Unequal Childhoods - Annette Lareau [157]
Race was consequential too. The young black men, regardless of social class, reported difficulties in public spaces. Alexander Williams was enrolled in an Ivy League college, but he was still occasionally followed around by clerks in stores. But while race did have situational consequences for some youths, the power of social class was striking for all.
The second edition of Unequal Childhoods presents three new chapters. First, in Chapter 13, there is an analysis of the ways in which social class shaped the young people’s transitions to adulthood. This chapter provides a brief overview of the research methodology for the follow-up and a short update on the life of each child featured in the original book. Then there is an analysis of the ways in which the trajectories begun when the children were ten persisted over time. The discussion takes up continuing class differences in parents’ relationships with institutions, particularly in the information the parents had and the interventions they made in the lives of the young people.
Around the time I was conducting the interviews, I gave each of the families a copy of the book. Some of the families were comfortable with how they were portrayed in Unequal Childhoods, but others were not. Chapter 14 addresses this issue, sharing each family’s reactions to the book. The chapter also offers a frank assessment of some of the challenges of doing longitudinal research using ethnographic methods. In the period after the first edition was published, I worked with colleagues skilled in quantitative methods to analyze how the patterns in this book meshed with data from a nationally representative sample. There is a short summary of this research in Chapter 15.1
Finally, as the second edition was going to press, when the youths were twenty-five and twenty-six years old, I made contact again with most (but not all) of them. In a brief Afterword I provide an update on their current life circumstances and my reflections on the project as a whole.
CHAPTER 13
Class Differences in
Parents’ Information
and Intervention in the
Lives of Young Adults
The children in Unequal Childhoods came of age in unsettled economic times. Had they been born decades earlier, when the United States had a strong manufacturing economy, job prospects for those with a high school diploma (especially young men) would have been much brighter.1 As economies have become global, the United States has lost many relatively high-paying manufacturing jobs to workers in other countries.2 Overall, the supply of “good jobs”—ones with high wages, health benefits, vacation time, and pensions—in the American labor market is dwindling; meanwhile, the number of “bad jobs”—those with low wages and no benefits or other “perks”—continues to grow.3 Good jobs are closely tied to high levels of education. Indeed, almost like a staircase, each additional year of education is associated with higher income.4 For every $1,000 earned by an individual with a B.A., someone with a high school diploma or GED earns about $600.5 Thus, if the key to success in the nineteenth century was to “Go West, young man,” in the twenty-first century it is to “Go to college, everyone.”6
Competition for good jobs is fierce, and it is widely agreed that access to a good job is now dependent on a college degree. As a result, schools are a critical sorting agent for the competitive workforce. Yet, as the original research for Unequal Childhoods suggested, social class provides families with differential resources for complying with school standards. The first edition of