Unequal Childhoods - Annette Lareau [71]
Social Connections
Both Mr. and Ms. Williams consider themselves to be very connected to their extended families. Ms. Williams is the daughter of a minister and a homemaker. She grew up in a medium-sized city in the South. All eight children in the family graduated from college. Ms. Williams says she feels close to her family, even though she lives far from them. She talks on the phone daily with her mother and visits her parents three to four times per year. On two of those visits, she takes Alexander with her to see his grandparents. Mr. Williams is the eldest of nine children; he grew up in a small town in the South. His mother, who worked as a domestic and later as a cook, is retired. His father and his stepfather (neither of whom is still living) had grammar school education and worked as laborers. Mr. Williams talks on the phone with his mother once a week and sees her twice a year. He sends her about $500 per month, and he also helps pay for the college education of one of his nieces.
Because Alexander has no cousins for hundreds of miles, interactions with cousins are not a normal part of his leisure time. Nor does he often play with children from his neighborhood. The occupants of the huge homes on his street are mainly couples without children. Most of Alexander’s playmates are drawn from his classroom or from the organized leisure activities in which he participates. Since the great majority of his school activities, church life, soccer games, choir, piano, baseball games, and other commitments are organized by the age (and sometimes gender) of the participants, Alexander tends to interact almost exclusively with children his own age, usually boys.
Impact on Family Life
Alex’s many activities keep his already-busy parents even busier. His mother typically moves through these demands in a gracious and sociable fashion. Mr. Williams, on the other hand, sometimes complains about the time consumed by his son’s events. He usually brings a newspaper to read while he waits for a school performance to begin, reads in the backseat of the car (with Alexander in the front seat) on the way to events, and sometimes sorts his work mail during soccer practice. This divergence between the spouses, with mothers seeming more invested in children’s activities than fathers, is typical of all of the parents we observed. Mothers are also generally more active than fathers in ancillary events such as the “parents group” for Alexander’s church youth choir group, which draws only mothers.
Mr. Williams’s long hours at work frequently leave him tired on the weekends. Rushing from scheduled event to scheduled event seems to weary him. One Sunday, as the family is hurrying from church to baseball to a school play, he reflects on the irony of all this coming and going on what is supposed to be a day off: “Leisurely Sunday afternoon schedule, huh?”
Besides sometimes being exhausting, Alexander’s activities also create tension between his parents over the division of labor in the family. Each commented on this in separate interviews. Mr. Williams feels that he shares equally (a fifty–fifty split) in labor related to caring for Alexander. His wife reports sixty–forty for physical labor and eighty-five–fifteen for mental labor. Mr. Williams does not believe Alexander’s activities have had any consequences for his wife’s career. She disagrees. Ms. Williams says she consciously chose to make her son her “priority.” Although adamant