Compared to the detailed answers and the animated tone we heard as middle-class parents like the Tallingers and Williamses discussed what they saw as the benefits of organized activities, Ms. Driver’s response is brief. She is more animated, though, as she reveals her hope that getting Wendy involved in extracurricular activities will keep her daughter “off the streets.” When Ms. Driver was a girl she wanted to “spend [time] with my friends and hang around on the corner with everybody else,” but her parents were “strict”:
My parents didn’t believe in that . . . My brothers could, but I couldn’t . . . So I had no choice. Either I stayed in or I did activities. So I chose the activities to keep myself busy and occupied, and it gave me a social life.
Although as a child Ms. Driver had thought the classes her parents made her take were “a waste of time,” Wendy is more positive. She likes her dance lessons (“I like to dance. It’s fun . . . You get to learn all this new stuff”), enjoys choir, and dismisses CCD as “boring.” She does not complain to her mother or Mr. Fallon about any of her activities, however. Her extracurricular commitments are not especially important to her; they do not dominate her life or the lives of her family members. The adults typically do not bring up Wendy’s classes at all; she mentions them periodically, but she does not dwell on them. Instead, her activities take a “backseat” to other topics of conversation (usually past and future family events).
DIRECTIVES: USING LANGUAGE AS A PRACTICAL TOOL
Similar to the adults in the McAllister family, both Ms. Driver and Mr. Fallon are quite directive, even authoritarian, in their child-rearing techniques. They tell the children what to do. Unlike children in middle-class families, Wendy and Willie rarely, if ever, argue with adults.
Wendy asks her mother, “Can I put the sticker on? Please?” Ms. Driver says, “We aren’t going to do that.” Wendy is silent.
Debbie, sitting in the kitchen with Mack, tells Willie, “Go in the living room.” Willie goes in without comment or protest. He watches TV.
Mr. Fallon, particularly when he is tired or exasperated, is likely to yell his directives. In some instances, Willie might “push it,” but usually, after a single protest, he falls silent:8
Willie asks if he could hold Valerie, who was in her chair. Debbie says, “No.” Willie says (in a whiny voice), “Why not? When am I going to be able to hold her?” Debbie retorts, “When you have your own baby.” Willie is silent.
Willie also sometimes needles the adults, but his approach is very different from that of Alexander Williams, for example. Willie is not trying to reason with his mother or Mr. Fallon or show them why they are wrong. Instead, he modifies his request to give it a slightly different form:
Willie wants to go out. Mack says, “No.” The phone rings and Willie rushes to answer it. Just before Willie answers it, Mack repeats, “You can’t go out.” Willie says “Hello?” and then “Just a sec,” and puts his hand over the receiver. He says, “Mack?” and Mack’s temper starts to rise. He demands loudly, “What did I say? What did I say?” Willie says, “Wait.” Mack responds in a lower tone of voice, questioning, “What?” Willie asks, “Can he come over and stay on the porch?” Mack seems to explode with anger, “What did I say? I said NO VISITORS! You can’t go out.”
Overall, Ms. Driver and Mr. Fallon use language as a tool, a practical necessity rather than an intrinsically interesting dimension of life. Neither adult is likely to urge the children to expound on a topic. In contrast to middle-class parents like Mr. and Ms. Williams, who frequently made a conscious effort to encourage Alexander’s language development, the adults in Wendy and Willie’s lives do not follow up when the children happen to mention some new piece of information. When, for example, Wendy asks her family members (one by one) if they know what a mortal sin is, her mother says, “Tell us what it is. You’re the one who went to CCD.” Wendy provides the answer, and both her mother and Mr. Fallon look at her as she speaks, but neither acknowledges her answer. They wait her out and then return to watching television.
INTERVENTIONS IN INSTITUTIONS
Wendy’s mother does not nurture her daughter’s language development like Alexander Williams’s mother does her son’s. She does not attempt to draw Wendy out or follow up on new information, such as the meaning of mortal sin. But, just like Ms. Williams, Ms. Driver cares very much about her child, and, just like Ms. Handlon, she wants to help her daughter succeed. Ms. Driver keeps a close and careful eye on Wendy’s schooling. Unlike Melanie’s mother, she is not forgetful with paperwork. She immediately signs and returns each form Wendy brings home from school and reminds her to turn the papers in to her teacher.
Debbie reminds Wendy, “Don’t forget to take those papers to school tomorrow.” To me, she explains, “They’re testing her again. So I had to sign papers to give my permission.” When I ask when the testing will happen, she says, “I don’t know when, but they’ll call us in there to go over the results and they’ll give us a written report of the results.”
Wendy is “being tested” as part of an ongoing effort to determine why she has difficulties with spelling, reading, and related language-based activities. Her mother welcomes these official efforts, but she did not request them. Unlike the middle-class mothers we observed, who asked teachers for detailed information about every aspect of their children’s classroom performance and relentlessly pursued information and assessments outside of school as well, Ms. Driver seems content with only a vague notion of her daughter’s learning disabilities. This attitude contrasts starkly with that of Stacey Marshall’s mother, for example. In discussing Stacey’s classroom experiences with field-workers, Ms. Marshall routinely described her daughter’s academic strengths and weaknesses in detail. Ms. Driver never mentions that Wendy is doing grade-level work in math but is reading at a level a full three years below her grade. Her description is vague:
She’s having problems . . . They had a special teacher come in and see if they could find out what the problem is. She has a reading problem, but they haven’t put their finger on it yet, so she’s been through all kinds of special teachers and testing and everything. She goes to Special Ed, I think it’s two classes a day . . . I’m not one hundred percent sure—for her reading. It’s very difficult for her to read what’s on paper. But then—she can remember things. But not everything. It’s like she has a puzzle up there. And we’ve tried, well, they’ve tried a lot of things. They just haven’t put their finger on it yet.
Wendy’s teachers uniformly praise her mother as “supportive” and describe her as “very loving,” but they are disappointed in Ms. Driver’s failure to take a more active, interventionist role in Wendy’s education, especially given the formidable nature of her daughter’s learning problems. From Ms. Driver’s perspective, however, being actively supportive means doing whatever the teachers tell her to do.
Whatever they would suggest, I would do. They suggested she go to the eye doctor, so I did that. And they checked her and said there was nothing wrong there.
Similarly, she monitors Wendy’s homework and supports her efforts to read.
We listen to her read. We help her with her homework. So she has more attention here in a smaller household than it was when I lived with my parents. So, we’re trying to help her out more, which I think is helping. And with the two [special education] classes a day at the school, instead of one like last year, she’s learning a lot from that. So, we’re just hoping it takes time and that she’ll just snap out of it.
But Ms. Driver clearly does not have an independent understanding of the nature or degree of Wendy’s limitations, perhaps because she is unfamiliar with the kind of terms the educators use to describe her daughter’s needs (e.g., a limited “sight vocabulary,” underdeveloped “language arts skills”). Perhaps, too, her confidence in the school staff makes it easier for her to leave “the details” to them: “Ms. Morton, she’s great. She’s worked with us for different testing and stuff.” Ms. Driver depends on the school staff’s expertise to assess the situation and then share the information with her.