Unequal Childhoods - Annette Lareau [186]
The emergence and popularity of such trade books as Not Everyone Gets a Trophy signal a growing dissatisfaction over the sense of entitlement displayed by middle-class youth.64 Similarly, working-class parents, such as Ms. Brindle, often do not mince words when describing middle-class youth:
The people . . . who I clean for have some really spoiled kids. I never in my life seen kids that have everything you could possibly think of—yet be the biggest slobs in the world and disrespectful to their mothers and fathers.
Yet scholarly inquiry remains focused on searching out deficits in the child rearing of working-class and poor families, rather than probing the limits of middle-class cultural practices.65 The logic and legitimacy of working-class and poor parents’ dependence on educators also need systematic attention. Many middle-class parents feel comfortable supervising teachers and intervening in the educational process. But if these same parents’ children needed surgery, they would be likely to turn over responsibility to the attending surgeon.66 Working-class and poor parents generally look up the status hierarchy to all “educated people.” Teachers and surgeons appear to be in the same category—both are experts in their respective fields. From this perspective, depending fully on such professionals to do what they have been trained to do is both logical and sensible. And, when working-class and poor parents accord educators and surgeons a similar status, teachers reap vastly more respect and deference than they frequently receive from middle-class parents. The latter routinely intervene in schooling, requesting that teachers “round up” their children’s grades or demanding that their children, despite failing to meet the qualifying criteria, be placed in a gifted program, or threatening legal action if educators appear hesitant to comply with these or other demands.
Class differences in how parents manage youths’ institutional lives are a crucial, understudied piece in the larger puzzle of unequal life outcomes. But, as many studies have shown, there are other important factors as well. The youth I studied were embedded in multiple social contexts. Different aspects of these contexts loomed large as the children traveled the path to adulthood. The interviews revealed some of the ways in which race has impacted their lives as they have grown older. For example, as others have shown, friendship patterns and dating choices were often racially stratified.67 Racial profiling was common. Alexander’s Ivy League admission and high SAT scores did not protect him from being monitored by store clerks as he shopped. And, although their families differed greatly, he and Harold shared very similar levels of deep resignation that race-based harassment was inevitable. White working-class and poor young men also reported being harassed by the police but, strikingly, middle-class white youth did not, a pattern echoed in national data. Given the racially stratified nature of American society, it is not surprising that the young adults reported racial dynamics surfacing in many of their rituals of daily life. Nevertheless, I did not observe race-based patterns in parents’ institutional knowledge or in their management of their children’s experiences within institutions.68 In these realms, the patterns that emerged fell along lines of social class, not race.69
Much as when they were youngsters, class position shaped the young adults’ relationships with their extended families. Among the working-class and poor young adults, there were palpably deep connections and tight interweavings of kinship and family life that were not apparent among the middle-class youths. To be