Unequal Childhoods - Annette Lareau [214]
DILEMMAS
It would be possible to write an entire book on the methodological dilemmas that emerged. I limit the focus here to the issue of differences in the extent to which the families understood the project and the problem of observation versus intervention.
Understanding us. We left it up to the parents to discuss the project with their children. In a play within a play, the concepts of concerted cultivation and the accomplishment of natural growth seemed to guide how the parents informed their children. In middle-class families, the project was presented as part of the children’s development, a kind of enrichment activity not so different from taking piano lessons or playing soccer. Middle-class children were allowed, even encouraged, to play a key role in the decision making. In the working-class and poor families, the parents did not solicit their children’s opinions; they simply told them that the family would be participating. Sometimes, even that information was not supplied until the day the research assistants and I arrived at the home to set up the schedule for the observations. For example, when we showed up at the McAllisters’ house, Harold’s mother, who had signed the parental consent forms earlier, without telling her son, explained the study to him this way:
She says, “A man is going to come tomorrow to interview you. You have to be here. Don’t dump him!” Harold doesn’t ask any questions.
The research assistants and I noted—and worried about the ethical implications of—evidence of a class difference in how much the families understood about the basic mission of the project. Many of the working-class and poor families had a truncated notion of who we were and what we were doing. For example, as I was completing an exit interview with Wendy Driver’s mother, I packed up my tape recorder and mentioned that I needed to go because I had to teach. Looking very surprised, she raised her eyebrows, and her voice, as she asked, “You teach? What grade do you teach?” Ms. Driver knew I worked at Temple University and had signed many consent forms, each of which listed me as an “Associate Professor.” Nevertheless, Wendy’s mother obviously had not formed any clear idea about my job. Middle-class parents, on the other hand, asked very detailed questions. Having been to college themselves, and having read books similar to this one, they asked me about the courses I taught at Temple, and some asked questions about other colleges in the area. Thus, despite many discussions of the study with families, many working-class and poor families maintained a limited understanding of the study, a pattern found by other ethnographers.21
The question of interventions. Problems surfaced when we were in situations that clashed with our own definitions of proper parenting, definitions which (as I noted above) varied across the team. It is one thing to believe, intellectually, as many do, that child-rearing practices are historically specific and that it is a mistake to valorize the practices of the middle class. It is quite another thing to be in the same intimate space with family members when different practices exist. (In some ways, it is comparable to the difference between being aware that automobile accidents and heart attacks happen all the time and actually being an eyewitness to one.) Further compounding the problem was the fact that as project leader I needed to both guide the research assistants and allow them the necessary autonomy to do what they thought was ethically and morally right in a given situation. These dilemmas were a constant source of tension in the project. In my view, both then and now, there are no easy answers. I often felt as if I was “between a rock and a hard place.”
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