My practice of sending an annual holiday card and small gift to the children prompted some messages in return over the intervening years and gave me a sense of how some of the families were faring. Still, these glimpses provided a picture that was incomplete. I wanted to know whether the differences in child rearing described in Unequal Childhoods had or had not continued over time. As young people develop into adults, they are less dependent upon their parents. The patterns observed during the original study might have significantly altered. Thus, approximately ten years later, when the youth were nineteen to twenty-one, I revisited the twelve families who were in the intensive study to take up these issues. As I explain in more detail below, I conducted a two-hour interview with each of the twelve young adults, and in most cases, I also did a separate in-depth interview with the mother, father, and, in most cases, one sibling.
These interviews suggest that there were important changes in the lives of the families over time. Some of the families did much better in this period than they had been doing a decade earlier. Among the working-class families, two—those of Wendy Driver and Tyrec Taylor—moved from being renters to home owners. Katie Brindle’s mother started working cleaning houses. All of the young adults, including the poor and working-class youths, were able to avoid major life difficulties. None of the twelve had been arrested as adults (although some had had run-ins with the police as juveniles). All were alive and healthy. Some were married with children.
Yet social class continued to matter in the lives of the young people. It mattered in their high school experiences. It mattered in their transitions out of high school as many sought, often unsuccessfully, to enter college. Differences in how much education each young person acquired in turn influenced his or her options in the world of work. Social class was not important in shaping how much the youths’ parents loved them, worried about them, and sought to help them. But it did make a critical difference in the resources parents could bring to bear on their children’s behalf. It was especially significant in parents’ interactions with educational institutions.
Race was consequential too. The young black men, regardless of social class, reported difficulties in public spaces. Alexander Williams was enrolled in an Ivy League college, but he was still occasionally followed around by clerks in stores. But while race did have situational consequences for some youths, the power of social class was striking for all.
The second edition of Unequal Childhoods presents three new chapters. First, in Chapter 13, there is an analysis of the ways in which social class shaped the young people’s transitions to adulthood. This chapter provides a brief overview of the research methodology for the follow-up and a short update on the life of each child featured in the original book. Then there is an analysis of the ways in which the trajectories begun when the children were ten persisted over time. The discussion takes up continuing class differences in parents’ relationships with institutions, particularly in the information the parents had and the interventions they made in the lives of the young people.
Around the time I was conducting the interviews, I gave each of the families a copy of the book. Some of the families were comfortable with how they were portrayed in Unequal Childhoods, but others were not. Chapter 14 addresses this issue, sharing each family’s reactions to the book. The chapter also offers a frank assessment of some of the challenges of doing longitudinal research using ethnographic methods. In the period after the first edition was published, I worked with colleagues skilled in quantitative methods to analyze how the patterns in this book meshed with data from a nationally representative sample. There is a short summary of this research in Chapter 15.1
Finally, as the second edition was going to press, when the youths were twenty-five and twenty-six years old, I made contact again with most (but not all) of them. In a brief Afterword I provide an update on their current life circumstances and my reflections on the project as a whole.
CHAPTER 13
Class Differences in
Parents’ Information
and Intervention in the
Lives of Young Adults
The children in Unequal Childhoods came of age in unsettled economic times. Had they been born decades earlier, when the United States had a strong manufacturing economy, job prospects for those with a high school diploma (especially young men) would have been much brighter.1 As economies have become global, the United States has lost many relatively high-paying manufacturing jobs to workers in other countries.2 Overall, the supply of “good jobs”—ones with high wages, health benefits, vacation time, and pensions—in the American labor market is dwindling; meanwhile, the number of “bad jobs”—those with low wages and no benefits or other “perks”—continues to grow.3 Good jobs are closely tied to high levels of education. Indeed, almost like a staircase, each additional year of education is associated with higher income.4 For every $1,000 earned by an individual with a B.A., someone with a high school diploma or GED earns about $600.5 Thus, if the key to success in the nineteenth century was to “Go West, young man,” in the twenty-first century it is to “Go to college, everyone.”6
Competition for good jobs is fierce, and it is widely agreed that access to a good job is now dependent on a college degree. As a result, schools are a critical sorting agent for the competitive workforce. Yet, as the original research for Unequal Childhoods suggested, social class provides families with differential resources for complying with school standards. The first edition of this book ended with the children’s fifth-grade graduation. What happened in the ensuing years, as the children progressed through middle school and high school? Did the class differences shrink? It seems a reasonable possibility. After all, American ideals suggest that schools are the “great equalizer.”7 Also, as they grew older, all the children were likely to have become more autonomous from their parents and more determined to make their own decisions. Interventions they would not object to as ten-year-olds might no longer be welcomed when they were young adults.
In this chapter, I answer the “what happened?” question. I take another look at the effects of social class on the youth in my study, this time focusing on their transition to adulthood. I show that in certain areas, class standing did not seem crucial. Being middle-class did not shield youths from bumps in the road such as broken hearts or dashed athletic dreams. And all of the kids expressed pleasure over their movement into adulthood. Overall, though, I find that the importance of social class did persist.8 Differences in the types and amounts of information the parents possessed continued to affect their actions. Applying to college was a family affair among the middle class. When working-class or poor youth applied to college, they depended on school personnel to help them. Hence, as I explain below, working-class and poor parents’ relationships to educators were fundamentally different from those of middle-class parents. Although all parents wanted their children to succeed, the working-class and poor families experienced more heartbreak. They were generally unable to prevent their children from being derailed from the higher education trajectory. The middle-class parents’ interventions, although often insignificant as individual acts, yielded cumulative advantages.