Unequal Childhoods - Annette Lareau [232]
3. This parent-teacher conference was in the fall, after I had interviewed Ms. Yanelli but before she was asked to be in the observational study. In this conference, Mr. Tier told her very directly that he thought that Billy had psychological problems. (Mr. Tier, not known for his tactfulness, also expressed frustration about Billy rolling down a muddy hill during a field trip, saying in the conference, “Even kids that were fat and stupid got themselves down the hill.”) Ms. Yanelli was very distressed by the conference. Taking my number from the consent form I had given her, she called me at home that evening to discuss it. She thought Billy’s report card was excellent. She was bewildered about why Mr. Tier would not discuss the report card in the conference but make claims of Billy having psychological problems. What is striking in this conversation and many others is that despite Ms. Yanelli’s clear sense that educators are acting inappropriately, she feels incapable of influencing the situation. Furthermore, she blames herself for her powerlessness. As she said that evening, “I think, ‘Why do you let the school do this to you time after time?’ ”
4. Given the dominant emphasis on reasoning in middle-class settings it is important to point out that reasoning is not without drawbacks. In middle-class families results could be ineffectual, as when parents were trying to reason with a cranky, grumpy, loud five-year-old.
5. Other research has shown that parents of lower levels of education are likely to use physical discipline, particularly with sons. See Ronald L. Simons et al., “Intergenerational Transmission of Harsh Parenting.”
6. To our knowledge, no one at Lower Richmond noticed the next day.
7. See Joyce Epstein’s work as well as James Coleman’s work on this point.
8. See Jacques Donzelot, The Policing of Families.
CHAPTER 12: THE POWER AND LIMITS OF SOCIAL CLASS
1. See Sharon Hays, The Cultural Contradictions of Motherhood.
2. Some researchers claim that happiness is not particularly connected to age, gender, race, or affluence. See David G. Meyers and Ed Diener, “Who Is Happy?”
3. Middle-class parents were self-aware of how hectic their lives were; they often talked about the lack of time. Some parents also mentioned how their own childhoods had been so different from those of their own children in terms of organized activities. But middle-class parents did not seem to be particularly aware of their emphasis on reasoning and, especially, their interventions in institutions. Nor were they, or working-class and poor parents, particularly aware that radically different approaches to child rearing were being carried out. Instead, parents viewed their approaches to child rearing as natural.
4. Cornel West, Race Matters.
5. See Jennifer Hochschild, Facing Up to the American Dream; Ellis Cose, The Rage of a Privileged Class; Beverly Daniel Tatum, Why Are the Black Kids Sitting Together in the Cafeteria?; and Elizabeth Higginbotham, Too Much to Ask.
6. In this study there were also, in some contexts, differences in sociolinguistic terms (including special words for white people). For a more general discussion of this issue see Mary Patillo-McCoy, Black Picket Fences, and Douglas Massey and Nancy Denton, American Apartheid. I also did not study a racially isolated school. See, among others, Eric A. Hanushek et. al., “New Evidence about Brown v. Board of Education.”
7. See Ellis Cose, The Rage of a Privileged Class, and Mary Waters, Black Identities.
8. Douglas Massey and Nancy Denton, American Apartheid.
9. This study’s findings are compatible with others that have shown children to be aware of race at relatively early ages. Indeed, girls often played in racially segregated groups on the playground. (Boys were likely to be in racially integrated groups.) Thus, this study suggests that racial dynamics certainly exist in children’s lives, but they are not (yet)