As their children grew older, middle-class parents continued the pattern of concerted cultivation. They actively monitored, gathered information, and intervened in their children’s academic careers. Parents of the youth raised under the accomplishment of natural growth also continued their pattern of being watchful and concerned. These parents desperately wanted their children to do well in life, and they too paid attention to their children’s schooling. They asked questions and sometimes attempted to intervene but, compared to the middle-class parents in the study, had much more limited success. Beyond primary school, educational institutions grow increasingly complex. There are many decisions to be made. Parents’ interventions are crucial for managing various aspects of secondary school experience, from high school course selection to college applications.9 As when the children were ten years old, middle-class parents had much more detailed knowledge of how schools work, and especially how higher education systems operate, than did their working-class and poor counterparts.
As discussed in Chapter 12, the benefits middle-class kids accrue do not result directly from their parents’ child-rearing methods.10 Class advantages are linked to the fact that as schools sort children, these institutions (and other institutions, as well) prioritize and reward particular cultural traits and resources. Many of these traits and resources are tied to social class standing. Differences by class in the development of language skills, highlighted in the first edition of the book, is one example. But social class also gives parents a different set of economic resources and, crucially, a different set of cultural repertoires for managing the experiences of their children as they interact with institutions such as schools, courts, hospitals, and government agencies.
Since education is legally required in the United States, and since school success is a key criterion in sorting youth for the labor market, schools are an “800-pound gorilla” in American society in the sense that they are a powerful organization with which families must interact. Schools play a powerful, sometimes overwhelming role in shaping students’ life chances. Schools vary tremendously in the quality of their curricula, pace of instruction, extent of teacher preparation, degree of safety, size of student body, and level of physical upkeep. Middle-class kids tend to go to different, and more academically, socially, and physically desirable, schools than do working-class and poor kids. In addition, at the secondary level, school personnel manage only part of students’ educational program and transition to college. Schools repeatedly request parent involvement, and even if the number of requests by educators is somewhat lower in high school than in elementary school, the stakes are higher. In fact, educators expect parents to be involved in bringing about a child’s successful educational experience in high school and transition to college. But middle-class parents are much more likely to be aware of and able to comply with these institutional expectations than are less privileged parents. Putting this into more general terms, institutional contexts build unevenly on family practices. These institutional advantages then are reproduced and expanded over time, thereby transforming individual actions into well-worn social pathways. Some individuals do deviate from these pathways. We see the evidence in the form of upward mobility and downward mobility. We should not, however, allow these deviations to distract us from the more important reality of the socially powerful, but typically invisible, ways that families’ practices translate into differential advantages for their children.
This chapter is another contribution to the broader, ongoing process of making invisible inequality more visible.11 I divide the discussion into five sections. In Section 1, I present a very brief summary of the methodology I used as I followed up on the lives of the children who participated in Unequal Childhoods. In Section 2, I provide a short update on each of the nine youth who were featured in the book. (A longer version of these portraits can be found at the web page for Unequal Childhoods at www.ucpress.edu. In Appendix D, I also summarize the situation of the young adults, as well as their families, for all twelve of the original intensive study participants.)12 In Section 3, I describe aspects of the social context in which the young people transitioned to adulthood, particularly the schools they attended and the neighborhoods in which they lived. I also share the youths’ reflections on the importance of the organized activities they took part in as children, as well as their awareness of the circumstances of young adults in social classes different from their own. The effects of class standing I report in this section are highly consistent with findings in existing literature on social inequality in the transition to adulthood.13 In Section 4, I turn to a theme largely absent from social science literature: the role social class plays in shaping interactions between families and institutions that sort youth into the labor market. Here I highlight the continuance of concerted cultivation and the accomplishment of natural growth in young adulthood. I show how—particularly in terms of relationships between families and schools—social class differences in family life remain important over time. Working-class and poor parents (and their kids) tended to have very general and often vague information about institutions; middle-class parents had more, and much more detailed, information. Middle-class parents also engaged in active interventions in their children’s institutional lives. Working-class and poor parents, although they loved their children very much, relied on professionals to shepherd the children through institutions. As a result, although all the young people were nearly the same age, in middle-class families, they frequently were treated as if they were still children, while in working-class and poor families they were treated as if they were grown. Lastly, in Section 5, I sum up what the follow-up study tells us about the far-reaching effects of social class differences that began long ago, in childhood.
SECTION 1. METHODOLOGY OF THE FOLLOW-UP STUDY
Beginning in 2003 and continuing over the next year, I recontacted each of the twelve families in the original study.14 I conducted two-hour interviews with each target young person (by then, they were between nineteen and twenty-one years old), as well as separate interviews with their mothers and fathers and one sibling. In all, I completed thirty-eight interviews. The interviews with the twelve young adults focused on key events in their lives in the preceding ten years, including their experiences in middle school and high school, interactions with the higher education system, and work experience. Questions also probed their future goals and their views of their current situations.15 The separate interviews with the parents and one sibling asked for their assessment of how the young adult was doing; I also asked them about their roles in the young adult’s educational experiences and jobs. The interviews also gathered information about the whole family’s situation. These interviews took place mostly in the youths’ parents’ homes.16
The interviews were audiotaped and transcribed. To analyze these data, I created a series of codes on key themes (e.g., education decisions, work, perceptions of parent role, disappointments, college applications, independence) and, with the assistance of two researchers, coded the interview responses accordingly. As has been the case throughout this study, all names are pseudonyms. To further protect the young adults’ privacy, when I refer to the colleges they attended, I use the names of colleges with comparable rankings, not those of the schools they actually attended.