Unequal Childhoods - Annette Lareau [204]
In the first of these analyses, we found that two of our proxy measures of social class—mother’s education and family income—remain powerful in predicting children’s participation in organized activities, despite the inclusion of numerous control variables. The accompanying figures indicate the magnitude of the relationships we found. For illustration, we present the predictions our statistical model makes for a hypothetical Black boy (Figure 1) and white girl (Figure 2). (To facilitate comparison, these hypothetical children are assumed to be identical in all other respects captured by the model—i.e., in terms of family structure, age, wealth, etc.) The patterns throughout the figures are quite similar. Indeed, we found that, with the control variables included, there is no discernable difference between Black and white children in participation in organized activities. These results confirm some of the central findings from Unequal Childhoods: participation in organized activities appears to be closely linked to social class, but not to race. Furthermore, while the effects revealed in the graphs are fairly substantial in magnitude, it is worth bearing in mind that income and education frequently “overlap” with one another—that is, families like the ones described as “middle-class” in Unequal Childhoods tend to have both high incomes and high levels of educational attainment. Thus the graphs should be viewed as conservative estimates of social class differences in organized activity participation.5
The multivariate analysis of hanging out also shows a pattern consistent with the findings of Unequal Childhoods. Children’s participation in non-organized leisure is closely associated with their mother’s level of education. Here, as in the first edition, the relationship is negative, meaning that children whose mothers have higher amounts of education tend to spend less time hanging out than children whose mothers have lower levels of education. Thus, it would appear that in middle-class families, organized activities substitute for hanging out. And, again, we found no evidence of a difference between Black and white children.
Note: Based on coefficients from a tobit regression. These computations assume a reference child who is Black and male; whose family wealth is in the second quartile; whose father works and whose mother does not; who has the sample mean values of age and number of siblings; and whose time diaries were collected on Wednesday and Saturday. For the education charts, income is set to the second quartile; for the income calculations, education is set to high school. Source: Based on author’s analysis of PSID-CDS data.
Figure 1. The effects of maternal education and family income on children’s participation in organized activities, for a reference child who is Black and male.
Note: Based on coefficients from a tobit regression. These computations assume a reference child who is white and female; whose family wealth is in the second quartile; whose father works and whose mother does not; who has the sample mean values of age and number of siblings; and whose time diaries were collected on Wednesday and Saturday. For the education charts, income is set to the second quartile; for the income calculations, education is set to high school. Source: Based on author’s analysis of PSID-CDS data.
Figure 2. The effects of maternal education and family income on children’s participation in organized activities, for a reference child who is white and female.
In addition to the core argument concerning class differences in time use, language use, and parents’ intervention in institutions, a number of other findings are threaded through Unequal Childhoods. One is that the middle-class children have less contact with their relatives than do working-class and poor children. The ethnographic research suggests that this finding is true for both whites and Blacks. In the case of time spent with extended kin, however, the multivariate results proved somewhat surprising.6 To be sure, the level of a mother’s education