Unequal Childhoods - Annette Lareau [53]
CHAPTER 5
Children’s Play Is for
Children: Katie Brindle
Katie told me excitedly on the phone, “I’m making a doll house! My Grandmom brought me some boxes and I am making a doll house!” When I got [to the apartment], I asked her about the doll house. She shrugged her shoulders and looked discouraged. She said, “I don’t know how to make it.”
Katie picks up the box off the Formica counter [in the kitchen] and carries it high in the air over to the living room and plops it down on the rug. She says, “Mom, will you help me?” CiCi says, “Nah.” Katie is silent but disappointed.
In middle-class homes, adults treat children’s activities seriously. A request for help is not likely to be waved aside. Since parents in these homes often are preoccupied with their children’s lives, things that are important to children can easily become major events for their parents as well. This in turn increases the pressure on children to succeed (recall how Mr. Tallinger yells to “encourage” Garrett during a soccer game). Middle-class parents follow up on children’s interests, often by enrolling them in organized activities, but also by watching impromptu skits or joining in backyard ball games or playing word games with their children after dinner. Parents usually enjoy this involvement, but they also see it as part of their obligation to their children. Parental involvement is a key component of the child-rearing strategy of concerted cultivation. As a result, middle-class children gain a sense of being entitled to have adults focus attention on minute details of their lives.
The working-class and poor children we observed, mainly nine- and ten-year-olds, were still young enough to enjoy the attention of their parents. Sometimes they would request adults to pay attention to them or to assist them with their activities. As this chapter shows, adults often (but not always) decline such requests. Generally, children accept these decisions silently, as Katie does with her dollhouse project. They do not pressure adults to cater to their wishes. A significant consequence of working-class and poor parents’ view of their children’s social lives as not particularly important and their children’s acceptance of that perspective is that the children are not trained to see themselves as special and worthy of being catered to in daily life. Children appear to gain a sense of constraint, as opposed to entitlement, in their workings with the larger world.
A feeling of constraint is not the only outcome, however. When parents follow the child-rearing strategy of the accomplishment of natural growth, providing close supervision in custodial matters and granting children autonomy in leisure matters, the children appear to take real pleasure in their playtime. The lack of adult attention and involvement in their activities leaves children in working-class and poor homes free to concentrate on pleasing themselves. The children we studied tended to show more creativity, spontaneity, enjoyment, and initiative in their leisure pastimes than we saw among middle-class children at play in organized activities.
The fact that working-class and poor parents pay less attention to their children’s playtime activities does not mean that these parents don’t enjoy seeing their children have fun. But, as we saw with Tyrec Taylor, this pleasure does not necessarily prompt parents to feel that they ought to regularly provide their children with such experiences. Nor do working-class and poor parents seem to feel obligated to attend to or follow up on children’s displays of creativity. In general, children’s leisure activities