Finally, it turned out to be virtually impossible to test some of the most important findings of Unequal Childhoods by analyzing survey data. The PSID-CDS data include test scores of reading ability (for children and parents), but this is not a meaningful measure of linguistic interaction. To capture that would require regularly recording snippets of conversation as talk took place within participating families—something well beyond the capacity of even high-quality data collection efforts such as the PSID-CDS. Most important, surveys are designed to be standardized. One of the key points of Unequal Childhoods, however, is that middle-class parents customize their children’s lives via individually insignificant but cumulatively crucial interventions. And, if these interventions are successful, the children’s problems that prompted the interventions vanish. Thus, a large, representative sample of American families highlights important cultural patterns, but the mechanisms of how social class shapes daily life can remain hidden from view.
Afterword
The children of Unequal Childhoods have grown up. They are scattered, not only to different cities, but to different positions within our country’s system of social stratification.1 In the five years since I followed up with the study participants, the gaps between them have continued to widen. Garrett Tallinger has recently started a career as an account executive. Alexander Williams is now in medical school. Stacey Marshall has left behind her plan to become a physician and is getting a doctorate in the humanities. Not all of the middle-class youth are professionals: Melanie Handlon is a hair stylist. But in most cases, the educational training of middle-class children has steered them toward spots in the top third of the income distribution. By contrast, none of the working-class and poor youth are employed in the professional sector. Billy Yanelli is a unionized painter, though he is currently jobless. Wendy Driver is a stay-at-home mom, supported by her husband, who is in the Navy. Harold McAllister is a waiter at a chain restaurant. Tyrec Taylor is looking for work. Katie Brindle, who had moved from cleaning rooms to working at the front desk of a hotel, was laid off with the recession. Her kids are with her ex-husband’s parents, and she is now in Florida, working in a nightclub. Some of the working-class and poor youth are content and happy in their lives, but all of them face considerable economic strain. Unlike many youth from middle-class families, their opportunities for advancement are limited.
All parents want the very best for their children. Yet parents do not have the same resources, gifts, or opportunities to give to the children they hold so close to their hearts. As much as the working-class and poor parents loved their children, not one of them was able to set their child firmly on the road to a college degree, the foundation of stable and lucrative employment. These parents were swimming against the tide. Among the girls and boys I studied, crucial pieces of the puzzle were already in place by the time they were ten years old, making it likely that they would end up in situations similar to those of their parents—and most did so. It is not impossible for individuals to significantly change their life position, but it is not common.
In America’s meritocratic culture, the idea of a competition implies both fair play and deserved outcomes. The culture suggests that people like Alexander and Garrett study hard in college and are rewarded with good jobs, where they continue to conscientiously apply themselves and, thus, accrue more and bigger rewards. But the fact that many middle-class youth work hard should not blind us to the underlying reality that the system is not fair. It is not neutral. It does not give all children equal opportunities. Not only do schools vary, but in schools and other institutions that sort children into positions in the stratification system, some cultural practices are simply privileged more than others. Our culture’s nearly exclusive focus on individual choices renders invisible the key role of institutions. In America, social class backgrounds frame and transform individual actions. The life paths we pursue, thus, are neither equal nor freely chosen.
APPENDIX A
Methodology: Enduring
Dilemmas in Fieldwork
It is very unusual to study families in a “naturalistic fashion,” observing them within their own homes. Many people are deeply curious about the process. Space considerations preclude a detailed description, but in this appendix I describe some of the difficulties and dilemmas that arose during the study.
DRAWING THE SAMPLE
The family observations that form the core of the book were only one aspect of a multidimensional study that also included observations in elementary school classrooms and interviews with a large number of parents. The earliest phase of the project began in 1990, when I interviewed (with the help of an African American woman undergraduate) the parents of thirty-one children from a third-grade classroom in a public school in Lawrenceville (pseudonym), a smaller university community (population 25,000) in the Midwest. The remaining fifty-seven children were drawn from elementary schools located in a large northeastern metropolitan area. I decided to focus on third-graders because I wanted children who were young enough for their parents to still be heavily involved in managing their lives (and thus transmitting social class influences to them) and yet old enough to have some autonomy regarding their free time. I also hoped to catch children before peer-group influences became decisive factors in their lives. Initially, I had hoped to interview children and parents; but I gave up on interviewing children when normally chatty children fell silent in front of a tape recorder.1
The decision to include both white and African American children and to define social class categories using a combination of parents’ educational levels and occupations grew out of empirical realities I encountered in Lawrenceville. Although I was originally planning to study whites across different social classes, the schools were about half white and half Black. Moreover, there had been a parental boycott by Black parents in recent years to protest insensitivity on the part of the district toward the needs of Black children. In this context, it did not make sense to study the impact of parental involvement on schooling and exclude the Black parents. Table C1, Appendix C, shows the distribution of the total sample (eighty-eight children) by race.
MEASURING SOCIAL CLASS IN A SMALL SAMPLE
Social scientists disagree over the proper way to measure inequality in the real world. Some take a gradational approach: on the basis of the key elements of inequality—especially occupational prestige, education, and income—they rank individuals or families in a relatively seamless hierarchy. Yet occupations differ greatly, particularly in the amount of autonomy workers enjoy, the degree to which some people supervise others, the pay, the cleanliness or dirtiness of the work performed, and the amount of prestige that the job commands. I think of these differences in nongradational terms.
There is also disagreement over how to conceptualize classes (i.e., whether to use a Marxian and Weberian approach).2 Regardless of approach, however, most current conceptualizations deploy a relatively large number of class categories in order to attain a fine-grained differentiation of economic positions. It was impossible for me to approximate such an approach in this study. Since my purpose was to develop an intensive, realistic portrait of family life, I was able to analyze only a small number of families. Indeed, with a small sample, and with a desire to compare children across gender and race lines, adopting the fine-grained differentiation of categories characteristic of neo-Marxist and neo-Weberian studies was untenable and unreasonable.