Unequal Childhoods - Annette Lareau [52]
The game was sort of like volleyball but much more complex. The players are organized in a rough circle. They volley the ball to one another. Each player must watch carefully to make sure that the person who volleyed the ball to them jumped before hitting the ball. If you hit the ball but did not jump then you are out. If you can cause a person to go out then you “gain a life.”
They often dispute whether or not the person jumped:
“Naw, man, that ain’t [it]. You did just like this.” (Shawn jumps, but his feet barely leave the ground.) “That ain’t my point.” Ken did not protest. He just said, “Okay, play it over.” Play resumes for another two minutes, then they argue again.
When the disputes evolve into prolonged arguments, the boys typically resort to some sort of informal conflict resolution. In this instance, they walk up the block to find a friend to adjudicate:
Shawn suggested that they go ask Reggie. Reggie lives in the next block to Tyrec. They put down the ball and walked to the end of Reggie’s block and they yelled to [people inside the house] . . . “Yo! Reggie–Reggie.” “Come here.” “Is Reggie up there?” Reggie walks down . . . Each person tried to tell his story at the same time. Reggie hollered, “Wait, one at a time. Ken, you first.” Ken gave his version of the story, then Tyrec gave his, and Shawn went last. It turns out Shawn was correct. Ken was out. Ken did not protest. He accepted Reggie’s ruling. He just sat on the hood of a parked car and watched. Reggie and Clayton now join in the fun.
With a new cast of players, the game resumes, interspersed with arguments, for another thirty minutes. Next, they set up a race, running to a point three blocks away, a public building with a small plot of grass outside. There, they initiate a different game (“Scram Ball”); the boys’ play continues well into the hot summer night.
As they pursue their various activities, Tyrec and his friends frequently show genuine excitement and pleasure or, sometimes, agitation. Unlike middle-class children, working-class and poor children rarely complain of being “bored.” We heard Tyrec whine about a variety of things (e.g., being restricted to inside play), but unlike middle-class children, we never heard him complain that he had nothing to do. Despite the lack of organized activities, he has no trouble filling up his schedule. He has ideas, plans, and activities to engage in with his friends. Unlike his middle-class counterparts, Tyrec needs no adult assistance to pursue the great majority of his plans. He doesn’t need to pressure his mother to drive him to a friend’s house or to organize a sleep-over or to take him to a store.
In sum, in the routines of his daily life, Tyrec learned important life skills not available to Garrett. He and his friends found numerous ways of entertaining themselves, showing creativity and independence. This experience was extremely valuable, but it was also distinctly different from the more bureaucratic experience of organized activities that dominated Garrett’s life. Tyrec and his peers did not get training in the enactment of organizational rules. Nor, as I show later in the book, did working-class and poor children receive the training observed in middle-class homes in how to pressure an organization to be responsive to a child’s individualized needs. In short, the leisure activities involved in concerted cultivation had the potential to offer more payoff in the world of institutions than did the spontaneous play involved in the accomplishment of natural growth.
Tyrec and his friends did not experience their leisure time as lacking any important component. In particular,