This is my third consecutive post about Unequal Childhoods. Here I explore the book’s civic implications, which Lareau does not address very explicitly. Organizing people to address their own problems from the grassroots up is an alternative to all the ideologies I described yesterday, and it might be the best way to solve the problems that Lareau uncovers. However, it’s hard to take successful grassroots political action without good civic education, and that is something that children of all classes lack.

All the families Unequal Childhoods have problems that are “political.” In other words, they cannot solve their dilemmas without coordinating their efforts with many other families and individuals. For the most part, the problems of the poor and working-class families involve dysfunctional public institutions or a lack of resources and opportunities. For example, one girl in the study has learning disabilities. She is receiving no special help at school. According to the rules of her school district, it would take a minimum of 120 days (out of a 180-day school year) for her to be assigned to special education (pp. 210-1). These rules–at least as Lareau describes them–must be changed; but it takes collective action to change bureaucratic procedures.

In general, the problems that face middle-class suburban families result from competition among themselves, not from underperforming or under-funded institutions. They are very good at obtaining excellent services from schools, doctors, and other organizations. If their schools were unresponsive, they would simply move. Nevertheless, their lives are not idyllic. They rush from activity to activity. If a parent refuses to take her kid to an inconvenient soccer practice, the child will be cut from the team. And if the child is cut from the team, she will lose access to peer networks and learning experiences. One parent says (p. 49) “There’s something arrogant about soccer. I mean, they just assume that you have the time, that you can get off work, to lug your kids to games. What if you worked a job that paid an hourly wage?”

One middle-class family struggles with an unmanageable load of homework. As the father says (p. 188), “I don?t think I did that much homework in college.” This burden could be the fault of teachers; but I suspect the underlying cause is pressure from other middle-class parents. It would take counter-pressure from many families to lower those demands.

As David Moore observed in a comment on Monday, each class would benefit from interacting with the other. The working-class kids miss educational opportunities that the middle-class children take for granted; and the middle-class kids miss opportunities to invent their own activities and manage their own affairs. In the fiction that suburban kids read, the young protagonists always decide what to do from hour to hour–something that only working-class kids actually do. Getting the two groups together would help both–but that, too, would require collective action.

In short, families’ most serious problems require political skills to address. To what extent do children learn such skills? Again, it depends on their families’ social class. Middle-class kids learn their rights. They know how to understand professionals and institutions and get the most out of them. They exchange information with one another. But they have no experience in organizing collective action and will usually respond to dissatisfaction by simply exiting from an institution–not a solution to all their problems. Working-class kids, meanwhile, learn how to self-organize and mediate conflicts. But they have low expectations of institutions and do not know how to navigate or change them.

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(From Pasadena, CA) Unequal Childhoods (see yesterday for a summary) catches children in the process of replicating their parents? class positions. When children who start in poor or working class families end up as poor adults (which happens frequently), they are deprived of health, longevity, and rich human experiences. The replication of social class is by no means a new problem or a new topic of research, but it is acutely important today, when solid working-class jobs are disappearing. Just as access to the middle class is narrowing, the price of not making it there is rising.

Lareau cautions (p. 251), “Untangling the effects of material and cultural resources on parents and childrens’ choices is beyond the scope of this study. These two forces are inextricably interwoven in daily life.” Yet our choice of ideology depends on how we untangle these effects. In a previous post, I argued that responses to poverty vary along three axes: 1) the degree to which we believe that money (versus culture) determines economic outcomes; 2) the degree to which we like (versus dislike) the dominant, white-collar culture; and 3) the degree to which we trust (versus distrust) the state to ameliorate poverty.

Despite Lareau’s disclaimer, her findings have implications for three important positions on this chart.

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(From San Francisco) This is the first of several consecutive posts about Annette Lareau’s book, Unequal Childhoods: Class, Race, and Family Life. It’s the most stimulating work of social science I have read for a long time, and I hope to explore its implications for political philosophy, education policy, and civic engagement in subsequent posts. But first, a brief summary of Lareau’s method and argument.

She and her students chose children from the same metropolitan area who were middle class, working class, and poor. From each of these groups (defined by the parents’ profession, not their income), they selected both African American and white children. They obtained permission to observe the kids’ lives–in school, in the neighborhood, at home, and on visits to church and medical appointments. They interviewed the parents and teachers, but mostly they just hung around, lying on the floor with the kids, riding in the back seat on the way to appointments, playing cards or ball, sleeping overnight in their homes.

Lareau finds that the middle-class parents in the study, without regard to race, use a strategy of “concerted cultivation” to raise their children. They devote almost every waking minute of the day to giving their kids educational experiences. The children are very heavily scheduled with organized after-school activities, to the point that they lead hectic lives with much rushed traveling and many overlapping or conflicting appointments. Even ordinary conversations are opportunities to develop kids’ cognitive and language skills. Parents use persuasion and negotiation to influence their children’s behavior–a laborious and slow way to get them to comply, but one that constantly challenges them mentally. Kids talk as equals with adults, including teachers and physicians.

Working-class and poor parents, on the other hand, attempt “the accomplishment of natural growth.” They are just as loving and concerned as middle-class parents, but they are much less likely to arrange activities, to teach verbal skills, and to negotiate. They protect their kids’ health and safety and then leave them to be kids. They defer to schools and medical professionals to diagnose and address any problems that arise.

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I spent yesterday in Philadelphia meeting various people, including a representative from the Comic Book Project. This outfit is active in 10 cities. Kids–mostly in middle school–are taught to make comic books on various social themes. The results look fantastic, because the program can teach non-artistic kids to make nice looking art from models. (Two young guys chose to make a comic book that describes the process–their book is a good one to start with.) Making comic books has lots of potential to teach literacy and civic skills to kids who are not otherwise captivated by school.