At school, Melanie is more often tentative than assertive. Although she is not especially popular, neither is she a social isolate. She misses school frequently for minor illnesses such as sore throat, sore foot, or cold (but in an interview, Melanie confesses to a field-worker that sometimes she feigns illness deliberately to avoid having to go to school). One teacher worries about her being in the “shadow” of her older brothers. Certainly at meals, where both her brothers jabber nonstop, she has little opportunity to talk.
Still, at times, she can be outgoing and engagingly uninhibited. For example, one day at school she learns how to sing the song “Happy Birthday” in Spanish. That afternoon, pleased with her new accomplishment, Melanie sings the song over and over and over. She sings in the car and while doing her homework. She sings at dinner. In fact, she sings all through the evening. The lack of an appreciative audience for her newest skill does not seem to diminish Melanie’s enthusiasm. She also enjoys playful interactions with her father, including pitching a paper airplane at his belly. Thus, while accurately described as shy, Melanie can and does change her behavior as she moves from context to context.
In the Handlon family, most household tasks, as well as scheduling and coordinating family members’ activities and providing transportation to and from events and appointments are Ms. Handlon’s responsibility. Despite the regularity of Mr. Handlon’s work routine (he leaves the house each weekday at 7:30 A.M. and returns home at 6:00 P.M.), he does very little child-related labor. Instead, he handles such matters as videotaping the church pageant and putting up the family’s Christmas tree lights.
THE HANDLONS’ WORLD
The Handlons, and Melanie in particular, live in a white world. Among the sixty or so children in the two fourth grades at Melanie’s elementary school, only five are nonwhite. Similarly, both Melanie’s Girl Scout troop and her family’s church congregation are overwhelmingly white. The Handlons’ nearly all white social world is coupled with a physical environment that is, if anything, even less integrated. The family’s four-bedroom home (a two-story, red brick house built in the late 1940s and worth about $245,000) is located in a homogenous suburban neighborhood.
With a family income of between $85,000 and $95,000 per year, the Handlons are solidly middle class and appear to take many elements of middle-class status for granted. They own an array of electronics (TVs, stereo, VCR, electronic keyboard) and each adult has a car. All three children participate in at least some activities organized by adults. The cost of these activities is dismissed as “minimal” and inconsequential. There is no indication that the Handlons feel the need to “pinch pennies.” They live in cluttered comfort. On our first visit, Ms. Handlon remarks apologetically and with some embarrassment that “housework isn’t my strong suit.” Indeed, the dining room table is piled with all sorts of items—coupons, socks, used cups, a laundry basket of clean but unfolded clothes, and piles of papers. In the kitchen, dirty dishes sometimes pile up in the sink and are left unheeded on the table. In the living room, several half-opened boxes of Christmas ornaments rest on the couch for over a week while the Christmas tree is being decorated. This level of untidiness is not common among middle-class families, but it does not appear to cause trouble for the Handlons.
Unlike most middle-class families, the Handlons have many relatives who live close by. Melanie’s parents describe themselves as feeling emotionally close to these members of their extended family. They report seeing their relatives about once a week and note that they also spend major holidays with them, including Thanksgiving, at which time they had twenty people at the house. The Handlons’ interactions with kin are much more frequent than is typical among the middle class, but they do not approach the kinds of connections that are common among working-class and poor families. Among these groups, as previous chapters have shown, informal play and visits with cousins are not restricted to once a week or special occasions. Instead, they dominate everyday family life.
COMPETING VALUES: THE IMPORTANCE OF ORGANIZED
ACTIVITIES AND UNSTRUCTURED TIME
Compared to other middle-class children, Melanie does not have a “heavy” schedule of organized activities. She is by no means idle outside of school, however. During December, she juggles several regularly scheduled commitments with assorted holiday events. Every Sunday includes an early church service, Sunday school, and youth choir practice. Mondays she has a piano lesson; Thursdays she goes to Girl Scouts. In addition to these standing events, Melanie also takes part in a special Girl Scouts “cookies for the homeless” holiday event on a Monday night and a school holiday musical performance on a Tuesday night. In between her two orthodontist appointments and five special rehearsals for the Christmas pageant at her church, she manages to Christmas shop.
Melanie does not complain about her schedule, nor do her parents seem to consider her activities overly taxing. In fact, Ms. Handlon perceives all three of her children as spending less time in organized activities than other children in the neighborhood. Both Mr. and Ms. Handlon believe that children should have free, unstructured time. Mr. Handlon explicitly criticizes the tendency of parents to “overschedule” children. Nevertheless, both Handlons hope Melanie will take on another commitment—they want her to join a swim team in the spring. When tryouts took place the previous year, Melanie had declined to participate. Her parents continue to bring the topic up from time to time, including around Christmastime. Mr. and Ms. Handlon’s belief that Melanie’s involvement in swimming would be an objectively good thing for her apparently trumps their resistance to the “overscheduling” of children. It can be a difficult trade-off. Middle-class parents (especially mothers) worry that if their children do not enroll in organized activities, they will have no one to play with after school and/or during spring and summer breaks. This kind of concern is clearly present with the Handlons. In addition to their desire to see Melanie enroll in swimming, they would like her to give softball a try. One winter evening, as the family is sitting around watching television, Melanie’s mother mentions softball three times. Although on each occasion she frames the decision to play softball as Melanie’s, Ms. Handlon urges the activity upon her daughter and explicitly mentions her concern that Melanie not be “left out.” Eventually, Melanie says, “Okay, I’ll play,” and the subject is dropped.
One striking though unintended result of Mr. and Ms. Handlon’s tendency to actively encourage Melanie to take activities she does not seek out herself is the speed and frequency with which she will complain, “Mom, I’m bored!” Ironically, although we observed this same pattern of self-proclaimed boredom among other seemingly very busy middle-class children in the study, we did not find it among the comparatively “underscheduled” working-class and poor children.
CULTIVATING ACADEMIC SUCCESS:
INTERVENING AT SCHOOL
Like other middle-class mothers, Ms. Handlon plays an active role in monitoring, criticizing, and intervening in Melanie’s schooling. She tries to work closely with Melanie’s teachers. At the beginning of the school year, for example, she brings Melanie, who is sick, to school for a brief visit so that her daughter can meet her teacher. Once Melanie is feeling better, Ms. Handlon inquires about the work missed, queries the teacher about items she did not understand, and works to facilitate her daughter’s transition into fourth grade.
She kind of felt lost because kids had already gone over a lot of the things and Melanie didn’t understand what was going on. So I went in, basically, every morning and talked with the teacher and asked questions.1