The rule of thumb I followed, and instructed the research assistants to follow, was to “hang out” and not to intervene unless there was blood or an imminent threat of serious danger. I added one caveat: no research assistant was ever to do anything she or he felt really uncomfortable doing. When they were in the field, the final decision was theirs.
This firm commitment to respect the families and their practices did not make the observations easy. For example, when faced with bitter sibling rivalry, one field-worker wrote that “it was incredibly hard to resist the temptation to intervene and force [the child] back into his seat.” It was also sometimes painful to watch the way parents treated their children. In general, such occasions were rare, but in one family, the Brindles, difficult moments were nearly continuous. The family was under tremendous economic and psychological stress. It quickly became clear that I would need to do the home visits rather than have one of the research assistants do them.22
There were three occasions, however, in which scheduling conflicts resulted in another field-worker going to Katie Brindle’s home. Even in a brief visit (after school, from 1:45 P.M. to 4:20 P.M.), the interactions the researcher observed were emotionally draining: Katie methodically hit herself on the head; her aunt recounted—with approval—an episode from her own childhood in which her father beat her with a belt so badly that she bled. The field-worker summed up her feelings after the visit:
I hate going there. I hate it because I feel like I can never say what I think. For example, when Mary tells me how she should hit Katie, I just nod. I just sit and watch Katie hit her head, Melmel stick his finger in a plug, and CiCi scream at Katie. UUUGHHHH.
Fortunately, these family dynamics we observed among the Brindles were the exception. Indeed, most of the time the family visits were relatively easy, and even with the Brindles there were many relaxed and fun moments. Often we had fun “hanging out” with the kids, playing basketball and wall ball, watching television, driving around in the car, or lying on the floor, talking. In a quirk of fate, we began the observational phase of the study with the Brindle family. All of the families that came after were much easier than they might have seemed had the research assistants and I not been so challenged at first.
FROM DATA TO A BOOK
The intellectual journey was not complete when we finished our visits with the families. In some ways, it had just begun.23 Because of the intensity of the research experience (as well as changes in my personal life), I followed the active period of field-work with a lull of reflection. Gradually, I began to analyze the data, mainly by reading, rereading, and reading again the field notes from the families (for each family, there was a chronologically arranged file of notes). For the interviews of the parents of the eighty-eight children, I coded the response data and then entered this information into a qualitative software program.24 For the twelve families, though, I proceeded the old-fashioned way: I read field notes, read the literature, talked to people, and reread the notes. I tried to link the bits and pieces of data to ideas; when the argument took shape, I looked for disconfirming evidence. In writing the book, I first considered organizing the chapters analytically, comparing all of the families with respect to one overarching theme. But ultimately, following the book The Second Shift by Arlie Hochschild, I chose to try to bring the families to life by devoting a separate chapter to each.25 I had begun the study interested in how children spend their time and in the nature of the interactions between families and institutions; those themes flourished in the book. Yet other, unexpected themes also emerged: particularly the role of language, the relative importance of kinship ties, the analogies of concerted cultivation and natural growth, and the limitations of social class in daily life.
Sometimes people ask me to name the most important thing that I learned from the study. I tell them that I discovered that all the families, despite their differences, felt safe and normal, after we had spent time together. They all felt like home. In addition, I was struck by how hard parents try, how much effort they put into each day as they pursue their lives; by the pleasures and frustrations the children experience in their daily routines; and by the challenges that all children face in growing up. Garrett Tallinger was resource rich compared to Harold McAllister, and yet Garrett had major disappointments in areas of his life that mattered to him, and Harold had some important life benefits that Garrett lacked, even as his family struggled economically. No child or adult has a smooth path in life: all have some share of pain and disappointment, as well as joy and rewards. Still, some paths are less rocky than others. Class position matters, every step of the way.
APPENDIX B
Theory: Understanding
the Work of Pierre Bourdieu
Pierre Bourdieu’s work provides a context for examining the impact of social class position. His model draws attention to conflict, change, and systemic inequality, and it highlights the fluid nature of the relationship between structure and agency.1 Bourdieu argues that individuals of different social locations are socialized differently.2 This socialization provides children, and later adults, with a sense of what is comfortable or what is natural (he terms this habitus). These background experiences also shape the amount and forms of resources (capital) individuals inherit and draw upon as they confront various institutional arrangements (fields) in the social world.3
Bourdieu is always attuned to power, especially the domination of powerful groups over scarce resources. He is interested in the power of individuals to define what constitutes a highly valued activity, but also to the reasons why particular social practices are valued more highly than others. Indeed, Bourdieu sees a pattern of domination and inequality at the heart of the social structure. His work suggests the importance of studying the strategies individuals use to maintain or improve their social position, as well as their children’s position. In any given society, the transmission of privilege is “mis-recognized.” Individuals tend to see their society’s social arrangements as legitimate. Status, privilege, and similar social rewards allegedly are “earned” by individuals; that is, they are perceived as resulting from intelligence, talent, effort, and other strategically displayed skills. Bourdieu, in showing how cultural capital is acquired and used in daily life, makes clear that individuals’ social position is not the result of personal attributes such as effort or intelligence. In particular, he argues that individuals in privileged social locations are advantaged in ways that are not a result of the intrinsic merit of their cultural experiences. Rather, cultural training in the home is awarded unequal value in dominant institutions because of the close compatibility between the standards of child rearing in privileged homes and the (arbitrary) standards proposed by these institutions.
To make this book more readable, I refrained from burdening it with Bourdieu’s terminology. Still, the book is a reasonably straightforward, if partial, empirical application of Bourdieu’s broader theoretical model. For example, in Distinction: A Social Critique on the Judgment of Taste as well as other works, Bourdieu clearly intends for habitus to be a set of internalized dispositions that operate in a large number of social spheres.4 In his discussion of habitus Bourdieu includes the preferences in food, furniture, music, makeup, books, and movies. The focus of Unequal Childhoods is much narrower, looking primarily at time use for children’s leisure activities, language use in the home, and interventions of adults in children’s institutional lives. Still, it is reasonable to assert that the elements discussed in this book, taken together, do constitute a set of dispositions that children learn, or habitus. Concerted cultivation and the accomplishment of natural growth are aspects of the habitus of the families discussed in this book.5