Jonah, did you ask your French teacher about why you got that B on that assignment? At 5:00 p.m. today, you have an orthodontist appointment. We'll pick up Thai food on the way home and then you'll finish your English homework. Don't forget to put a book cover on your essay. A book cover always bumps a grade up half a point. Your dad can check your math when he gets home. Do you want tofu in your green curry or chicken? Ian, do you want noodles?
Every once in a while, you step back from yourself as a parent and say, "Dude! Did I actually just say that? I used to be cool. Did some alien take over my brain and turn me into this Mom Machine?"
No crab-faced alien can be blamed for transforming me from a slacker in a black dress into what I am today. According to sociologist Annette Lareau, I'm a product of my social class.
More here…
Apt. 11d 
How do you get a kid to eat tofu and green curry? I won’t eat tofu and green curry.
Anyway, good article that makes me think about how different my son’s upbringing is from my own.
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Woo hoo! Great piece!
And I’ll have the tofu.
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MH – True and gross story. Years ago, I read some story that Indian women’s placentas smell like curry. Babies eat curry while in the womb, so they like those tastes. Knowing that, I made a point of eating lots and lots of spicy Indian food when I was pregnant with Jonah. So, it was either my freaky pregnancy eating habits that is responsible for his weird tastes or he’s a complete freak.
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Sounds like a plan that worked. All we get ours to eat for vegetables is tomato sauce (he’ll eat it with a spoon if the pasta is gone) and broccoli.
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Haha, I have always told my high school students to NEVER put a plastic cover on their essays–such a waste, and it just makes them heavier/harder to manage!
Elizabeth at Half-Changed World did some great blogging about Lareau when back when. I think my parenting style falls somewhere in the middle, but my childhood was definitely working-class-style.
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My kids tolerate Indian and Thai food much better than stuff like pizza, spaghetti, macaroni and cheese or anything from the casserole family. Although, back in the day, I did get requests to wash the sauce off the Indian chicken. (Like dave s., we’re fans of Patak’s sauces.) The kids were eating chicken satay from earliest toddlerhood. The bummer is that they’re starting to demand adult meals (like yellow curry) at Asian restaurants, rather than being happy with their kiddie stuff, which seriously increases the costs involved. At the cafeteria, my 9-year-old’s typical dinner is to go and order a stir fry from the stir fry station (the new-style campus dining is so much better than the old days). From the parental point of view, the great thing about East Asian food is that there are veggies, they aren’t all mushy and nasty and the kids will eat them, or at least try them.
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The 9-year-old eats stir-fried tofu pretty happily, but even a year or so ago, when I’d make something tofu-based, the kids would be picking through their dinners and asking where the chicken was.
Note that the afternoon schedule Laura mentions is not conducive to slaving over a hot stove making dinner every night.
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Interesting theory that Lareau has, but I have also seen studies that suggest that the correlation between parent and child income is almost zero for adopted children, which would mean that the ability to “challenge authority, navigate bureaucracy, and manage [one’s] time” is either innate, not taught, or is not particularly important.
Also, of course, there is the theory that one’s peer group, not one’s parents, is what really matters, so that what middle-class parents really do for their children is raise them with middle-class peers, not teach them directly. This theory seems to fit my daughter, who doesn’t have much intellectual curiosity, but studies hard, partly to please her parents, but mostly to maintain her social status.
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Well, we should all come back here in 20 years and we’ll see if y81’s readings were right. I have two children through adoption and two through birth. All four are being raised by the same two parents in the same manner- though they say every child is raised differently even in the same family.
My kids are probably raised in a hybrid of the activities. They do have lots of time to play, hang out, watch tv. Only my youngest has enjoyed neighbor kids (because of our move to a new neighborhood). My other kids always played with each other or had play dates. We do have discussions every night at the dinner table on everything thing from the depravity of the Kardashians to Meriweather Lewis’ suicide. I’ve never allowed more than one activity per child per time, so my rushing is minimized. I think of it as lazy parenting. Nearly all of their friends do more lessons, sports than they do.
I did a great job of choosing elementary/middle and high schools. They have good peers who take college as a given.
They will all eat anything. Seriously. Even the ones who didn’t grow in my womb. I can be pretty bitchy if you complain about the food I serve you, so they don’t.
P.S. I’m now going to say “My friend who writes for The Atlantic”. Congratulations Laura for what looks like is becoming a more and more regular gig.
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Thanks, Lisa. I’m just recycling conversations that we’ve had here and spending an extra hour or two on the writing. It’s rather fun. If people pay me for it, even better.
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I deduct points for book covers–watch out! I see them as a sign that the essay is going to be horrible!
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we’ll see if y81’s readings were right
If he parents were interested in research design, he might have come out O.K.
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I think about this kind of thing a lot because as a foster and foster/adoptive parent I’ve taken kids into a more middle-class context from a poor one. I think a lot about how my daughter’s upbringing will be different from those of her siblings who live with relatives. We live in a middle-class/wealthier neighborhood city where there are plenty of other kids in poverty and there’s still plenty of “go out and play with the kids down the street” but also where at least so far we’re choosing not to be as upwardly mobile and scheduled/structured as many of our parenting peers. It’s all a weird dynamic and something I think about a lot.
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Yes, the middle-class kids gain advantages later in life, but are they really happier than the working-class and poor kids?
While I don’t often agree with Penelope Trunk, one of her points that hit home for me was that I (and I assume many middle-class types) do not actually have “happiness” as a goal — we just think we do.
Most of the things I do — working a complicated project at work, raising three daughters, go to the movies and see Schindler’s List — I do because it is interesting/ stimulating, not because it will make me happy. The working class may correctly conclude that seeing Holocaust themed movies will not make them “happy,” so choose not to go. I have a different standard, and avoid only certain types of movies that will make me actively miserable.
Middle class kids/ adults may simultaneously be less happy and place lower importance on “happiness” — leading to a higher overall Whatever (where ‘Whatever’ is defined as the sum of your total Happiness and Interesting-lifed-ness, compared to how much value you place on each.)
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My own bias is towards a childhood that emphasizes the importance of education but de-emphasizes the importance of structured activities. That’s probably because that is the environment in which I was raised. Spouse was raised similarly but in a rural area where he and his siblings were allowed to roam free from a young age. Even though I’m a city dweller through and through I have a tendency to romanticize that type of childhood and have some regrets that my own children won’t get to experience that.
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Don’t have time to read the Atlantic piece now (sorry) but 2 things:
1. Book covers suck! Glad to see support for my view. When I get a paper even with a cover page, I draw a picture of a tree crying and write “Title pages kill trees.”
2. My daughter comes into my bedroom at 7:30 every morning and we have those conversations while I am half-asleep.
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Shouldn’t we be commenting over at the Atlantic?
I think Ragtime’s insight that many of us “middle-class” (and, I’m not sure what that word means) aren’t looking for straightforward happiness in life, but something else (sometimes in alternative, but potentially in addition). Stimulation and interest could be examples, but so is accomplishment and success (I differentiate those with accomplishment meaning having accomplished something and success as having had other people recognize you for having the accomplishment).
Of course, ultimately, in some sort of theoretical construct, all of those things get wrapped into “happiness” (if one defines happiness as some form of life reward in the psychological reinforcement sense). But, the steps to happiness might involve real differences.
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Lisa V said:
“Even the ones who didn’t grow in my womb. I can be pretty bitchy if you complain about the food I serve you, so they don’t.”
I definitely notice being more invested in getting my kids to eat stuff that I have worked hard on.
Ragtime said:
“While I don’t often agree with Penelope Trunk, one of her points that hit home for me was that I (and I assume many middle-class types) do not actually have “happiness” as a goal — we just think we do.”
Is there any more miserable and worthless specimen than the sort of adult who spends all their time trying to be happy?
While it’s debatable whether it’s more enjoyable to be a middle class child or a working class child, I think it’s clearly the case that it is much more fun to be a middle class old person.
Wendy says:
“When I get a paper even with a cover page, I draw a picture of a tree crying and write “Title pages kill trees.””
When I see a cover or a title page, I think to myself, this person is trying to make a thin essay look fatter.
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Oh come now — you guys aren’t being fair applying your college/adult standards to the kids (and their teachers) (Except Tammy — I know she teaches kids).
Let’s presume that Laura is accurately reflecting the reality that Jonah will get credit for his cover (which, as the rest of you are pointing out, is unfortunate).
Now, though, is telling your children to meet the expectations that get them the grades so that they can get more opportunities to try to get high grades middle-class parenting? Or, would it reinforcing the value of challenging authority by having Jonah question the teacher about getting credit for the cover? He could use the tree excuse (or write “I did not provide a cover because I weep for the trees” on his report).
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I assumed that getting credit for a cover is a reference to a Calvin and Hobbes joke from back in the day.
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Ragtime, really interesting, thought provoking point.
AmyP, all sorts of times I don’t make the meals my family eats (we share cooking, once in awhile eat out) but I’ve always worked hard to make sure they have food to eat, so I glower at them when they don’t eat it. Luckily, it’s not really an issue, never has been. We do have to say once in awhile “Eat your beans, Pierre.” This was a story my mom used to tell about Lyndon Johnson bullying Pierre Sallinger to eat beans at a Texas bbq. Sallinger didn’t like them and Johnson apparently enjoyed bullying Salligner into submission. (I have no idea if it’s true or not). So in our family it’s always been shorthand for “I have the power, you better eat your food.”
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Is there any more miserable and worthless specimen than the sort of adult who spends all their time trying to be happy?
I dunno; do I seem miserable and worthless to others?
I suppose it depends on what makes you happy. I like my job. I like to learn something new, so I’m always studying on my own. Right now it’s Epictetus. I also designed two knit scarves and am knitting samples before I write up the patterns. I am happy when I cook interesting food, and when I dance to pop music while doing the dusting and other housework. I play with my grandchildren when they visit–that really makes me happy.
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“I dunno; do I seem miserable and worthless to others?”
I was thinking of the sort of person who is always one new relationship and one new purchase away from total bliss, rather than what you describe, which is being basically happy with what you’ve got and seeking joy in duty.
I’ve been watching Hoarders again and a persistent theme is the depressed hoarders who need the high of shopping or dumpster-diving new stuff to be momentarily happy. Then they drag it all home and make their homes more miserable, depressing places than they were to begin with.
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I think Amy was referring to the kind of self-important happiness quest (as in Gretchen Rubin’s book/website/enterprise).
But, I think that Rubin’s book and the life that motivated it is the application of middle-class parenting once again. I believe Rubin did write the book because after a lifetime of building “happiness” around accomplishment, she realized it wasn’t giving her the kind of happiness she wanted. That some people know how to be happy doesn’t invalidate the need of others to approach happiness more deliberately.
(One does wonder, though, whether middle-class parenting means that you then have to go off and set happiness as a challenge. But, if it works, well, we get accomplishment and happiness).
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I think that LisaV’s mom’s quote “Eat your beans, Pierre” points to another aspect of class difference that has a huge impact on success (let’s just assume for the sake of this point that success means a good job/career, stable family life, reasonable standard of living, etc.). The fact that her family can “get” a joke that refers to a past president has all sorts of class/culture issues attached to it. In a good way.
In other words, in addition to the “poor people have less stuff/courses/activities than middle class people” trope, there are many, many invisible class differences that we take for granted. There are subtleties in how we act and understand the world that we aren’t even conscious of yet are different from those of a different social/economic class.
I call it “knowing how to be” in a variety of situations. Think about how different the conversations are around the middle class supper table compared to the working class supper table and how that impacts their respective children’s future.
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Or take eating, for example. It’s easy to eat because you feel happy while you’re eating, but then feel bad because you’re fat, and then eat more because you’re unhappy, which leads to being even more fat and depressed. There’s a real spiral of doom in this sort of situation.
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“I think Amy was referring to the kind of self-important happiness quest (as in Gretchen Rubin’s book/website/enterprise).”
I didn’t even know about that. But yeah, I’m sure I’d dislike that, too.
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I’d make a distinction between scheduling activities to burnish a resume for college, and scheduling activities because the children want to be with their friends.
Some of my kids’ friends were leading very scheduled lives in late elementary/middle school. Playdates could only happen with advanced scheduling–synchronize 3 adults (parent, parent, nanny) and 2 kids type of things. If they were in the same activity, though, they could see each other and share carpools.
However, once kids reach high school, that sort of scheduling seems to drop off. The kids gain more control over their schedule. Their circle of friends grows smaller and closer. They are able to drop out of activities they don’t enjoy, principally music and sports. They can identify their peers who have been forced to continue by their parents.
Some kids take over the over scheduling duties. I don’t know if they’ve internalized their parents’ messages, or if the parents were meeting their children’s desires.
I think the things which really make a difference are the family conversations about the world. Also, correcting grammar. I remember my father correcting our grammar, and banishing “like” and “you know.” We do the same for our kids, almost without conscious thought. At times, we both correct the same error. “He and I, not him and me.”
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Sandra, while my parents are smart, curious people, most everyone would consider them working class. My mom went to college for only a year, has done office work for most of her life. My dad was a DJ and worked for the Chamber of Commerce. He is a high school graduate only. However, they’ve always been interested in politics and we always had lots of discussions about political and current events in our house. I was a latch-key kid, didn’t have lessons or anything else. Totally working class.
Bert and I both straddle the line between working class and middle class. We’re overeducated liberals that are really the working poor. Our kids have had discussions about politics and culture. Whether this will make them happier or more engaged with the world I don’t know. If most certainly will make them crankier during political seasons when things don’t go their way.
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LisaV – I grew up working class too but in that more “traditional” sense. Jumped social and economic classes due to education and career. My parents were/are suspect of education while still fascinated by it.
My daughter has a childhood completely different from mine – and from her cousins who live a few hours away from a medium sized city in farm country. The internet is dial up which you can imagine ALSO creates quite the divide.
There is a lot of cultural/class knowledge that my daughter is learning by osmosis that I had to learn by the school of hard knocks.
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I hope the French teachers replies by asking Jonah what he thinks
– he did well to deserve a B
– he could improve to deserve an A
I also agree with the evil of plastic covers. Never ever never.
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I read the Lareau book last year and was kinda “meh” about it. I think some of her descriptions about how working-class kids are raised are woefully outdated. Free time, wandering all over the neighborhood? Nahh, not anymore, for two main reasons:
1)Drugs. Middle-class folks might use “concerted cultivation” to give their kids a leg up in a competitive atmosphere; in my neighborhood kids get school sports, the Boys & Girls Club’s afterschool programs, the “Y” and such to keep them off the streets and away from drugs/gangs. Middle-class kids can get addicted, go into rehab, and go on to lead a successful life. Not so for working-class and poor kids, who get incarceration instead (with its on-again, off-again treadmill).
2). The economy. Meaning: on-again, off-again employment requiring frequent household moves. Parents in working-class and poor neighborhoods are really reluctant to let their kids have any kind of free rein in the new neighborhood before developing connections with other parents and getting the lay of the land as far as street crime. By the time those connections are made? It’s time to move again.
I also disagree that working-class parents teach their (our) children conformity as a way to get by. Frankly, many of us teach our kids—explicitly—to not trust authority; that people in positions of authority are highly likely to abuse it. Poor and working-class parents have adversarial relationships with our employers and we are not seen by them as social or intellectual equals. I can’t recall any conversation between adults about their workplace that I overheard as a child that didn’t involve copious use of the terms “asshole” and “motherfucker”.
If I recall correctly, she does point out our different view of competition—but I don’t remember her mentioning that economic success and stability for the working-class came via collective bargaining, not individual competition.
Anyway. Me and my kid have a different environment to negotiate our way through than (at least most of) the readers of this blog. Adopting many of the strategies of what Lareau referred to as the middle-class (folks who would be regarded as upper-middle-class, shorthanded to “rich” where I live) is totally unworkable for me (for example: I don’t have the flexible work schedule necessary to some of the extracurriculars mentioned in the book. Anything my daughter does outside of or in addition to school has to revolve around my work, and that’s non-negotiable).
Other strategies rely on having the cultural capital to back them up. I mean, I give my daughter choices about dinner too, we talk a great deal, she has a high vocabulary….but it doesn’t mean the same thing in our environment or at her school. It isn’t interpreted the same way.
And mind you—she’s a bright kid. Everyone comments on her reading ability (holy shit was that hard won) and asks if she’s “gifted”. Nope. She has learning disabilities (premature; 25 weeks gestation. It doesn’t show physically, but there are still residuals). She has Forrest Gump’s IQ scores, because testing can’t really accommodate that. There is a tremendous difference between what happens to LD kids in working-class schools and what happens to the same kids in middle-class schools. (no, seriously. One of my friends recently moved her family to a different school district in order to get accommodations for one of her sons; that was a possibility afforded via both parents hustling extra work on top of their regular jobs. I’m a single parent. I can’t move to the ‘burbs.)
I really think anyone reading Lareau’s book needs to immediately follow up with Alfred Lubrano’s “Limbo” (on moving from the working to the middle class, and how difficult it is to do culturally). Class is real. Classism is real. That gets overlooked. I could no more successfully adapt to a middle-class perspective than I could morph my Sicilian appearance into that of a WASP.
Last but not least, economic segregation (of schools, neighorhoods) seriously ramped up since the publication of Lareau’s book.
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I could no more successfully adapt to a middle-class perspective than I could morph my Sicilian appearance into that of a WASP.
That varies, mostly because the Norse got around. Most, but not all, of my Sicilian relatives look Sicilian, but most of the relatives from Naples have red hair and freckles.
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La Lubu said:
“I think some of her descriptions about how working-class kids are raised are woefully outdated.”
I was wondering about that very same thing. There have been enormous changes in child-rearing practices over the past 40 years, and here, as elsewhere, the middle class is the vanguard of change in parenting practices (they tend to be pretty docile toward authority, they devour books of expert advice, and are often scrupulous about obeying the expert advice). Forty years ago (i.e. The Ice Storm era), middle class children would have had much more freedom and free time (with maybe the very occasional lesson). Twenty years ago, Lareau might have been accurate about class differences. Today, who knows?
(On the docility and love of expert advice of middle class mothers during the early 20th century, see Conceiving Parenthood: American Protestantism and the Spirit of Reproduction (2008).)
I also think that this middle class docility has gotten much more pronounced. I recently learned that 30-some years ago doctors told my parents and my husband’s parents to put me and him in leg braces (it must have been the medical fashion of the time). Both sets of parents were educated people (particularly my in-laws) and both totally ignored the medical advice. Now, nothing terrible happened to either of us, but I think the episode points to the enormous difference in parenting in the two eras. If a doctor told me today to put my kid in leg braces, I might well do it, whether they needed it or not.
La Lubu said:
“I also disagree that working-class parents teach their (our) children conformity as a way to get by. Frankly, many of us teach our kids—explicitly—to not trust authority; that people in positions of authority are highly likely to abuse it.”
I wondered about that, too–inner city schools are not known for the docility and cooperativeness of the children. (A guy my husband knows once taught in a middle school in inner city LA where the kids would bring rocks into class to throw at their him.)
“I could no more successfully adapt to a middle-class perspective than I could morph my Sicilian appearance into that of a WASP.”
You might have had you started younger. I think a lot of commentors here have come out of blue collar families (mine was a sort of amphibian blue collar/graduate educated family). I wasn’t brought up to do almost any of the stuff I do with my kids today and there are lots of things my parents did that I don’t do. There’s a very intense socialization process that middle class mothers go through.
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To sum up: it’s easy to get middle class parents to change their practices. It’s a much slower and harder to get working class parents to change theirs.
I sometimes think that if one of those baby books said that slathering your infant with mayonnaise was good for him, a certain percentage of readers would do it.
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Here’s a true story on class. A good friend of mine is also a professor’s wife. She used to gripe about the snobby plumber’s wife at her kid’s preschool.
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Twenty years ago, Lareau might have been accurate about class differences. Today, who knows?
For what it’s worth, the book is based on field work with real families that was done quite recently, and the new edition checks back in on them from a very short time ago. This sort of research is necessarily limited- it’s mostly qualitative, interview-based rather than demographic, so has a limited reach. It doesn’t purport to give an exhaustive picture. But what’s there is drawn from working with real families in the quite recent past.
(Also, it’s not a self-help or how-to book. It’s not telling you how to raise your kids, get them good jobs, or move into the upper-middle class. It’s just not that sort of thing.)
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Thanks, guys. Really good comments. I”m sorry that I’m being a terrible blog mistress today and can’t pull out the best comments and respond. Just being a mom today.
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BTW, I think that this type of blog post – part personal, some academic stud, policy recommendations — is going to be my niche at the Atlantic. If there are books, studies, topics that you think would appeal to a broad audience, send them my way.
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I’m burning up my 5 comments at a terrible rate, but I thought I should mention a small piece of family history.
20-25 years ago, my aunt and her husband (an airline pilot) were early adapters for the current upper-middle class model. My aunt ran herself ragged with the kids’ music, sports and Kumon. My parents (who had a small fraction of my aunt and uncle’s income) thought it was totally bizarre to put that much time and money into kids’ activities and didn’t do anything like that for their two oldest kids. 1) They didn’t want to and 2) They didn’t have the money. However, by the time my youngest brother was in high school and they were more prosperous, my parents did do some sports stuff.
Fast forward to the present and interestingly, despite the income disparities and the huge difference in extracurriculars, the two families of children turned out essentially the same with regard to education and professional success, and in fact in each family, there’s one military officer and one successful hospitality professional. Normally, genetics is my favorite hobby horse, but two of the kids from the other family are steps, so that explanation doesn’t work. It might just be that once you reach a certain moderate level of income and have some educational savvy and a strong family culture, everything else is just icing on the cake. Or maybe that was true 20 years ago and isn’t true today.
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Just being a mom today.
I went to the office while sick because today is a school break day.
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AmyP, mayo has been recommended for head lice, and I have, well… slathered my kid with mayonnaise. Just saying.
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If you were from the midwest, you’d have probably used Miracle Whip.
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MH says Miracle Whip is the secret sauce for flyover country…
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I have to wonder what effect generation has on this kind of thing. My parents both grew up very working class, but I grew up very upper-middle class, and for me the middle class = challenge authority totally breaks down. Although my parents were very supportive of us when my sister and I were negotiating school and so on (didn’t automatically take the teacher’s side), not getting in trouble was a big thing, as was learning the rules and going along with everything. Now, is this because my parents grew up working class, or is it because they were Depression babies? I associate a lot of the “challenge authority” thing with the entitlement (sorry) of the Boomers. I think my parents were big on independent thinking, but that was something we did on our own time, not on our schools’ time or employers’ time. (Perhaps it’s telling that my mom thought it rather unfair that for my dissertation I had to come up with something totally original!)
(Also, is there a difference between challenging authority and believing yourself to be entitled? I want to think there is, and tend to associate some of the “challenge authority” kind of attitude with entitlement. Though this may be unfair to Lareau, since I don’t know her book.)
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Getting back to what Amy P said about the socialization process for middle-class mothers….
What I liked about Lubrano’s book was its frank admission that acculturating oneself into the midle class isn’t easy, and it’s never a complete process. Women find it harder than men. Not just because of physical appearance issues (men have a more standard uniform of both formal and casual clothing; women’s apparel/appearance is a minefield for social-class climbers. Also, men don’t have the same issues with beauty standards—and yes, those standards signify *class* as well.)…..
See, the standards for masculinity aren’t that much different between classes for men. That isn’t true for women. There’s a *huge* gulf in socially-acceptable feminine behavior between the middle and working classes.
Parenting isn’t something that happens in a vacuum. The lessons I’m teaching my daughter—both the explicitly verbalized and the implicit ones, the lead-by-example and don’t-you-make-the-same-mistakes…..those lessons don’t just come from the way *I* was raised, but from the actual environment we are living in. I can’t parent to some textbook ideal, and neither can anyone else. We have to parent in response to what we have to deal with, and where we’re dealing with it.
And back to the antiauthoritarianism….I think in my case it probably leads back generations—a deep, historical aversion to abusive authority (the only kind my ancestors experienced). But it’s not that I was taught (or observe other teaching their kids, either) to be aggressively oppositional at all times—quite the opposite. Staying out of real trouble (like getting suspended from school or arrested) was a mandate (practically on pain of death). No…it was more like…an emphasis on one’s human dignity and the fact that authority figures aren’t likely to respect it from those lower on the hierarchy. Not to *trust* authority, not to *believe* authority….to recognize that their best interests were definitely not yours. That authority was often an obstacle between you and success—because no one expected much out of someone like you. That’s the kind of thing I’m talking about (just unsure I’m phrasing it clearly….)
Anyway…I think that is one of the radical differences between middle-class and working-class parenting. That and the fact that (from my perspective) so few people question middle-class parenting practices. I’m jealous—I get Monday-morning-quarterbacked ever step of the way (compounded by my being a single mother, no doubt).
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I think La Lubu cuts to the heart of the issue with whether or not your parenting is likely to be questioned by others as one of the big differences between working class/middle class/upper class parenting.
For example, a middle class/upper class parent might feel very comfortable leaving their pre-teen or teen child at home alone because 1. their child can handle that responsibility and 2. if something goes wrong in that situation – the parent most probably will not worry about being prosecuted for child endangerment or neglect.
There isn’t a lot of Monday quarterbacking on middle and upper class parents and I think that is one of the reasons that when middle and upper class parents get push back (for example – when trying to get a child the special needs assistance for school) it is shocking for many. It might be the first time they experience the byzantine labyrinth of pointless bureacracy that many working class and poor parents are incredibly familiar with in all aspects of their life.
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“For example, a middle class/upper class parent might feel very comfortable leaving their pre-teen or teen child at home alone…”
Show of hands, who is leaving tweens home alone? I don’t think that’s standard upper-middle class parenting, unless “pre-teen” means an 11-year-old.
I’m just getting to the point of being comfortable leaving my 9-year-old in the house while I take her younger brother outside to play and letting her out of my sight in public places.
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Well, Amy P, living in a fairly wealthy suburb of Chicago (median household income in town over $85K, most houses in neighborhood start at 500K and go up), and having all school age children – I will tell you I know a lot of parents who routinely leave their 4th, 5th, 6th grade children alone in the house for 30-90 minutes without really thinking twice.
Usually because they are squiring their other children to soccer, piano, gymnastics, etc. Heck, some of those children have a 20-25 minute walk to school that they make unaccompanied by any adult. As early as being in 1st/2nd grade. Usually with older siblings/neighbors. But sometimes alone…especially as the school year progresses.
There are still free range kids here, starting at around 4th grade you will see little packs of children in downtown having walked from home, or at the library (having ridden their bike). Kids 10 and older can be left at the community pool without an adult. Etc.
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sasha,
I think that’s rather unusual for that socioeconomic group in the US. In our neighborhood (a ring of houses surrounding a green space near a campus), most of the kids enjoy a lot of freedom within the neighborhood, but I never see kids outside the neighborhood unattended. It’s a rougher area than yours, though, and tween-magnets have to be driven to.
The last time I checked, the city crime rate was the same as DC and Baltimore, despite being just a medium-sized city. Also, I did a sex offender check recently, and there are five sex offenders living at the Salvation Army men’s shelter a block or two from my kids’ school, plus another sex offender working at the post office a block away. A couple years back, we had a child molester with about 9 aliases who was hanging outside our kids’ school panhandling with his dog.
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Here’s a long article by a law professor on “Criminal Child Neglect and the “Free Range Kid”: Is Overprotective Parenting the New Standard of Care?”
http://works.bepress.com/cgi/viewcontent.cgi?article=1010&context=david_pimentel
I haven’t read the whole thing, but Pimentel takes the position that current standards are excessive.
There’s a counter-example in Pimentel’s article to the idea that upper-middle class parents can get away with stuff that others can’t with regard to leaving children unattended, namely that 2009 case when a professor in Montana dropped off a bunch of kids at the mall (hers and some friends), and then (very predictably) the big girls got so absorbed in shopping fun that they spaced out on the fact that they were supposed to be taking care of a 3-year-old. The mother narrowly avoided being handcuffed in front of the kids.
And then around the same time, there was the case of the Park Avenue attorney who kicked her quarreling tween girls out of her car, eventually driving off and leaving the younger one 3 miles from home.
http://womensissues.about.com/b/2009/04/22/mad-mom-madlyn-primoff-kicks-bickering-daughters-out-of-car-then-drives-away.htm
I don’t think upper-middle class mothers have been getting a free pass. In some respects, they may in fact be more harshly judged.
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Well, Amy P, living in a fairly wealthy suburb of Chicago…..I know a lot of parents who routinely leave their 4th, 5th, 6th grade children alone in the house for 30-90 minutes without really thinking twice.
Interesting. In Illinois, it’s illegal to leave children under the age of 13 unsupervised (though it’s pretty universal for working parents to do so when the kids enter middle-school. Parents just warn the kids to not answer the door for anyone, and warn them that if they get caught being alone, it’s arrest for the parents and foster care for the kids).
Which is what makes me skeptical about the upper-middle class mothers being “more harshly judged”. More gossip and tongue-clicking doesn’t really compare to having one’s kids whisked off into the foster care system and getting a couple hours per week of supervised visitation for…what? six weeks? six months? a year? for committing the crime of not being able to make child care arrangements (since school hours don’t match work hours).
Show me the wealthy moms that are doing the supervised foster care visits and taking parenting classes for “free-ranging” it.
FWIW, I was a latchkey kid from the age of six on. That was pretty standard practice in the seventies, so I regard today’s standards as not just bizarre, but developmentally inappropriate.
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I don’t know what you mean by tweens, but I leave my kids, 9 and 12, home alone. E will get left home alone while I walk the dog or taxi the 12 year old, but not any more than that. S can stay by herself for hours – and will this upcoming week since it’s school vacation week. But she is and always has been very mature.
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“Which is what makes me skeptical about the upper-middle class mothers being “more harshly judged”.”
Let’s say upper-middle class mothers who screw up are more harshly judged, but probably less punished. (I certainly am judging Primoff and Kevane in a way that I wouldn’t a mother with a fraction of their resources.)
Interestingly, at the time, Judith Warner treated Kevane as a sort of feminist martyr who was singled out for being an educated mother. Apologies in advance for the huge quote–you can’t really get the flavor of Warner’s defense with just snippets:
“The prosecutor pursued her child endangerment case ultra-zealously because she “said she believed professors are incapable of seeing the real world around them because their ‘heads are always in a book,’” Kevane writes. “I just think that even individuals with major educations can commit this offense, and they should not be treated differently because they have more money or education,” the prosecutor wrote to Kevane’s lawyer.
“Kevane reflects, “I now realize that her pressure — her near obsession with having me plead guilty — had less to do with what I had done and more to do with her perception of me as an outsider who thought she was above the law, who had money to pay her way out of a mistake, who thought she was smarter than the Bozeman attorney because of her ‘major education.’ This perception took hold even though I had never spoken one word to her directly. Nor did I ever speak in court; only my lawyer did. I was visible but silent, and thus unable to shake the image that the prosecutor had created of me: a rich, reckless, highly educated outsider mother who probably left her children all the time in order to read her books.”
“This simmering resentment is common and pervasive in our culture right now. The idea that women with a “major education” think they’re better than everyone else, have a great sense of entitlement, feel they deserve special treatment, and are too out of touch with the lives of “normal” women to have a legitimate point of view, is a 21st-century version of the long-held belief that education makes women uppity and leads them to forget their rightful place.”
http://opinionator.blogs.nytimes.com/2009/07/09/dont-hate-her-because-shes-educated/
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Quick comments before I get on a plane ….
1. Remember you shouldn’t really use your own experiences to critique an academic study, because you may be an outlier. Frankly, anyone who reads a blog is always an outlier.
2. Lareau didn’t say anything about leaving kids alone for an hour or two when doing chores or working late.
3. Let me back up a bit. Lareau (and other sociologists) have noticed that there are different styles of parenting between poor/working class families and middle class families. For example, there is just more talking in middle class families. It doesn’t matter if there’s a working mom or a SAHM mom. Sociologists have actually counted the number of words spoken in each house during average days. Middle class families talk a lot more. These words translate into advantages taking the SATs. MIddle class life is highly verbal and those early skills come in handy later in life.
Approach to authority. I told Jonah to ask about his grade, because the grade appeared on the electronic grade book, but he hadn’t seen the actual test. I wanted him to find out what he did wrong, so he could learn from his mistakes. I told him that he had to be a self-advocate and talk to the teacher after class. This kind of nudging and urging to not be afraid of authority is typical of what Lareau observed in other middle class families. Navigating bureaucracy and friendly challenging of authority is a very important skill that helps the middle class remain in the middle class.
4. Lareau never says that parenting is the ONLY reason that the poor remain poor and the middle class remain middle class. There are clearly lots of structural, economical conditions at play, as well.
I’m really leaving in a couple of hours. I’m taking my iPad, so I’ll do some minor blogging. Harry B at Crooked Timber has promised to continue this conversation at CT, so he’ll be able to answer questions.
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“Remember you shouldn’t really use your own experiences to critique an academic study, because you may be an outlier.”
That rule would shut down a huge amount of ordinary conversation in most educated upper middle class venues, including this one. I’m not sure Crooked Timber could continue to exist on that basis.
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“I’m really leaving in a couple of hours. I’m taking my iPad, so I’ll do some minor blogging.”
This week, since my schedule is lightening up a bit, I may actually blog a little on things I think you guys are interested in, so feel free to pop over there now and again. I feel a rant about “religious liberty” coming on (I am in the Cranston, RI media market, and they just finally gave up on the stupid prayer banner thing).
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Wendy,
I don’t know if it’s relevant to the cases you are looking at (HHS?), but you may want to do some reading on RFRA (the Religious Freedom Restoration Act of 1993). A political science/philosophy guy was telling me about it after church today–RFRA came out of a Native American peyote case.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/RFRA
There was also an interesting piece recently at Get Religion about “equal access.”
http://www.getreligion.org/2012/02/hey-times-folks-can-you-say-equal-access/
There was a recent 9-0 Supreme Court decision for Hosanna-Tabor, which may well prove important for the HHS case.
http://www.getreligion.org/index.php?s=hosanna+tabor&submit.x=20&submit.y=26
http://www.scotusblog.com/case-files/cases/hosanna-tabor-evangelical-lutheran-church-and-school-v-eeoc/
In Hosanna-Tabor, it was decided that because a teacher was deemed a minister, she was not subject to normal employment law.
Then there are lots of traditional religious freedom exceptions: Catholics were able to continue using wine at Mass during Prohibition, Amish children only have to attend school up to 8th grade, and Wikipedia claims that Rhode Island still allows uncle-niece marriage for groups that permit it (i.e. Jews).
http://volokh.com/posts/1178131546.shtml
There’s also a religious Social Security exception for clergy. And of course, there’s also the right to conscientiously object to military service.
Have fun and good luck!
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Catholics were able to continue using wine at Mass during Prohibition
But not gin, especially not for the wedding party. I think we’ve all heard that talk.
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I was just at a confirmation party where somebody brought their mobile martini kit. It’s a very Baptist area, and one the people I knew said, “This is probably illegal here.”
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If they shared with the honoree, it sure was.
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These were adult converts.
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What’s a “mobile martini kit”? A bottle of gin, a bottle of vermouth, some olives or lemon peel thrown in for fiber?
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I only saw it from afar, but there was a sort of carrying case and various metal containers (a shaker?). It looked something like this:
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To remain annoyingly on-topic, I think parental support in school can help a student to pass through gates set up to channel students into different tracks. If the cut-off for honors French in the high school is B+, catering to the teacher’s tastes pays off. Most middle schoolers aren’t aware of the long-term consequences.
Nevertheless, I think the gaps between social levels is set earlier. At present, before the child is 3. Thus, the activities and parenting may make childhood more hectic or expensive, but the mold was set when the child was a toddler. How many words were addressed to the child? And how many of the parent/child interactions were open-ended and affirmative?
http://www.childrenofthecode.org/interviews/risley.htm
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Although I find the idea of how cultural differences in child-rearing can affect outcomes interesting, ultimately I find the Lareau “data” really unconvincing (especially combined with her distaste for larger scale studies). I’m simply unwilling to believe that one can come to large scale conclusions from even good and in depth discussions of 12 individual families (presumably six of each kind? I can’t remember). I think that kind of observation can give us ideas to ponder, in the same way that a case study can lead us to interesting data. But, I don’t really see why the 12 observed int he study are more representative than 12 commenters on this blog (assuming some distribution, as described in these comments).
I peeked in on the follow up information (which confirms the assumptions of the study, that the middle-class children would become middle-class and the working-class children working class), and could not conclude much more than that the rich are different because they have more money. It’s possible that the child-raising practices result in one child going to law school and another to waitressing, but its also true that money smooths a lot of paths. My kids are raised in a pretty cultured mode, but its also true that they will have lots of second chances, if they need them.
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Cranberry,
That’s very interesting, and very long.
It’s very unlikely that I’m churning out 1500 words an hour to my kids every hour they’re at home. I certainly made an effort to talk to my kids more than was natural to me when they were little, but I guess I’m one of those “taciturn” mothers.
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You might be surprised. If you note, the researchers recorded the interactions. The tenor of the interactions was also important. The longer the interactions, the more likely it was to enter “non-business” territory. The shorter interactions were more likely to be business, and not positive. There’s a difference between “Don’t touch,” and “Now, snookums, the cat doesn’t want you to touch her tail. Do you remember she scratched you last time? Watch her, she’ll let you know when she wants to be patted. Oh, that’s a good idea. See if she feels like going outside. You’re learning how to take care of her (etc. etc.)”
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