Unequal Childhoods - Annette Lareau [63]
LEAVING CHILD’S PLAY TO CHILDREN
Middle-class parents often are busy, even at home. They certainly do not always stop to watch every time one or more of their children is engaged in some sort of performance, be it playing the piano, putting on a skit, or doing a dance. Still, these parents appeared to feel an obligation to cultivate their children’s talents. Often, they would meet that obligation by watching, evaluating, and encouraging their children’s at-home performances.8 At times, parents would also voluntarily participate in children’s activities, playing board and word games with them, engaging in backyard sports and helping with projects.
Working-class and poor parents also sometimes join their children in play. For example, in the white working-class Yanelli family (see Chapter 11), Billy, the focal child, and his father would sit outside on the sidewalk in front of their house and play cards while Mr. Yanelli smoked a cigarette. In Katie’s family, too, adults sometimes participate. Ms. Brindle periodically agrees to watch Katie and her cousin, Amy, perform little skits. Katie’s mother also occasionally plays Monopoly with her.
Although in all the families we studied, adults seemed willing to take time occasionally to observe a child’s activity or to join a child in a game, adults in working-class and poor families make relatively few interventions in children’s leisure activities, especially compared to the level of involvement we observed in middle-class homes. Most working-class and poor parents did not consider children’s activities as consequential or, more specifically, as something that ought to involve adult time or energy. In their view, children’s activities are something they do with one another, not with adults. Therefore, there was a separation between adults’ and children’s worlds. When working-class and poor children ask for adult participation, their requests may be seen as unnecessary and possibly annoying as well:
Amy says out of the blue, “Katie is good at dying. She is good at dying and crying.” Katie turns and tells us, “Shoot me.” . . . Without affect or enthusiasm, Gmom (Grandmom) makes a play gun out of her fingers and aims at Katie’s chest and says (in a monotone), “Bang.” . . . Katie has backed up . . . [She] begins a slow, dramatic performance of dying, clutching her heart with both hands, then stretching both hands and arms completely outward [and then] leaning back and falling onto the day bed. She slowly slides off the day bed and onto the floor, and—as a final touch—lets her head drop and rest against her left shoulder. She lies still.
Amy is hopping up and down with excitement . . . I smile and say, “Great.” Grandmom says nothing; she looks bored. Katie scrambles up and says, “Shoot me again.” This time I shoot her with my right hand. She repeats the performance. Grandmom is [not paying attention to Katie at all but is] watching TV.
By the third time Katie asks to be shot, Grandmom looks quite annoyed, but she does not say anything. There is no fourth request because, in a move typical of young children playing informally, Katie and Amy suddenly shift gears. They retreat to the kitchen to plot a Christmas skit and then come out to the living room to perform. In middle-class homes, parents routinely praise their children’s displays of creativity. At Grandmom’s house, the skit is assiduously ignored by the adults:
Amy says to us, “I’m Santa and you