4. Given the dominant emphasis on reasoning in middle-class settings it is important to point out that reasoning is not without drawbacks. In middle-class families results could be ineffectual, as when parents were trying to reason with a cranky, grumpy, loud five-year-old.
5. Other research has shown that parents of lower levels of education are likely to use physical discipline, particularly with sons. See Ronald L. Simons et al., “Intergenerational Transmission of Harsh Parenting.”
6. To our knowledge, no one at Lower Richmond noticed the next day.
7. See Joyce Epstein’s work as well as James Coleman’s work on this point.
8. See Jacques Donzelot, The Policing of Families.
CHAPTER 12: THE POWER AND LIMITS OF SOCIAL CLASS
1. See Sharon Hays, The Cultural Contradictions of Motherhood.
2. Some researchers claim that happiness is not particularly connected to age, gender, race, or affluence. See David G. Meyers and Ed Diener, “Who Is Happy?”
3. Middle-class parents were self-aware of how hectic their lives were; they often talked about the lack of time. Some parents also mentioned how their own childhoods had been so different from those of their own children in terms of organized activities. But middle-class parents did not seem to be particularly aware of their emphasis on reasoning and, especially, their interventions in institutions. Nor were they, or working-class and poor parents, particularly aware that radically different approaches to child rearing were being carried out. Instead, parents viewed their approaches to child rearing as natural.
4. Cornel West, Race Matters.
5. See Jennifer Hochschild, Facing Up to the American Dream; Ellis Cose, The Rage of a Privileged Class; Beverly Daniel Tatum, Why Are the Black Kids Sitting Together in the Cafeteria?; and Elizabeth Higginbotham, Too Much to Ask.
6. In this study there were also, in some contexts, differences in sociolinguistic terms (including special words for white people). For a more general discussion of this issue see Mary Patillo-McCoy, Black Picket Fences, and Douglas Massey and Nancy Denton, American Apartheid. I also did not study a racially isolated school. See, among others, Eric A. Hanushek et. al., “New Evidence about Brown v. Board of Education.”
7. See Ellis Cose, The Rage of a Privileged Class, and Mary Waters, Black Identities.
8. Douglas Massey and Nancy Denton, American Apartheid.
9. This study’s findings are compatible with others that have shown children to be aware of race at relatively early ages. Indeed, girls often played in racially segregated groups on the playground. (Boys were likely to be in racially integrated groups.) Thus, this study suggests that racial dynamics certainly exist in children’s lives, but they are not (yet) an organizing feature in the same way that social class membership is. For a piece that stresses the salience of race in the lives of preschoolers, see Debra Van Ausdale and Joe R. Feagin, “Using Racial and Ethnic Concepts.”
10. A majority of middle-class and working-class parents self-report the use of reasoning in child rearing. Since there is an emphasis in broader cultural repertoires of the importance of using reasoning, it is not surprising that parents of all social classes might report that they use reasoning. Indeed, for many of the working-class and poor parents, physical discipline was a “last resort.” Studies do consistently show that more educated mothers, however, are more likely to stress reasoning. See, among others, Cheryl Blueston and Catherine S. Tamis-LeMonda, “Correlates of Parenting Styles in Predominantly Working- and Middle-Class African American Mothers.”
11. Of course, some middle-class parents also appeared slightly anxious during parent-teacher meetings. But overall, middle-class parents spoke more, and they asked educators more questions, including more critical and penetrating ones, than did working-class and poor parents.
12. Working-class and poor children often resisted and tested school rules, but they did not seem to be engaged in the same process of seeking an accommodation by educators to their own individual preferences that I witnessed among middle-class children. Working-class and poor children tended to react to adults’ offers or, at times, plead with educators to repeat previous experiences, such as reading a particular story, watching a movie, or going to the computer room. In these interactions, the boundaries between adults and children were firmer and clearer than those with middle-class children.
13. Carol Heimer and Lisa Staffen, For the Sake of the Children.
14. My discussion here is necessarily speculative. Parents of all social classes took for granted key aspects of their child rearing and thus had difficulty articulating the rationale behind their actions.
15. In the South, children between the ages of ten and thirteen comprised one-third of the workers in textile mills between 1870 and 1900. Viviana Zelizer, Pricing the Priceless Child. See especially chapter 2.
16. Quoted in Zelizer, Pricing the Priceless Child, p. 78.
17. Zelizer, Pricing the Priceless Child, p. 67.
18. Zelizer, Pricing the Priceless Child, p. 59.
19. Zelizer, Pricing the Priceless Child, p. 97.
20. See William Corsaro, Sociology of Childhood.
21. As Randall Collins notes, Max Weber assigns multiple meanings to the term rationalization. Here I am referring to the meaning that “emerges when Weber compares different types of institutions. Bureaucracy is described as a rational form of administrative organization as opposed to the irrational elements found in patrimonialism . . . . The key [conditions] here seem to be predictability and regularity . . . . There is a strong implication that rationality is based on written rules, and hence on paperwork.” Randall Collins, Max Weber: A Skeleton Key, pp. 63, 78.
22. Ritzer also discusses the importance of efficiency. See George Ritzer, The McDonaldization of Society.
23. Ritzer, The McDonaldization of Society, p. 3.
24. Hays, The Cultural Contradictions of Motherhood, p. 11.
25. On safety see Mark Warr and Christopher G. Ellison, “Rethinking Social Reactions to Crime,” as well as Joel Best, Threatened Children. On changes in work-family relationships see Rosanna Hertz and Nancy L. Marshall, Working Families, as well as demographic research. On time spent with children, see Suzanne Bianchi, “Maternal Employment and Time with Children.” On suburbanization see Kenneth T. Jackson, Crabgrass Frontier.
26. Hays, Cultural Contradictions of Motherhood.
27. In 2002, enrolling a child in a single sport could cost as much as $5000 per year. The estimates for ice hockey include $100 skates (which usually need to be replaced twice a year), $60 gloves, and annual league fees of up to $2,700. David M. Halbfinger, “Our Town: A Hockey Parent’s Life.”