5. Sharon Hays, in her 1996 book The Cultural Contradictions of Motherhood, studies the attitudes of middle-class and working-class mothers toward child rearing. She finds a shared commitment to “intensive mothering,” although there are some differences among the women in her study in their views of punishment (with middle-class mothers leaning toward reasoning and working-class women toward physical punishment). My study focused much more on behavior than attitudes. If I looked at attitudes, I saw fewer differences; for example, all exhibited the desire to be a good mother and to have their children grow and thrive. The differences I found, however, were significant in how parents enacted their visions of what it meant to be a good parent.
6. See Urie Bronfenbrenner’s article, “Socialization and Social Class through Time and Space.”
7. Katherine Newman, Declining Fortunes, as well as Donald Barlett and James B. Steele, America: What Went Wrong? See also Michael Hout and Claude Fischer, “A Century of Inequality.”
8. Some readers expressed the concern that the contrast to natural would be “unnatural,” but this is not the sense in which the term natural growth is used here. Rather, the contrast is with words such as cultivated, artificial, artifice, or manufactured. This contrast in the logic of child rearing is a heuristic device that should not be pushed too far since, as sociologists have shown, all social life is constructed in specific social contexts. Indeed, family life has varied dramatically over time. See Philippe Aries, Centuries of Childhood, Herbert Gutman, The Black Family in Slavery and Freedom, 1750–1925, and Nancy Scheper-Hughes, Death without Weeping.
9. Elijah Anderson, Code of the Street; see especially Chapter 2.
10. For a more extensive discussion of the work of Pierre Bourdieu see the theoretical appendix; see also David Swartz’s excellent book Culture and Power.
11. I did not study the full range of families in American society, including elite families of tremendous wealth, nor, at the other end of the spectrum, homeless families. In addition, I have a purposively drawn sample. Thus, I cannot state whether there are other forms of child rearing corresponding to other cultural logics. Still, data from quantitative studies based on nationally representative data support the patterns I observed. For differences by parents’ social class position and children’s time use, see especially Sandra Hofferth and John Sandberg, “Changes in American Children’s Time, 1981–1997.” Patterns of language use with children are harder to capture in national surveys, but the work of Melvin Kohn and Carmi Schooler, especially Work and Personality, shows differences in parents’ child-rearing values. Duane Alwin’s studies of parents’ desires are generally consistent with the results reported here. See Duane Alwin, “Trends in Parental Socialization Values.” For differences in interventions in institutions, there is extensive work showing social class differences in parent involvement in education. See the U. S. Department of Education, The Condition of Education, 2001, p.175.
12. In this book, unless otherwise noted, the statistics reported are from 1993 to 1995, which was when the data were collected. Similarly, unless otherwise noted, all monetary amounts are given in (unadjusted) dollars from 1994 to 1995. The figure reported here is from Everett Ladd, Thinking about America, pp. 21–22.
13. This quote is from President Bill Clinton’s 1993 speech to the Democratic Leadership Council. It is cited in Jennifer Hochschild, Facing Up to the American Dream, p. 18.
14. Paul Kingston, The Classless Society, p. 2.
15. As I explain in more detail in the methodological appendix, family structure is intertwined with class position in this sample. The Black and white middle-class children that we observed all resided with both of their biological parents. By contrast, although some of the poor children have regular contact with their fathers, none of the Black or white poor children in the intensive observations had their biological fathers at home. The working-class families were in between. This pattern raises questions such as whether, for example, the pattern of concerted cultivation depends on the presence of a two-parent marriage. The scope of the sample precludes a satisfactory answer.
16. As I explain in Appendix A, three of the twelve children came from sources outside of the schools.
17. Arlie Hochschild, The Second Shift.
18. My concern here is the vast diversity in views among white Americans as well as Black Americans. The phrase “a white perspective” seems inaccurate. This is not to say that whites don’t experience considerable benefits from their race in our stratified society. They do. Whites benefit from racial discrimination in many ways, including their improved ability to secure housing loans and employment as well as relatively higher market values for their homes in racially segregated neighborhoods. There are also well-documented differences in street interaction, including the ability to secure a taxi on a busy street. Thus the question is not the amount of racial discrimination in our society. Instead the question is how much being a member of a dominant group, interested in studying racial differences in daily life, precludes one from “seeing” or “understanding” important dimensions of the phenomenon. See Douglas Massey and Nancy Denton, American Apartheid; Kathleen Neckerman and Joleen Kirschenmann, “Hiring Strategies, Racial Bias, and Inner-City Workers”; and Elijah Anderson, Streetwise. Finally, there is an extensive literature on “whiteness” and the benefits that whites gain from their position of privilege. See, among others, Phil Cohen, “Laboring under Whiteness.”
19. See Julia Wrigley, “Do Young Children Need Intellectual Stimulation?” and Linda A. Pollock, Forgotten Children.
20. As I explain in more detail in Appendix A, some of the families in the study, including the Williamses, were upper–middle class. The project, however, was hampered by its small sample size and my desire to compare different racial and ethnic groups. As a result, the differences between middle-class and upper-middle-class families are not a major focus of the work. Within the scope of the sample of thirty-six middle-class families, however, clear differences did not emerge between the middle class and upper–middle class. As a result, in this book I use only the term middle class to encompass both.
CHAPTER 2: SOCIAL STRUCTURE AND DAILY LIFE
1. William Kornblum, Sociology: The Central Questions, p. 72.
2. Jepperson defines an institution as “a social order or pattern that has attained a certain state or property . . . . Put another way, institutions are those social patterns that, when chronically reproduced, owe their survival to relatively self-activating social processes.” Ronald L. Jepperson, “Institutions, Institutional Effects, and Institutionalism,” p. 145.
3. C. Wright Mills, The Sociological Imagination, p. 161.
4. Lower Richmond teachers also coordinate their classroom efforts with an after-school tutoring program that takes place at the local housing project, even though it is not a formal school-sponsored activity.
5. Most of the quotes reported in the book are from tape-recorded interviews or tape recordings made during family observations. At times, following traditional ethnographic work, the excerpts are from field notes that the research assistants and I wrote up immediately after the observations. In those instances, we added quotation marks only if we were certain that we could remember the exchange verbatim. As a result, there are excerpts from field notes that recount speech without the use of quotation marks. (I did not carry notebooks or permit others to write notes during field visits; rather we “hung out.”) In editing the quotes for readability I removed false starts, “um,” “you know,” “like,” and stuttering when they did not appear to be analytically significant. The signal of a . . . indicates the omission of words (or in a few cases a slight reordering of sentences). Finally, the research assistants and I had different nicknames for the family members that we used in our field notes (e.g., “Mr. Tallinger,” “Mr. T.” or “Don”). Rather than tamper with the text of field notes, I have allowed this variability to remain.