parents to “set limits and make decisions.” The solution the experts offer calls mainly for individual action: each parent is encouraged to look within her or himself to find the necessary strength to take charge, to give clear directives to children, and to resist the temptation to seek their children’s approval.

Ironically, the new agenda for middle-class parents, whether expressed collectively or individually, amounts to a reinstatement of many of the elements of the strategy of the accomplishment of natural growth. For overburdened and exhausted parents, the policy recommendations center on setting limits: reducing the number of children’s activities, scheduling family time, making family events a higher priority than children’s events, and generally putting the needs of the group ahead of the needs of the individual.

Gaining Compliance with Dominant Standards:

Implications for Working-Class and Poor Families

For working-class and poor families, the policy recommendations center on trying to gain advantages for children in institutional settings. Some programs stress the importance of reading to children, bolstering vocabulary, and addressing “summer setback” (a reference to working-class and poor children’s tendency to lose academic ground when they are out of school while middle-class children’s academic growth spurts ahead).41 Here, it is important to bear in mind the ever-changing nature of institutional standards (phonics is “in” one year, whole language the next; computers are promoted and then challenged). Providing children with the resources needed to comply with institutional standards may be helpful, but it leaves unexamined the problematic nature of class-based child-rearing methods themselves. It is possible that policies could be developed to help professionals learn how to be more sensitive to differences in cultural practices and how to “code switch”; they, in turn, might be able to teach children to “code switch” as they move between home and encounters with institutions. One promising development is the success of programs that offer to working-class and poor children the kinds of concerted cultivation middle-class children