BOOK CORNER February Book of the Month
Unequal Childhoods: Class, Race, and Family Life (2003, University of California Press) By Annette Lareau
A book review by Spencer Haught
No matter what race or class we are, we can all agree that we want what is best for our children. Yet how do we as individuals go about doing this? In her book, Unequal Childhoods, Lareau examines what parenting means for different classes and how those differences might affect the life experiences of our children.
Using interviews with 88 different families as well as classroom observations and intensive home observations of 12 families with 3rd graders, Lareau uses each chapter to describe the particular parenting style of a different family. From these observations, she finds a distinct difference between parenting among the middle class and parenting among the poor/working class.
Middle-class parents, says Lareau, engage in a process of concerted cultivation where children become engaged in a number of adult-organized leisure activities. Middle-class children are enrolled in a variety of sports programs, arts programs, camps, and other activities where they learn to interact in a structured way with other children and adults. The skills imparted upon children by these activities are congruent with the skills valued in schools and in the work force. Children of the middle-class are therefore advantaged when it comes to succeeding in education and employment.
Poor/Working class parents, on the other hand, facilitate natural growth where children are left to their own devices for leisure. Many of these parents have economic obstacles, which are their primary concern, and do not have the luxury of engaging their children in such leisure activities. It is common for these children to spend most of their leisure time ‘hanging around’ with friends in an unstructured environment, which puts them at a distinct disadvantage when it comes to the skills valued by society at large. Despite the social limitations of natural growth, however, Lareau is also careful to point out that the method has many pros.
Lareau finds that while the method of concerted cultivation may have many institutional advantages, it fails to provide children with enough leisure time and hinders the development of kinship ties- qualities that are encouraged by natural growth. The problem is not, therefore, that one method of parenting is better than the other. Both styles encourage certain values, which are equally important within certain contexts. The problem is instead that different parenting leads to a transmission of differential advantages to children, and the advantages of concerted cultivation give children the means, the cultural capital, to navigate to the top of the American hierarchy known as class.
Be sure to check out this book for a more in depth view of what parenting means for you and your class.
View previous Class Action Book of the Month selections...
January Movie of the Month: The Story of Stuff
December Book of the Month: Graceful Simplicity: Towards a Philosophy & Politics of Simple Living
November Book of the Month: All Our Relations: Native Struggles for Land and Life
October Movie of the Month:The Milagro Beanfield War
September Book of the Month: Tearing Down the Gates
August Book of The Month: Staff Picks
July Book of the Month: Theory of the Leisure Class
June Book of the Month: Capitalism 3.0: A Guide to Reclaiming the Commons
May Book of the Month: Death in the Haymarket
April Book of the Month: Food Politics
March Book of the Month: Psychology and Economic Injustice
February Book of the Month : What's My Name, Fool?
December Book of the Month:
Dead Heat: Global Justice and Global Warming
November Book of the Month: Awol
October Book of the Month: Class Passing
September Book and Video of the Month: Beyond Silenced Voices and Declining By Degrees
August Books of the Month: Human Cargo and Gathering the Sun
July Book of the Month: The Overworked American by Juliet Schor
June Book of the Month: More Money Than God by Steven R. Leder
May Book of the Month: Global Class by Jeff Faux
April Books of the Month: Classified and Strapped
March Book of the Month: Welfare Brat, A Memoir by Mary Childers
February Book of the Month: Fingersmith by Sarah Waters
January Book of the Month: Invisible Privilege: A Memoir about Race, Class, and Gender by Paula Rothenberg
View last year's Book of the Month selections...
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