Unequal Childhoods - Annette Lareau [243]
57. See Kathryn M. Neckerman, Social Inequality; Grusky and Szelényi, The Inequality Reader; Aaron M. Pallas and Jennifer L. Jennings, “Cumulative Knowledge about Cumulative Advantage”; Lareau and Conley, Social Class; Bill Keller and the New York Times, Class Matters; Future of Children, Opportunity in America.
58. See, for example, the influential work of Michèle Lamont, Money, Morals, and Manners; Dignity of Working Men; Lamont and Marcel Fournier, eds., Cultivating Differences; David J. Harding, Lamont, and Mario Luis Small, eds., Reconsidering Culture and Poverty. See also Pierre Bourdieu, Distinction.
59. See Pallas and Jennings, “Cumulative Knowledge about Cumulative Advantage.”
60. Stacey’s success also could be associated with her family background, but the concrete actions her parents took would remain unclear. There are methodological constraints associated with using fixed-response surveys to study the type and timing of interventions middle-class parents undertake. These constraints account for why social scientists so often try to understand a variety of social outcomes by conducting studies of grade point averages, verbal test scores, hours watching television, time parents spend reading to a child, and parents’ attendance at parent-teacher conferences. The problem, however, as we have seen, is that many of the things that middle-class parents do are difficult to capture on surveys.
61. See pictures of art work in Peter Demerath’s Producing Success, which provide haunting images of alienation. Some elite high schools have been shaken by suicides, including in Palo Alto, Calif., where five high-achieving students committed suicide in six months. See Christina Farr, “After Five Suicides, Palo Alto High School Students Change Culture,” www.sfgate.com/cgi-bin/blogs/inthepeninsula/detail?entry_id=80342; accessed March 22, 2011. College Unranked, edited by Lloyd Thacker, discusses the “arms race” of preparation for college applications. See also Nelson, Parenting Out of Control; Suniya Luthar, “The Culture of Affluence.”
62. See Wills, “Parent Trap”; Jacobson, “Help Not Wanted.”
63. As Katherine McClelland noted, the “concerted cultivation metaphor itself suggests an explanation of middle-class parents’ shame at their children’s failures: if cultivation is what we’re engaged in, then I am a poor gardener if your flowers bloom while mine do not” (personal communication, September 17, 2010). There are many other drawbacks to middle-class life that draw only limited scholarly attention. For instance, middle-class families, including the Tallingers, often must relocate (sometimes moving great distances) in order to meet one or both parents’ career demands. Middle-class parents, including Mr. and Ms. Williams, also work very long hours and spend a great deal of time in airports and hotels, away from home, for their careers. Numerous studies have studied the number of hours spent at work, but the implications for the social class differences in the quality of family life have been harder to unpack (but see Marianne Cooper, “Being the ‘Go-To Guy’”; Pamela Stone, Opting Out; Mary Blair-Loy, Competing Devotions for studies of middle-class families). For discussions of the class divide in time spent at work, see Jerry A. Jacobs and Kathleen Gerson, The Time Divide.
64. Bruce Tulgan’s Not Everyone Gets a Trophy was published in 2009. There is an older popular literature on the downside of what I term concerted cultivation, including David Elkind’s 1981 book The Hurried Child. See also Suniya Luthar, “The Culture of Affluence.”
65. See chapter 8, “The Dark Side of Parent Involvement,” in Lareau, Home Advantage.
66. It is likely that middle-class parents would try to manage as many elements of a surgical intervention as possible, e.g., learning the names and side effects of the medications, asking about alternative courses of treatment, and researching their child’s medical condition enough to formulate informed