61. See pictures of art work in Peter Demerath’s Producing Success, which provide haunting images of alienation. Some elite high schools have been shaken by suicides, including in Palo Alto, Calif., where five high-achieving students committed suicide in six months. See Christina Farr, “After Five Suicides, Palo Alto High School Students Change Culture,” www.sfgate.com/cgi-bin/blogs/inthepeninsula/detail?entry_id=80342; accessed March 22, 2011. College Unranked, edited by Lloyd Thacker, discusses the “arms race” of preparation for college applications. See also Nelson, Parenting Out of Control; Suniya Luthar, “The Culture of Affluence.”
62. See Wills, “Parent Trap”; Jacobson, “Help Not Wanted.”
63. As Katherine McClelland noted, the “concerted cultivation metaphor itself suggests an explanation of middle-class parents’ shame at their children’s failures: if cultivation is what we’re engaged in, then I am a poor gardener if your flowers bloom while mine do not” (personal communication, September 17, 2010). There are many other drawbacks to middle-class life that draw only limited scholarly attention. For instance, middle-class families, including the Tallingers, often must relocate (sometimes moving great distances) in order to meet one or both parents’ career demands. Middle-class parents, including Mr. and Ms. Williams, also work very long hours and spend a great deal of time in airports and hotels, away from home, for their careers. Numerous studies have studied the number of hours spent at work, but the implications for the social class differences in the quality of family life have been harder to unpack (but see Marianne Cooper, “Being the ‘Go-To Guy’”; Pamela Stone, Opting Out; Mary Blair-Loy, Competing Devotions for studies of middle-class families). For discussions of the class divide in time spent at work, see Jerry A. Jacobs and Kathleen Gerson, The Time Divide.
64. Bruce Tulgan’s Not Everyone Gets a Trophy was published in 2009. There is an older popular literature on the downside of what I term concerted cultivation, including David Elkind’s 1981 book The Hurried Child. See also Suniya Luthar, “The Culture of Affluence.”
65. See chapter 8, “The Dark Side of Parent Involvement,” in Lareau, Home Advantage.
66. It is likely that middle-class parents would try to manage as many elements of a surgical intervention as possible, e.g., learning the names and side effects of the medications, asking about alternative courses of treatment, and researching their child’s medical condition enough to formulate informed questions. But they would turn over responsibility for the surgery itself to the surgeon, just as working-class and poor parents turn over responsibility for teaching to educators.
67. Peggy C. Giordano, “Relationships in Adolescence”; Jennifer Lee and Frank D. Bean, “America’s Changing Color Lines.”
68. For a review, see Kathleen V. Hoover-Dempsey and Howard M. Sandler, “Why Do Parents Become Involved in Their Children’s Education?” See also John B. Diamond and Kimberly Williams Gomez, “African-American Parents’ Educational Orientations.”
69. I have a very small sample. In the working-class and poor families, all the parents were interviewed. But, among the middle-class, Alexander Williams’s parents declined to be interviewed. This limits the conclusions that can be drawn. I looked closely across the sample for signs of racial differences in the character, frequency, and type of interventions parents made in institutions. Class differences were quite striking, but racial differences did not emerge. For discussions of the power of race in family life, see Linda Burton et al., “Critical Race Theories, Colorism, and the Decade’s Research on Families of Color.” Of course, there are countless studies of race and ethnicity, and there is compelling evidence of continued discrimination in daily life against African Americans. For discussion of race and employment, see Pager, Marked. For race and incarceration, see Western, Punishment. For a review of race and residential segregation, see Douglas Massey, Categorically Unequal. For wealth gaps, see Melvin L. Oliver and Thomas M. Shapiro, Black Wealth/White Wealth. For race and public space, see Joseph Feagin and Melvin P. Sikes, Living with Racism. See also, among others, the work by Michèle Lamont, Elijah Anderson, Alford Young, and Mica Pollock.
70. See Emily Beller and Michael Hout, “Intergenerational Social Mobility.”
71. I am grateful to Katherine Mooney for suggesting this phrase.
CHAPTER 14: REFLECTIONS
1. See William Foote Whyte, Street Corner Society.
2. See Annette Lareau, “Common Problems in Fieldwork: A Personal Essay,” in Home Advantage. See also Annette Lareau and Jeffrey Shultz, eds., Journeys through Ethnography, as well as Appendix A in this book.
3. Michael Burawoy, “Revisits”; Linda M. Burton, Diane Purvin, and Raymond Garrett-Peters, “Longitudinal Ethnography”; Nancy Scheper-Hughes, “Ire in Ireland”; Jay MacLeod, Ain’t No Making It. See also Michael Burawoy, “Public Ethnography as Film.”
4. See Norman K. Denzin and Yvonna S. Lincoln, The SAGE Handbook of Qualitative Research; Caroline Ramazanoglu and Joan Holland, Feminist Methodology; Diane L. Wolf, ed., Feminist Dilemmas in Fieldwork; Martyn Hammersley and Paul Atkinson, Ethnography; Dorothy Smith, Institutional Ethnography; Paul ten Have, Understanding Qualitative Research and Ethnomethodology; Joan Cassell, “Risks and Benefits to Subjects of Fieldwork.” For a vigorous defense of the position that ethnographers should collaborate and “co-construct” ethnographies with research participants, see Luke Eric Lassiter, The Chicago Guide to Collaborative Ethnography.
5. Whyte, Street Corner Society; Scheper-Hughes, “Ire in Ireland”; Arthur J. Vidich and Joseph Bensman, Small Town and Mass Society; Carolyn Ellis, “Emotional and Ethical Quagmires in Returning to the Field”; Arlene Stein, “Sex, Truths, and Audiotape.”
6. The original research was done in 1993–95. Some families had kept in touch with me over the years since then. I attended Wendy Driver’s high school graduation party, for example; I got a prom picture and graduation notice for Tyrec Taylor. I also received announcements of high school graduation and college enrollment for Garrett Tallinger and Stacey Marshall.
7. Williams, Marshall, Handlon (mother and Melanie), Irwin, Greeley, Carroll, Brindle, Tallinger (Garrett), and Yanelli family-member interviews were completed before they received the book. The interviews with Ms. McAllister and the Tallinger parents took place on the day I delivered the book. The Driver, Taylor, and Handlon (father) interviews occurred after they had read the book. Some of the interviews took place as late as 2005. Then, in 2009 and 2010, I began contacting the families to share my summary of their reaction; as I note elsewhere, I invited them to submit their own reactions. In 2010, as the second edition was going to press, I confirmed the employment status of all the young adults except Alex Williams and Harold McAllister. Although I did not ask them directly, most people appeared to have read only the chapter about their family. Conversations with the Tallingers, Ms. Yanelli, and Ms. Marshall, however, revealed that they had read the entire book.
8. Indeed, the follow-up does not meet the definition Michael Burawoy gave to ethnographic revisits: “An ethnographic revisit occurs when an ethnographer undertakes participant observation, that is, studying others in their space and time, with a view to comparing his or her site with the same one studied at an earlier point in time, whether by him or herself or by someone else.” “Revisits,” p. 646.