Unequal Childhoods - Annette Lareau [97]
Similarly, when the McAllisters visit a local clinic so that Harold can get a physical for Bible camp, their experiences contrast sharply with the Williamses’. Here, too, the normally boisterous Ms. McAllister is quiet, sometimes to the point of being inaudible. She has trouble answering the doctor’s questions. In some cases, she does not know what he means (e.g., she asks, “What’s a tetanus shot?”); in others, she is vague:
DOCTOR: Does he eat something each day—either fish, meat, or egg?
JANE (her response low and muffled): Yes.
DOCTOR (attempting to make eye contact but failing as mom stares intently at paper): A yellow vegetable?
JANE (still no eye contact, looking down): Yeah.
DOCTOR: A green vegetable?
JANE (looking at the doctor): Not all the time.21
DOCTOR: No. Fruit or juice?
JANE (low voice, little or no eye contact, looks at the doctor’s scribbles on the paper he is filling out): Ummh humn.
DOCTOR: Does he drink milk every day?
JANE(ABRUPTLY and in a considerably louder voice): Yeah.
DOCTOR: Cereal, bread, rice, potato, anything like that?
JANE (shakes her head, looks at doctor): Yes, definitely.
Harold, too, is reserved. When the doctor asks, “What grade are you in at school?” he replies in a quiet, low voice, “Fourth.” But, when the topic shifts to sports, his voice grows louder. He becomes confident and enthusiastic. When the doctor reacts with surprised disbelief to Harold’s announcement that he plays all positions in football, Harold is insistent. “All of them,” he reiterates, interrupting when the doctor seeks to clarify things by listing positions (“tailback? lineman?”).
Nor is Ms. McAllister always passive or subdued during the visit. For example, when the doctor comes into the waiting room and calls their name, she beckons Runako to come along and, only as an afterthought, asks if her nephew may come too. Ms. McAllister also asks that Harold’s hearing and weight be checked. Not content to trust the doctor, she sends Runako down the hall to watch Harold being weighed and report the results back to her.
Nevertheless, there was an important difference in the character of the interaction between the McAllisters and their doctor and the Williamses and their doctor. Neither Harold nor his mother seems as comfortable as Alexander, who was used to extensive verbal conversation at home. Unlike either McAllister, Alexander is equally at ease initiating questions as answering them. Harold, who was used to responding to directives at home, answered questions from the doctor but posed none of his own. Unlike Ms. Williams, Ms. McAllister did not train her son to be assertive with authority figures, nor did she prepare him for his encounter with the doctor. Finally, the two families approached the visit with their doctor with different levels of trust. This unequal level of trust, as well as differences in the amount and quality of information divulged, can yield unequal profits to the individuals involved during a historical moment when professionals define appropriate parenting as involving assertiveness and reject passivity as inappropriate.22
DISCUSSION
The verbal world of Harold McAllister and other poor and working-class children offers some important advantages as well as costs. Compared to middle-class children we observed, Harold is more respectful toward adults in his family. In this setting, there are clear boundaries between adults and children. Adults feel comfortable issuing directives to children, which children comply with immediately. Some of the directives that adults issue center on obligations of children to others in the family (“don’t beat on Guion” or “go do [her] hair for camp”).23 One consequence of this is