Unequal Childhoods - Annette Lareau [213]
All of the families considered the request to observe them odd. Mr. Tallinger summed up the majority view. Following up on the field-worker’s description of the research project as “unusual,” he said:
“Yeah, I know. It’s really unusual. The only people weirder than the people agreeing to be watched are the people who want to watch!”
The first few visits were very awkward. No one seemed quite sure what to do (including us). Not surprisingly, families felt the need to socialize with us, particularly during the first few minutes after we arrived. They asked us about our journey and almost always offered us soft drinks. The children, however, usually had something that they were doing or wanted to do. So, we often plopped down on the floor to watch television with them, or went outside to play ball. We also rode along in the car as parents and children went on errands. Family members got used to us. We found that the tension eased, particularly on the third day, and again on the tenth day. The children were young, so it was hard for them to sustain “company manners” for a relatively long period of time. We had the sense that normal family rhythms resumed over the course of our visits. Moreover, the key purpose of the study was to compare how different families organized their lives. There was no particular evidence that some families relaxed more than others on a systematic basis by class or race.
The children all seemed to like our visits, but their level of enthusiasm varied by class. Poor and working-class children were genuinely excited to see us. Having adults paying close attention to them at home was out of the ordinary. At the end of any given day of observing, it was common for these children, especially the girls, to plead with us to stay longer. As the Irwin’s daughter explained in an exit interview, “It was nice to have somebody different in the house.” Little Billy Yanelli said that having the field-workers in his home “felt good” to him. And Harold McAllister, when queried, smiled shyly and replied that he “liked it” when the fieldworkers were at his house. Middle-class children were more blasé; they were used to having adults pay close attention to them.20
For all children, the visits worked best as they became routinized. Overall, repeated visits just to “hang out” with the children worked well, going to their sports activities worked well, and going to church was relatively easy, as was going along on family outings. More unusual events (e.g., doctor visits, overnights) were more difficult because they were more disruptive.
Our experiences with the first families we observed taught us that we needed to develop an exit strategy. Leaving the field is no easier than entering it. We instituted pizza parties as a way of saying thank-you and good-bye. Pizza was a rare treat in the working-class and poor homes and the children looked forward to the party. They seemed to feel genuinely thanked by it. For the middle-class children (whose parents bought pizza so often that one father had memorized the local vendor’s telephone number), the party was not a special treat, and they did not seem to feel thanked by it.
Even after the study had formally ended, contact with the families continued. We did a few “mop up” visits, particularly doctor visits or special recitals, for most families. In the first year or two following the end of the project, I stopped in for brief visits with many of the families (most, but not all, encouraged the research assistants and me to come back for a visit “anytime”). I continue to stay