Unequal Childhoods: Class, Race, and Family Life

Unequal Childhoods: Class, Race, and Family Life

By: Annette Lareau  

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Average Customer Rating: 4.5 out of 5

Publisher: University of California Press

Customer Review: 5 out of 5
Suzanne - I first came across this study as it was referenced in a Malcolm Gladwell book. Curiosity getting the better of me, I decided to seek the research for myself and easily found this book by the researcher. The information (case studies) were presented in an easy-to-read and understandable format. The subject matter was a tad provoking, yet highly relevant to today's living conditions under which many children face challenges at home, at school, at the playground, everywhere. As a middle-aged person, I've noticed such differences in children and parenting styles in my neighborhood and larger community. Reading this book confirmed for me a peronsal hypothesis about child-rearing, and impacted me enough to cause me to take a renewed approach with the children with whom I come in contact. The classic 'nature vs. nurture' argument is still afoot! A 'leg up' is certainly what every child needs, and only conscientious parents and adults can provide this critical training to children - and at their most impressionable age.

Customer Review: 5 out of 5
Book - I haven't read the book yet because it's for a class I'm taking over the summer. It came super fast and was in great condition. I've had a few teachers recommend it.

Customer Review: 2 out of 5
Environmentalist Ideology - from HBD Books:

A person who does honest research and looks at questions of what causes different life outcomes from all possible perspectives finds out that cross-adoption studies show that unrelated people who grew up in the same home are no more alike than any two strangers in the general population. To many in academia, the research on nature/nurture might as well have never been done.

So why read a book like Unequal Childhoods? Annette Lareau, a sociologist at Temple University, is part of the know-nothing tradition of the human sciences. Building on observations of children from 88 families, she and her associates provide in-depth observations of 12 families with nine- or ten-year-olds -- six White families, five Black and one interracial. The families were divided into three categories based on education and economic situation: middle and upper class, working class, and lower class. From comparing the kind of interactions the children have with their families and the outside world, the author thinks that she can explain how unequal childhoods lead to unequal adulthoods.

Although Lareau's conclusions are wrong, the book proves interesting for two reasons. First of all, she inadvertently shows that environmentalist ideology -- the belief that who we are is shaped mostly by what happens to us -- has led to the middle class being absolutely miserable. Secondly, she provides an intriguing account of how people of different IQs interact with each other and how they deal with government and private institutions.

The main dividing line that the author finds is between the middle/upper class and the two lower ones. It's common among educated Americans to follow the advice of experts, who in recent decades have made suggestions such as avoiding corporal punishment and treating children as equals. The middle and upper class follow a parenting style the author calls concerned cultivation, while the lower and working classes follow one of accomplishment of natural growth.

The author finds that there are few differences in child-rearing between Blacks and Whites of the same social class. Race is little more than an afterthought in the book. What Lareau fails to inform the reader is that middle- and upper-class Blacks do worse on standardized tests than Whites of the working and lower classes. This fact has led some gene-ignoring researchers to claim there's a sort of hidden institutional racism X-factor that holds Black children back. With this author, however, this inconvenient piece of data is ignored.

Families are given their own chapters to illustrate each point. We start with the Tallingers (all names are fake). The parents appear to be of North European descent, both with Ivy League degrees. They are raising three boys, including nine-year-old Garrett who is the target of the study. He has an IQ of 119, but his passion is sports. A table of his activities for the month of May shows one week where he participates in soccer four times, baseball three times, swimming five times, and basketball once.

Lower-class children participate much less in extracurricular activities, and, when they do, the parents don't attach nearly as much importance to them. The Tallingers live their entire lives around Garrett's sports practices and piano lessons. They will rearrange their work schedules in order to give him a ride to where he needs to be. The other two comparatively inactive sons are often dragged along and grow resentful of their brother. Middle-class children in general have relatively poor relationships with their siblings during childhood. Middle class children also have no relationships with their extended kin -- an element of the individualist tendencies of Western family structure. The family structure itself seems fragile: If a soccer match is scheduled for the same time as a family outing, the sporting event tends to get priority.

While Garrett enjoys his busy schedule, he is often exhausted. The parents put up with the inconveniences because they're convinced that their son gains an advantage from all this activity. Middle-class children spend most of their leisure time in events organized by adults. The author calls this a "bureaucratic" existence.

All these activities don't just consume time, but money. The Tallingers estimate that the extracurricular activities of Garrett alone cost $4,000 a year, and that excludes any lost work productivity on the part of the adults. Seeing the time and money middle- and upper-class parents are putting into each of their children, it's no wonder that they have so few of them.

Environmentalist ideology has led society's genetic elite to absurdly overestimate what a stimulating environment can do for their children, and needlessly fear a less managed existence. After giving a son or daughter the basic necessities of life and educational opportunities, further investments likely result in diminishing returns. If intelligent parents knew this, they would be less busy, have much less anxiety and possibly have more children, since doing so would be more financially feasible and enjoyable.

We have to remember that that the parent who is providing a rich language environment for the child also provides genes to the child so that the child is able to soak up this rich environment -- a phenomenon that behavior geneticists refer to as the passive genotype-environment correlation: The child is the passive recipient of genes and environments from their parents and the genes and environments mesh together. The same thing happens when parents like tennis stars Andre Agassi and Steffi Graf transmit genes for athletic ability to their children and also provide them with great environments for training in tennis.

The section on language is ostensibly about variation in raising children, but it can just as easily be read as about passive genotype-environment correlations between people with high and low IQs. For example, when an upper-class child talks about something he learned, the parents will ask follow up questions. This is not the case among less intelligent caregivers. When the higher classes discuss why they like this or that car or X-Man character, they expect one another to present relevant reasons. Welfare mothers aren't able to verbalize why they prefer X to Y or to figure out what does or doesn't relate to an argument. Middle-class families are described as always talking to one another with brief interruptions of silence, and working and lower class families as doing the opposite, with silence being the norm. All these differences are the results of IQ inequality, not the causes of them.

Lareau points out that the middle class parents in the study who grew up in the 1950s and 60s were themselves products of natural growth childhoods. She doesn't seem to see how this harms her theory of a generational transmission of different parenting styles being the source of inequality in America. On the other hand, the author does have some good ideas about why the middle- and upper-class parents do things differently from the way their parents did. The "institutionalization of children's leisure" is a product of the modern world, as are "scientific motherhood" and the attempted "rationalization" of all aspects of human existence. She writes:

"The rationalization of children's leisure is evident in the proliferation of organized activities with a predictable schedule, delivering a particular quantity of experience within a specific time period, under the control of adults... areas of family life are growing more systematic, predictable, and regulated than they have been in the recent past."

While the author believes that this new form of parenting at least has the redeeming quality of making children eventually more capable of dealing with the modern world, those of us who know the importance of nature in determining how humans turn out can see the modern upper-class forms of child-rearing for what they are: Wasteful in both time and money.

Customer Review: 4 out of 5
Review - Annette Lareau's descriptively rich, nonjudgmental, and brutally honest portrayal of family life through nine detailed case studies reveals tangible differences in child rearing strategies and childhood experiences among families of various races and social classes. A major strength of this book is Lareau's engaging writing style, which intimately situates the reader in the physical and emotional context of each family. This may be an experience for the reader that is comfortable, uncomfortable, or both.

Another positive quality rests in Lareau's neutral and objective voice that does not validate or condemn any child rearing method. Her self proclaimed perspective, ". . . that in raising their children, parents were doing the best they could" (p. 272), is consistently present throughout the text. By consciously neglecting to qualify the child rearing strategies and childhood experiences she is thoroughly describing, Lareau is empowering the reader to make any and all judgments.

For example, Lareau's tireless research teased out two distinct, class-specific, child rearing methodology camps she refers to as "concerted cultivation" and the "accomplishment of natural growth". She describes the benefits of being a child raised in each camp and outlines specific skills children develop when exposed to either child rearing method. In addition, she contextualizes these skills within the adult world by articulating in which situations certain skills are advantageous. Likewise, she identifies situations where lacking certain skills can create poignant disadvantages. Which advantages are valued and which disadvantages are acceptable is entirely dependent upon the reader.

Another strong contribution, which also proves to be a weakness, is the length to which Lareau went to find both African American and Caucasian families across classes. This feat goes a long way to support how class, more so than race, influences child rearing methods. However, Lareau's exclusive focus on urban and suburban African Americans and Caucasians leaves out a multitude of people from other races, ethnicities, sexualities, linguistic backgrounds, immigration experiences, as well as those living in rural communities. Other groups including Asian Americans, American Indians, Latinos, Homosexuals, Immigrants from the Middle East and South Asia, as well as Refugees from East and Sub-Saharan Africa, Southeast Asia, Central and South America, and Eastern Europe may have very different family contexts and child rearing methods than those Lareau describes in this book.

By her own admission, Lareau explains, ". . . one cannot generalize from these results to the broader population" (p. 266). This is not possible because she was unable to randomly select her participants. Although her intention may not be to generalize her results to the broader population, I hope researchers and scholars will diligently and rigorously explore the unique ethnographic details of childhood experiences of the distinct groups listed above and many others.

In addition to the lack of generalization and limited racial and ethnic scope, Lareau also neglected to explicitly define her class distinctions, especially middle class. In her methodology, she describes her initial intent to focus strictly on middle class and working class. She wanted to find parents who were all employees distinguished by their supervisory and managerial duties or lack thereof. However, she found some parents were unemployed, underemployed, living below the poverty line, and receiving public assistance. Therefore, she includes poor class with working class to juxtapose the middle class. My question is, if she includes poor class, why does she neglect to include the wealthy class comprised of the employer and the self-employed?

Shortcomings and weaknesses aside, this powerful text is beneficial to anyone who strongly believes or strongly opposes the notion that we live in a post-racial, merit-based, classless society where all citizens have truly equal opportunities for success. Anyone studying, having intellectual curiosities, or working in the fields of anthropology, sociology, education, social justice, public health, psychology, urban studies, or cognitive development would find this qualitative research literature both functional and enjoyable.

From reading this book, I learned that exposing the detailed realities of middle class family life without valorization allows for a discussion that permits challenging of middle class values that are often unquestionably accepted as the exemplary lifestyle in contemporary American society. I also learned that there are tangible advantages and benefits to growing up in a working class or poor household such as the ability to cooperate, negotiate with peers, be creative, entertain oneself, and effectively make use of leisure time.

Many educators may not be familiar with the behaviors and skills children raised in an accomplishment of natural growth setting bring to the classroom. Since educators are required to attend college, many of them have only experienced concerted cultivation child rearing methods. Educators who actively engage with this text may potentially find and enhance skills in students who come from accomplishment of natural growth households. They may also be more patient and understanding when expecting or encouraging skills that are exclusively transmitted in a concerted cultivation household.

Customer Review: 4 out of 5
A worthy sequel but not as coherent - Unequal Childhoods is a worthy sequel to Annette Lareau's immensely popular ethnography Home Advantage. In Unequal Childhoods Laureau addresses many of the same issues, especially the structure and functioning of the affluent middle class family with high aspirations for its children, and the much less affluent working class family that wishes its children well, but has no strict regimen as to how academic and material success should be achieved.

To overstate the case, the affluent parents with high aspirations for their children subject them to a rigorous, structured, and very busy schedule of study time and extra-curricular activities. They are preparing their children for admission to a selective college or university, and they expect them to succeed there. Furthermore, they expect their children, once they are adults, to carry this demanding socialization process with them, governing their lives, and, in due course, the lives of their children.

By sharp contrast, the less affluent families remind me very much of my own upbringing in the '50's and '60's. Out-of-school-time, especially during the summer months, was my own. Baseball, BB guns, long bicycle rides to nowhere in particular, B-grade movies, sneaking cigarettes, and a lot of TV. Parental discipline and supervision were limited almost entirely to seeing that we stayed out of trouble and avoided injury. Childhood was devoted, in traditional form, to being a child.

Working class parents valued education, but they gave it little thought. My expected destination after high school was an in-town state college. Two years before it had been a state teachers college, still referred to by many as "the normal school." Tuition was $150 a month, which I paid for by earnings from a part-time job. And, of course, I would cut costs further by living at home. I dropped out after two years.

In addition to her extremely interesting typology, Lareau makes clear that families vary more than we might expect. Poor inner-city families are often extended families, and a child might sleep in a different house each night. Sleeping arrangements depended largely on who was working the night shift

This kind of hit-and-miss arrangement would have been anathema to affluent upper middle class parents. They almost certainly would have taken it as evidence of neglect.

The upper middle class parents raised children who were imbued with a sense entitlement. They expected to mature and live at least as well as their parents.

For the working class and poor children, the future was open-ended. They expected to get by, using familial sources of extended-family support that served them well as children. Their aspirations, however, were not high.

Perhaps because Unequal Childhoods focuses on more schools and more families than Home Advantage, I thought it may have lacked the coherence that made Home Advantage such a good read. This difference may also be due to the fact that Lareau used graduate students, all quite competent, I am sure, to do her field work, often actually living in subjects' homes. This made for a great source of rich and varied ethnographic material, but then it all has to be put together into one book. Having done something like this on a very small scale, I know how difficult it can be to construct a coherent and readable picture.

In any case, this is a fine piece of ethnographic research, and we can all learn a great deal from it. It raises a very difficult question? Just how should children be raised? I hate to think that it is after the fashion of the upper-middle class entitled, but that seems the better answer. What have we wrought.

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