Unequal Childhoods - Annette Lareau [30]
The sheer number of activities increases the potential for overlapping events and last-minute conflicts. Thus, all events—including outings for Sam—have to be scheduled:
Louise returns from getting the mail. She stands in the doorway and exclaims, “And Sam, this is for you!” She opens up the envelope and Sam scurries over next to her. She hands Sam the card (an invitation to a birthday party), and he smiles as he looks at the dinosaur-like animal on the front of the invitation.
Four-year-old Sam is already aware of the importance of the family calendar. He knows that his older brothers’ commitments may preempt this invitation:
[Louise] says, “I know we have to be somewhere on the eleventh. If we are home in the morning, you can go to this.” . . . Louise walks over to the calendar and flips ahead to June. She looks at the calendar for a moment. Sam asks hopefully, with a trace of concern, “Can I go to it?” Louise says, “You’re in luck; we’re home in the morning.”
In some ways, though, Sam has more autonomy than his older brothers; less of Sam’s daily life is taken up with discrete, prescheduled activities. Neither Garrett nor Spencer typically has long stretches of time to organize or define for himself. Scheduled activities are so central to their lives that the boys use activities to keep track of days of the week (including evenings). Garrett and Spencer also designate time as before, during, or after a given activity (e.g., soccer, practice, swimming, and piano). Moreover, like other middle-class children we observed, the boys spend a significant amount of time simply waiting for the next event. Most of their activities—including school—require adult-provided transportation, and most of these activities begin and end on timetables set by adults. Sports, such as Garrett’s baseball games, all occur in settings organized and planned by adults; the kind of “pick-up” games of softball or basketball with neighborhood children that we observed among working-class and poor children are rare to nonexistent in Garrett’s life.
Of course, not every moment of every day is adult-determined. The Tallinger boys sometimes take the bus home after school, make themselves a snack, and watch television for about an hour until their parents get home, all without adult supervision. Garrett, Spencer, and Sam also play outdoors informally. Before and after scheduled events, the three often run around the yard playing baseball (with a tennis ball), or they ride their bikes. Sometimes, their parents join them for backyard ball games. The Tallinger children do not, however, go out and play all day, the way children from poor families typically do. There are not many children in the Tallingers’ neighborhood, and no boys their ages. Sometimes, a friend bikes over to visit, but more often, a parent drives the children to “play dates.”
The Tallingers enjoy wordplay as well as physical play. One night, before the parents sit down to dinner, the boys tell riddles to each other and to the field-worker.
Spencer smilingly begins to probe me with a battery of riddles. He begins by asking, “Mary, if a rooster lays an egg on a barn roof, which side will the egg fall off?” I smile and pause for a moment, then say with a tone of mock suspicion, “Well, let’s see. I didn’t think that roosters laid eggs.”
Joking occurs at the dinner table, too. Spencer reminds his mother to sign the form for his field trip to the art museum. In a display of intellectual competitiveness, Garrett tests his brother’s knowledge of Van Gogh. This inspires Mr. Tallinger to wordplay of his own:
Garrett then challenges Spencer, “Do you know what Van Gogh did?” Spencer says, “Yes, he cut off his ear and sent it to his friend.” Don chortles quietly and says, “So you could say, he sent it ear mail!” Everyone