Unequal Childhoods - Annette Lareau [206]
All parents want the very best for their children. Yet parents do not have the same resources, gifts, or opportunities to give to the children they hold so close to their hearts. As much as the working-class and poor parents loved their children, not one of them was able to set their child firmly on the road to a college degree, the foundation of stable and lucrative employment. These parents were swimming against the tide. Among the girls and boys I studied, crucial pieces of the puzzle were already in place by the time they were ten years old, making it likely that they would end up in situations similar to those of their parents—and most did so. It is not impossible for individuals to significantly change their life position, but it is not common.
In America’s meritocratic culture, the idea of a competition implies both fair play and deserved outcomes. The culture suggests that people like Alexander and Garrett study hard in college and are rewarded with good jobs, where they continue to conscientiously apply themselves and, thus, accrue more and bigger rewards. But the fact that many middle-class youth work hard should not blind us to the underlying reality that the system is not fair. It is not neutral. It does not give all children equal opportunities. Not only do schools vary, but in schools and other institutions that sort children into positions in the stratification system, some cultural practices are simply privileged more than others. Our culture’s nearly exclusive focus on individual choices renders invisible the key role of institutions. In America, social class backgrounds frame and transform individual actions. The life paths we pursue, thus, are neither equal nor freely chosen.
APPENDIX A
Methodology: Enduring
Dilemmas in Fieldwork
It is very unusual to study families in a “naturalistic fashion,” observing them within their own homes. Many people are deeply curious about the process. Space considerations preclude a detailed description, but in this appendix I describe some of the difficulties and dilemmas that arose during the study.
DRAWING THE SAMPLE
The family observations that form the core of the book were only one aspect of a multidimensional study that also included observations in elementary school classrooms and interviews with a large number of parents. The earliest phase of the project began in 1990, when I interviewed (with the help of an African American woman undergraduate) the parents of thirty-one children from a third-grade classroom in a public school in Lawrenceville (pseudonym), a smaller university community (population 25,000) in the Midwest. The remaining fifty-seven children were drawn from elementary schools located in a large northeastern metropolitan area. I decided to focus on third-graders because I wanted children who were young enough for their parents to still be heavily involved in managing their lives (and thus transmitting social class influences to them) and yet old enough to have some autonomy regarding their free time. I also hoped to catch children before peer-group influences became decisive factors in their lives. Initially, I had hoped to interview children and parents; but I gave up on interviewing children when normally chatty children fell silent in front of a tape recorder.1
The decision to include both white and African American children and to define social class categories using a combination of parents’ educational levels and occupations grew out of empirical realities I encountered in Lawrenceville. Although I was originally planning to study whites across different social classes, the schools were about half white and half Black. Moreover, there had been a parental boycott by Black