Unequal Childhoods - Annette Lareau [42]
Like the organizational aspects of children’s activities, these home-based practices contribute to the development of skills that have a particularly smooth fit with the behaviors and expectations of occupations and other social institutions. Thus, in their everyday experiences, middle-class children not only acquire a variety of important life skills, but they also have repeated opportunities to practice those skills. Their working-class and poor counterparts, on the other hand, typically neither participate in organized activities nor grow up in homes where the preferred approach to child rearing meshes seamlessly with the practices and values of society’s dominant institutions.
THE FRENETIC FAMILY
In the nineteenth century, families gathered around the hearth. Today, the center of the middle-class home is the calendar—the middle-class homes we visited typically had a large, white paper monthly calendar, hung on the wall above or next to the kitchen telephone. Scheduled, paid, and organized activities for children are noted (sometimes in a colored pen) in the two-inch-square open spaces beneath each day of the month. Month after month, children are busy participating in sports, music, scouts, and play groups. And, before and after going to work, their parents are busy getting them to and from these activities. At times, middle-class houses seem to be little more than holding places for the occupants during the brief periods when they are between activities.
The pattern we observed among middle-class families like the Tallingers of involving children in many organized activities and adjusting family life to accommodate those activities does not fit neatly into existing sociological approaches. Social scientists interested in determining the dominant factors shaping children’s lives are often preoccupied with a hunt for single determinants—they hope to be able to point to, for example, the overriding importance of income or education. We looked diligently for key causal elements, but across the twelve families we observed closely, what we found was a pattern of practices or strategies attached in various ways to class cultures. Among the middle class, the hectic schedule of children’s activities is not directly attributable to any single dimension of their lives, such as family income, parents’ educational levels or occupational conditions, neighborhood type, family size or gender composition, or parents’ leisure preferences. And, at least in the Tallingers’ case, the family’s emphasis on organized activities was not an effort on the parents’ part to reproduce their own childhood experiences. Mr. Tallinger’s mother was a single parent from the time he was four. As a boy, he played outside for long periods, often in “pick-up” games with other boys in the neighborhood. Ms. Tallinger, too, grew up in a single-parent family. As a child, she had long stretches of unstructured time, which did not give way to organized activities until she was older.
Moreover, neither the benefits nor the costs of the strategies I term concerted cultivation seem to be fully understood by parents. For example, the close fit between skills children learn in soccer games or at piano recitals and those they will eventually need in white-collar professional or technical positions goes unnoted. Similarly, that middle-class children have trouble adjusting to unstructured time and that they often find it difficult to forge deep, positive bonds with siblings are largely unrecognized costs of concerted cultivation. So too are the ways that one child’s schedule dominates family time, particularly at the expense of the schedules of younger siblings. Of course, sometimes parents grumble over the hectic schedules. Parents also note that they did not place similar demands on their own parents. But middle-class parents take for granted their obligation to develop their children’s talents through means including organized activities.
Perhaps there is little understanding of the ways in which the middle-class approach