Unequal Childhoods - Annette Lareau [228]
19. Many psychologists also insist that this kind of confusion over parent-child roles is harmful for children. For complaints see Paul Kropp, I’ll Be the Parent, You Be the Child, and Dana Chidekel, Parents in Charge.
CHAPTER 7: LANGUAGE AS A CONDUIT FOR SOCIAL LIFE
1. On Father’s Day weekend, for example, Harold took the bus across town by himself and visited. With help from his grandmother, he made his father breakfast.
2. The family also has a German shepherd, Luke, who stays in the front yard, tied to a tree. He does not come in the house. Family members pet and talk to Luke as they come and go. He is the only dog on the block.
3. Since the study was completed, a major welfare reform was passed, changing the terms of public assistance for poor families.
4. Other researchers have described similar sorts of economies among the poor. See Kathy Edin and Laura Lein, Making Ends Meet, and Susan Holloway et al., Through My Own Eyes.
5. During an interview, his mother reported that Harold wanted to be on a sports team but that she “couldn’t find one around here” and was not going to travel “all the way over” (about a forty-five-minute bus ride) to a community that did have a team. We found that there was a football team that was close to the housing project, but Ms. McAllister was not aware of it. It also was costly. In addition to paying registration fees, the players were involved in fund-raisers, and Harold would have had to have bus fare to get back and forth to practices and games.
6. Whites who drive into the housing project often receive prolonged, hostile stares from residents (arriving in a car is itself the sign of outsider status, since few living in public housing can afford a car). This hostility is situationally specific, however. When I attended the big family reunion picnic after the study ended, although I was one of only two white people in a crowd of more than two hundred, no one stared (perhaps because neither white drug users nor Department of Human Service officials would likely attend such an event).
7. Douglas Massey and Nancy Denton, American Apartheid.
8. It is striking that she only mentions the Black male field-worker, and did not include the white female field-worker, or me, a middle-age white woman. I concluded that she did not see white women to be at risk for intimidation in the project in the way a young Black male would be.
9. In one of the more carefully done studies of speech, Betty Hart and Todd Risley, Meaningful Differences, found (using a sample of forty-two children) that by about the age of three, children of professionals had larger vocabularies and spoke more per hour than the parents of similarly aged children on welfare.
10. As I explain below, Harold did engage in elaborated and embellished speech in his interactions with peers.
11. On the issue of language use and social class, see the classic work of Basil Bernstein, especially Class, Codes, and Control.
12. Unlike Ms. Williams, Ms. McAllister does not use this as a “teachable moment” for a short math lesson.
13. I found this exchange distressing, partly because Runako did not actually hear the announcement that Ms. McAllister would not be cooking that evening. I also found it difficult to accept the idea of a child going to bed hungry. In keeping with the field work approach, however, I did not say anything or express my concern. Indeed, worried about being seen as judgmental on a highly sensitive topic, I didn’t ask Ms. McAllister about the logic behind her reasoning. I presumed, however, that aside from potato chips and orange juice, there wasn’t much food in the house or, given the tight economic constraints, what food there was had been reserved for other purposes.
14. Note that in the example presented earlier, when Ms. McAllister yells at Alexis for swearing, she implicitly acknowledges that her