Unequal Childhoods - Annette Lareau [62]
CiCi says under her breath, “That’s right.” Katie does not say anything.
Aunt Mary volunteers, “I would hit her like my father hit me,” and then tells a story of how he beat her so badly she bled, but she altered her behavior thereafter.
Katie says to CiCi, “You did punch me in the face once.” CiCi says, “I slapped your face. Don’t exaggerate.” Katie says, “I went to school with a black eye.”
The afternoon wears on; most of the time, everyone is watching soap operas and Oprah. With her mother and aunt only a few feet away, Katie begins to hit herself. There is no mistaking that they have heard and seen her, but there is no reaction on their part:
Katie starts hitting her forehead with her fist. She is sitting on the bed and falls backwards as she beats her forehead. She is hitting with her right hand. She continues for about three minutes, which seems to me like a very long time.
Moreover, Melmel begins to mimic her:
Melmel climbs up on the bed between her and myself and imitates Katie. He does this for about a minute. CiCi and Mary watch without saying anything. Katie says to me, “That’s why I was in the hospital.” I ask, “Why?” She says, “For hurting myself.” I ask, “What did they do to you?” She says, “They locked me up.” I ask, “And then what did they do?” Katie says, “They taught me about self-esteem and told me not to hurt myself.” I looked over once and CiCi and Mary were watching Oprah.
Clearly, Katie does not want to stay behind, either with her grandmother or her aunt. Knowing her daughter’s flair for being dramatic, Ms. Brindle may think that Katie is deliberately exaggerating her feelings and thus ignores her. Perhaps, though, she simply cannot allow herself to acknowledge her youngest daughter’s feelings, regardless of their validity. Ms. Brindle has a history of depression, and she seems to be haunted by the death of her first child. She feels she must go to Florida to help Jenna. Leaving Katie in someone else’s care would simplify several aspects of the move. (When the move finally happened, Ms. Brindle took both Melmel and Katie with her.)
All of the families in the study—all families everywhere—face problems. Differences arise in terms of the specific kinds and amounts of difficulties, the ways in which individuals’ temperaments shape their responses to the challenges they face, and the structural resources available to families. The Brindles had more numerous and deeper psychological problems than other poor families we visited. Many of the other challenges they faced, though, were common among poor families and arose from the same basic dilemma: insufficient resources for getting children through the day and meeting their needs. The sorts of difficulties we observed Ms. Brindle trying to cope with—going to get food stamps, finding working laundry machines, dealing with landlords and problematic neighbors, and sorting out errors on the part of powerful bureaucracies—are all routine problems for families below the poverty level.
These everyday sorts of dilemmas fit the definition of social structural problems: they are created by the way the social structural system is organized. Mixed into these social structural problems are the difficulties that arise from the individual biographies of family members. Thus, in observing real families as they move through their days, what we see are the outcomes of an ongoing interaction between structure and biography. Within the sample of working-class and poor families, the structural problems were the most oppressive ingredient in the structure-biography mixture. Insufficient resources shaped where families lived, what jobs parents held (or didn’t hold), how individuals traveled from place to place, and how much and what kind of care parents could provide for young children.
In this context, it is not surprising to find that children’s leisure activities are given a lower priority.