Sociology Readings - Unequal Childhoods (5/5): Final Thoughts

Final notes on Unequal Childhoods:

-- All the siblings in these homes wound up on generally the same trajectories as the profiled children (to the point where Stacey's sister Fern also got a four-year basketball scholarship to a solid school, Melanie's younger brother also dropped out of community college, etc.). There was strikingly little variation in their outcomes. Their parents' class status (with maternal education being the most influential factor) really was all but determinative of how these kids turned out.

-- Class differences also began to show up among the parents during the ten-year check back. Everybody remained in the same general economic category (one of the middle-class families got substantially wealthier when the father got a new job, and a borderline working-class/middle-class family moved solidly into the middle class when the mom went back to school and got a better professional certification, but otherwise everybody stayed where they were), but health differences began to become apparent for the parents.

By the time their kids were in their early 20s, about half of the working-class parents were beginning to suffer from chronic health problems (the Yanellis, both heavy smokers, were showing the toll of that; another father was injured at work and did not regain full function). The majority of the poor parents were in poor health. Of the middle-class parents, one was diagnosed as diabetic and another had a bad leg, but they were otherwise all in good health.

-- Lareau observed that when the children were ten years old, she thought the middle-class kids looked tired and overscheduled, while the working-class and poor kids were buoyant and full of energy. By the time they were in their 20s, their positions were reversed: the middle-class kids seemed younger and full of optimism, while the less fortunate kids appeared to be worn down and, while still hopeful, far older than their years.

-- Lareau also noted that "the experience of adulthood itself influenced how individuals conceived of childhood." Middle-class parents "tended to view childhood as an opportunity for play, but also as a chance to develop talents and skills that could be valuable in the self-actualization processes that take place in adulthood." Moreover, they were keenly aware of the competitive job market for middle-class occupations and thus felt "it was important that children be developed in a variety of ways in order to enhance their future possibilities."

For the working-class and poor parents, by contrast, Lareau found that "it was the deadening quality of work and the press of economic shortages that defined their experience of adulthood and influenced their vision of childhood. [...] Thinking back over their childhoods, these adults acknowledged periods of hardship but also recalled times without the kinds of worries that troubled them at present. Many appeared to want their own youngsters to spend their time being happy and relaxed. There would be plenty of time for their children to face the burdens of life when they reached adulthood."

-- Lareau's study included a small number of upwardly mobile families where the parents were middle class, but the grandparents were poor or working class. "In some cases," she wrote, "these grandparents objected to the child-rearing practices associated with concerted cultivation. They were bewildered by their grandchildren's hectic schedules of organized activities, outraged that the parents would reason with the children instead of giving them clear directives, and awed by the intensive involvement of mothers in the children's schooling." The upshot, she found, was that "as parents' own social class position shifts, so do their cultural beliefs and practices in child rearing."

It would be interesting to know whether the same is true of downwardly mobile families (do they revert to natural growth philosophies?), but there weren't enough of those in the study to make any observations on that front. There was only one such family, and they practiced concerted cultivation within the time and money constraints that their family was under. Their kid, not included in my previous summary because they weren't among the primary profiled families, did end up going to a four-year college on a full scholarship and made the dean's list there.

-- While none of the kids in the primary profiles went to a predatory for-profit school (probably because that wasn't as much of a thing during that time period), some of their younger siblings did. All the kids who went to for-profit schools were either working-class or poor (I would presume, although Lareau doesn't say, because the middle-class kids' parents knew enough to steer them far the hell away from that trap).

They all accrued significant debt, only one of the three who took that road finished with a degree, and none of the three was able to obtain work or any significant economic benefit from having gone to a for-profit school. All of them basically sank into deeper debt with nothing to show for it.

THE END. This is a pretty good book, I'd definitely recommend it if you're into doing sociology readings in your spare time.

Sociology Readings - Unequal Childhoods (4/5): Child Outcomes

Child outcomes in Unequal Childhoods (all the names are pseudonymous, and these kids ranged from 19 to 21 years old when these outcomes were recorded):

1. Melanie Handlon (white, middle-class): her learning disability was finally diagnosed in 8th grade. She became a high school cheerleader, which she loved. After graduation, she enrolled in a nearby community college but failed out in less than a semester. Unemployed and single at the time of the interview, she stated that her hope is "to be a stay-at-home mom until my kids are in school."

2. Stacey Marshall (black, middle-class): switched from gymnastics to basketball after a growth spurt made her too tall to compete seriously in gymnastics. Was recruited by Columbia, but her parents wouldn't let her take on that level of debt load given that she wanted to go on to med school, so instead she took a four-year full basketball scholarship to the University of Maryland. At the time of the interview she was working two summer jobs, had no immediate plans for marriage or kids, and wanted to get her career established before trying for a family.

3. Garrett Tallinger (white, middle-class): switched from soccer to basketball when his family moved to an area where soccer wasn't a serious sport. Took a full four-year basketball scholarship to Villanova, where his team made it several rounds into March Madness. Picked a business major, opting not to become a teacher because his dad told him he wouldn't earn enough money. Hopes to marry and have a family sometime after 25; also hopes to play basketball a few years in Europe after graduating.

4. Alexander Williams (black, middle-class): Pursuing a combined undergrad-and-med-school eight-year program at Columbia, where he was doing well. Noted to the researcher that he had less difficulty transitioning to Columbia than some of his peers from all-black schools did, because he was already accustomed to navigating predominantly white institutions. At the time of the interview, was excited about traveling to California to visit his girlfriend there, and seemed "content and optimistic about his future."

5. Wendy Driver (white, working-class): when interviewed at 20, had an 18-month-old daughter and was pregnant with her second kid. Graduated from high school and was accepted to a small local college but opted not to attend because "she was afraid she would be unable to do college-level work." Married a Navy guy whom she described as "a nice guy" who was "really shy," had a "troubled" past, and "used to drink a lot." Became a stay-at-home mom, though she noted that she hoped to "take night classes" someday and open a home-based day care business.

6. Tyrec Taylor (black, working-class): went from a decent middle school to a poorly performing city high school, which caused him to get mixed up with "the wrong people" and "g[e]t locked up." His mom stretched financially to get him into private high school for a year, which helped him straighten out. Graduated high school, went to community college for two semesters, at the time of the interview was working a good construction job in lead abatement. His main preoccupation, though, was "simple survival": two of his good friends had been killed by street violence in recent years.

7. Billy Yanelli (white, working-class): dropped out of high school as a sophomore, later got his GED. Was living at home with his parents at the time of the interview and trying to make it into the painters' union (where his father got him an in), but was continually being undermined by behavioral problems and drug use; at the time of the interview, he was on probation and down to his last strike.

8. Katie Brindle (white, poor): dropped out of high school after struggling with drinking, drug use, and fighting. Got pregnant the summer after her sophomore year; having a baby stabilized her but didn't fully resolve her problems, and she ultimately gave the child to her sister to raise. She was briefly married (to a different man than the baby's father) but they divorced before the child was three years old. At the time of the interview, Katie was cleaning houses alongside her mother, who had gotten her the job. Her aspirations were to get her GED, get a better job, and be able to afford her own apartment.

9. Harold McAllister (black, poor): although he was an unrivaled basketball player as a kid, he got derailed when the coach at his high school insisted that he should play football instead and wouldn't let him play basketball. Harold, who had been a pretty solid student up until then, started working full time as a bus boy "to get [his] mind off basketball." Because he worked late hours as a bus boy, he slept through too many school mornings and ended up dropping out six weeks before graduation. At the time of the interview, he was working as a waiter at the same suburban chain restaurant where he'd been a bus boy during high school -- a job that required him to make a two-hour bus commute each way. His aspirations are to get married, have children, and "earn enough money to be able to retire at 35."

It's interesting to survey these outcomes after reading Promises I Can Keep, because both of the lower-income girls did largely follow that pattern: the working-class girl grew up to be a teen mom who married, and the poor girl grew up to be a teen mom who wound up single. The poorer kids in general had much more explicltly gendered childhoods than the middle-class ones, and were raised in accordance with some pretty clear double standards. I didn't see much evidence of that happening in the more affluent and educated homes.

It's also interesting to note that while race had an impact on the kids' trajectories (all the black boys reported experiencing discrimination, even the premed student at Columbia, and all were resigned to it; meanwhile, the working-class white boy got a lot of second chances that he probably wouldn't have otherwise, although he too reported being harassed by the police, on the basis of his class status rather than race), class was a much much bigger determinant of their life outcomes.

Finally, one thing that stuck out to me was that while all the families aspired for their kids to go to college, the working-class and poor families were generally content with high school graduation (and the Yanellis were thrilled when Billy got his GED; Lareau noted that to them, it seemed that "a diploma" was all that mattered, and Billy Yanelli Sr. did not differentiate between a college diploma and a GED). Meanwhile, for the Handlons, it was perceived as a "humiliation" that their daughter flunked out of community college, and her mother visibly blushed and was embarrassed when she realized that Lareau was doing her follow-up interviews during the summer, "before the kids go back to college."

To me, this suggests that aspirations aren't the only factor. Negative social pressure pushes middle-class kids to finish school too. There's a stigma to middle-class kids dropping out of college that the lower-class families don't experience.

I don't know whether that's good or bad (it sure didn't make the Handlons feel great, and it probably pushes some kids into suboptimal decisions), but I do think it's pretty clearly a factor.

Anyway, the conclusion of the book was that in 8 out of 9 cases, the kids appeared to be clearly on a path to mirroring their parents' life outcomes. This suggests that while there is some room for exceptional cases to move upward or downward, those are exceptions, and in general, for most people, the class you're born into will have a significant influence on the class you end up in.

Sociology Readings - Unequal Childhoods (3/5): Further Thoughts

Further notes on Unequal Childhoods (Chs. 10-12, discussing how class differences influence families' interactions with schools):

-- Working-class and poor parents expressed "more distance, distrust, and difficulty in their relationship with educators than occurred [with] middle-class families. [One mother] did not feel that she had the 'words' to 'talk about' what she wanted to cover in [parent-teacher] conferences. Instead, she felt powerless and constrained."

This is in part due to the fact that many of these households relied on physical punishment as a primary means of discipline (reasoning and negotiation was not as emphasized as in the middle-class households) and this "was not in keeping with the standards promoted by professionals." Accordingly, one mother who relied on physical punishment "felt rightfully threatened [by school officials' standard warnings that they were legally bound to report child abuse], since she felt that 'Billy gets so out of control that maybe he does need [a beating with a belt] once in a while.'"

"In short," Lareau concluded, "[this mother's] failure to use reasoning and her adoption of a belt made her vulnerable, since she moved in a 'field' (the school) that privileged reasoning. [Physical punishment] carries a potentially catastrophic risk: that her son could show the teacher the marks on his arm, she could be arrested for child abuse, and her son could be put in foster care."

This worry contributes to "an ongoing feeling of the threat of a looming catastrophe" in the parents' dealings with the school, which "undermines their feeling of trust or comfort at school, a feeling that other researchers have argued is pivotal in the formation of effective and productive family-school relationships."

That whole section was interesting to me because while I was aware of the research showing a more direct correlation between use of physical punishment and lowered life outcomes for kids, *that particular* wrinkle had never occurred to me. And Lareau's research confirms that for middle-class parents, it's literally unimaginable that the school would "come and take my kids away" for that reason; they often joke about it, but for them it's not remotely considered a real possibility. But for all the working-class and poor families who got profiled, physical punishment was a core tool, and the risk of being turned in for abuse was perceived as very real by those parents.

-- Relatedly, because their approach to discipline and problem-solving is different, working-class and poor parents "are likely to regard the school's approach [to discipline] as inappropriate. Many encourage their children -- in direct violation of school rules -- to hit peers who harass them, specifically including the advice to take their retaliatory actions 'when the teacher isn't looking.'"

All else aside, this dramatically raises the risk that the parents are effectively advising their kids to get suspended or expelled (or even arrested and charged as delinquents), which is not helpful for their long-term educational prospects or upward mobility.

-- Another theme was that while working-class and poor parents were very willing to push back verbally against "cable companies, landlords, and local merchants," they did not do so against educators, because "these parents view education as the job of educators and thus they expect teachers and school staff to be the ones primarily responsible for seeing that their children learn all that they should."

However, that isn't the expectation that most teachers hold. They expect that parents will be actively involved as partners working toward the same goal, and "openly criticiz[e]" more passive parents "for not taking more of a leadership role in their children's schooling."

This has major implications when it comes to choosing an appropriate class load for high-schoolers and beginning the college application process, because all of that is highly individualized and requires extensive knowledge of the expectations and requirements that different colleges have, plus how those colleges align with the kid's abilities and goals. For middle-class parents, all of whom were college-educated in this sample, it was relatively easy to navigate the process because they were familiar with the requirements and the various strengths and weaknesses of the competitive schools they were considering.

For the working-class and poor parents, none of whom had a college degree, the whole process was foreign, and most of them didn't have any inkling that they were supposed to be involved at all. They saw that as educators' duty to guide their kids through, and took a much more hands-off approach.

-- Finally, the researchers found "a common tendency among working-class and poor parents to merge authority figures into one indiscriminate group. Thus, classroom teachers, resource teachers, librarians, and principals are usually all referred to as 'the school.'"

One mother in the sample even conflates nurses at two different schools, one assigned to treat her son and the other assigned to treat her daughter in two separate incidents, as "the school." When one nurse (in the mother's mind) overreacted to a minor matter, and the other nurse failed to notice a fairly serious injury some time later, the mother's interpretation was that "the school" as a whole was not to be trusted.

I imagine this doesn't help parents' level of engagement/cooperation with school officials when, e.g., a kid has a single ineffective or unpleasant teacher and, rather than moving their kid to a different class or registering objections to that individual teacher, the parents' conclusion is that the whole monolithic system is against them.

All this stuff is likely obvious to people who have worked in the educational system, but I had never thought about it before and so this was all new to me.

Sociology Readings - Unequal Childhoods (2/5): Intersectionality!

Unequal Childhoods, Chs. 6 and 7, examine differences in language use and development through the prism of two black boys. One is the son of two wealthy professionals, the other that of a single mother in a housing project. It's an interesting (and understated) demo of "intersectionality" that might be worth using to illustrate the idea for people who aren't sure what that's all about.

It's also well worth reading just for its more direct insights: 

"The positive aspects of Harold's upbringing -- the ease he displays with his peers, his resourcefulness in creating games and organizing his own time, his respectful attitude toward adults, his deep connection to family members -- are rendered nearly invisible in the "real world" of social institutions.

Educators, health-care professionals, employers, and others accept (and help to reproduce) an ideology that values, among other things, reasoning and negotiating skills, large vocabularies, facility in speaking and working with strangers, and time management -- the very attributes [that middle-class children] like Alexander develop in their daily lives [via continually being treated as a conversational equal, encouraged and challenged regarding his opinions, and taught new vocabulary and argument techniques in the course of daily life.]

[Over time, these] institutional preferences evolve into institutionalized inequality, as differences come to be defined as deficits."

But back to the intersectionality bit:

The professional couple is very conscious about educating their son in the realities of race, but also in guiding that education to maximize his advantages. His mother takes pains to ensure that he's never the only black kid in any given class or organized activity; she never puts him in a position to be isolated or bullied without someone else at his side. However, at the same time, his parents ensure that he spends lots of time around "cultured" white people, so that he becomes accustomed to and comfortable in their company and social activities.

By contrast, race is seldom or never overtly discussed in the poor kid's life, and he lives in an extremely segregated world where he basically never sees white people who aren't either in the projects to score drugs or government employees checking in on the residents. While he encounters white children and their parents at school, and sees them in the stores and on public transportation that his family frequents, he has no occasion to interact with them socially and is never exposed to upper-middle-class white people or given a chance to develop comfort with their norms.

It doesn't take much squinting to see how that difference in interacting with the people in power is likely to play out when these kids are adults.

Also, I appreciated the author noting that the poor kid's mom does not work and is on welfare. Lareau is careful to show, however, that Ms. McAllister is a dedicated and loving mother who is extremely responsible and hardworking, and the reason she can't work is because she has to look after a whole house full of kids: her own two minor children, plus the children of relatives who are either (at one extreme) lost to drug addiction, or (at the other) striving to break free of poverty by moving to locations that offer more opportunity, but where they can't easily bring their kids.

While there are other relatives who drift in and out and help when they can, it's clear that this mom is the one holding together an extended web of people who depend on her. So I thought that was a nice (and hopefully eye-opening, although it's somewhat underplayed in the text and so might not strike people as hard as it should) example of how sometimes being on welfare is the most positive and responsible choice a person can make. If this mom goes to work, not one but three families lose their emotional center and the warm but watchful guidance that's their kids' best chance to make it out of this world.

Sociology Readings - Doing the Best I Can (2/2)

Yet another factor in relationship sabotage is that "men emphasize that it's critical not to settle." Their ideal conception of marriage is a little different from the middle-class version, though, and similarly different from that expressed by the women in Promises I Can Keep.

These men define their ideal wife as someone who has a job, "since most men insist they shouldn't be expected to support a family on their own; in fact, men often avoid attachments to women who hold the expectation that the man will be the sole provider." In addition to financial support, they want "undying devotion" and "unconditional love to where there is nothing, nothing that you wouldn't do for this person." (The double standard inherent in this arrangement is underscored by the fact that "even in the earliest days of the relationship," many of these men "can't seem to tolerate all the 'togetherness' and are irritated by the idea that they are accountable to their partner for their time." But asking the woman to be selflessly devoted to them is apparently just fine and dandy.)

The upshot is that "[h]olding out hope for eventual marriage [to an idealized and gainfully employed "soul mate"] seems to keep many of our men 'in the market' for a wife even while trying to make a go of it with their children's mothers." Even while suspecting that their girlfriends would be quick to ditch them for "the younger guy in the flashy car," these men are often keeping one eye out for a better catch of their own. "Such a man," the researchers note (in perhaps a bit of understatement!), "will likely fail to invest -- shape up, overlook differences, and be content at home -- to the degree required."

To relieve some of this dissonance, "men embrace the belief that in the end, their relationship with their child is pure and unassailable and should have nothing to do with their relationship to the mother of that child."

At this point, the book examines what these men think their relationship with their children should be. "Providing" is key to their conception of a worthy father, but their definition of "providing" is, uh, pretty flexible:

"[One father] has been more or less living off of [the mom's] family, and [her] steady job, since he graduated from high school, but he helps out with diapers and formula when he can. [He] firmly believes that as long as a father is making an effort, and is at least *part* of the team, he ought to be golden, no matter what portion of the bottom line his contribution constitutes. Note that he does not count the cost of his keep against the value of his sporadic donations."

These men will also often choose to contribute to the upkeep of non-biological children who live in their households (with new girlfriends, after the men have broken up with their own children's mothers), prioritizing them over the men's own biological kids: "If, out of the goodness of his heart, this part-time caterer who lives with the family of his girlfriend [...] spends a hundred dollars on her son Kevin Jr., this contribution is judged as a hundred dollars more than he is obligated to pay. For [the girlfriend], who badly needs the help because Kevin Sr., the boy's father, does nothing, this represents an act of valor."

"In sharp contrast, if [another father] chooses to put a hundred dollars into the hands of his seventeen-year-old son's mother, the woman he says he likes best out of the three he's had a child with, she might rightly point out that this is but a drop in the ocean. The value of his contribution, coming on the heels of seventeen years of neglect, is calibrated to the amount she thinks he was obligated to provide all those years. Thus, if it's gratitude or admiration he's seeking, better to spend the money [on] his fiancee's child."

This creates a dynamic where, once they've become estranged from their children's mothers, men feel more rewarded and appreciated for buying "pricey sneaks, or 'Jordans'" for non-biological children than they do for buying essentials for their own kids. "Most mentally label the mother as the 'primary' financial provider [...] and deem themselves as her 'helper,' responsible only for 'doing the best I can.'" When "the 'good provider' is redefined as the man who is 'doing the best I can,' a father's self-esteem is bolstered at the same time that his perceived financial obligation to his offspring is decreased. The theme of self-sacrifice for the child, so evident in the accounts of the mothers of these chidren, is [sometimes] absent in the narratives of their male partners, except in the abstract."

To assuage their guilt and shame over their inability to provide financial support, many fathers choose to focus on a version of the middle-class ideal of "new fatherhood," which emphasizes warmth, affection, and a loving emotional relationship over financial concerns. However, their version of this relationship "often means relegating all the difficult jobs -- paying the bills, setting the limits, providing the good example -- to [the mother]."

Often this sentiment is rooted in the fathers' own sense of childhood deprivation: "love and not money is what they say they missed most from their own fathers [...] The story men tell of their own histories often reveals that their father's absence, coldness, abuse, or rejection was the source of their own rebellion." But, at the same time, they recognize that defining their obligations in this way "offers a more flexible and forgiving way to proceed," in which "a phone call, a letter or gift in the mail" may suffice to win their children's affection and create a meaningful role. Sometimes this works, and sometimes it doesn't. Quite often, the fathers stop trying after a few years and move on to focusing on their new partners' children.

The researchers asked the fathers to identify "the barriers that kept them from being as involved as they would like with each of their children." The answer was that while sometimes the children's mothers acted as gatekeepers to prevent contact, "[m]ost often, fathers' own limitations and behaviors are the obstacle [...] Substance abuse, criminal behavior, and a lack of financial wherewithal [...] are all common barriers."

"Ultimately," the researchers conclude, "many find that it's easier to start fresh than to persevere." Mothers stay behind with their children, while fathers move "from one household to another as relationships fail and then form," because it "is the physical distance from children from past failed relationships that allows the glittering prospect of a clean slate with a new partner and child. [F]athers enjoying their slice of the whole fatherhood experience in do-over fashion can mentally discount, or simply ignore, their earlier failures as fathers."

And when they fail again, generally, they leave again.

Edin and Nelson conclude their book by suggesting that perhaps one solution (in addition to pursuing policies that increase income and stability for low-skilled workers across the board) might be encouraging low-skilled men to forgo the traditional breadwinner role (which they're mostly unable and unwilling to do anyway) and adopt more of the caretaker role instead.

It's a nice idea and certainly worth encouraging as far as it goes, but I don't really see how you're going to get a guy who chafes against "togetherness" or his girlfriend's "I'm the boss attitude" to suddenly buy into changing diapers or rocking cranky toddlers to sleep. That's going to require a heavy lift in cultural change -- which is not to say that it's impossible, but I'm not optimistic about the short-term prospects of getting immature and irresponsible men to buy into some of the hardest and most stereotypically "women's work" parts of parenting.

This is one situation where I don't really see any good answers. Personally I feel like you kind of have to take down male ego fragility and toxic masculinity (which appear, in my readings, to be much more potent ideas in lower-income neighborhoods) altogether to get very far, and welp good luck with that one.

Sociology Readings - Doing the Best I Can (1/2)

Next up is Doing the Best I Can, by Kathryn Edin and Timothy Nelson: an examination of low-income unmarried parenthood from the other side, this time taking a long hard look at the fathers.

This is in large part a story about a crisis of masculinity among less-educated and unskilled men, who find themselves economically and socially adrift, struggling to define themselves, and often unable to do so satisfactorily. The problem for me, as a reader (and Judgy Person), is that they aren't enduring this crisis in a vacuum; they're doing it in the context of relationships where a lot of other people get to suffer for their largely self-inflicted failures.

But we'll get to that.

Edin and Nelson identified a common pattern to these relationships, which tended to go more or less as follows: boy meets girl, they "begin to affiliate," and within weeks or months, when they consider that they've "moved to the next level," a pregnancy results.

The language used to describe these relationships is telling. Men rarely speak of "love" or "commitment," but rather use less weighted terms like "socializing" or "associating" to describe their level of involvement. They don't generally plan to become fathers, but they don't take precautions either -- they adopt a passive role, letting the girl decide, even if they feel no particular attachment or even liking for that girl.

In the great majority of cases, the couple don't even know each other that well. Children "often enue from relationships that have a haphazard, almost random quality. The women who bear these men's children seem to be indistinguishable from others that they 'get with' but don't happen to become pregnant[...] Precious few men are consciously courting a woman they believe will be a long-term partner around the time that pregnancy issues a one-way ticket to fatherhood."

The men usually take a similarly passive stance as to whether the woman should keep the baby. "While most fathers we spoke to believe abortion is wrong, even those who are strongly morally opposed are typically careful to say [that it's the woman's choice, as she'll be bearing the child]. While this sounds quite progressive, there is often another logic in play [... Because] the buck stops with her[,] men's sense of responsibility for bringing a child into the world in even wildly imperfect circumstances is significantly diminished."

And yet, at the same time, almost all of these men are delighted to become fathers. They don't deny paternity (some even go to great lengths to claim children that aren't theirs) and, contrary to "deadbeat dad" stereotypes, they earnestly, almost desperately want to be involved: "By embracing a less than perfectly planned conception, becoming a father, and attempting to meaningfully engage in a child's life, young men [...] are embracing the chance to do something productive to counteract the problems they see all around them. [...] 'I was happy' [at the news of impending fatherhood] is shorthand for a recognition of a rare opportunity for a clean start in a new role, immense gratitude for that opportunity, and a symbol of one's determination to take up the gauntlet and attempt to 'do right' by a child."

But the seeds of failure are already sown: the relationship with the mother is seldom serious, the responsibility for both conception and carrying the pregnancy to term is laid at the mother's doorstep, and the man's already half backed out from involvement even as the stakes are about to escalate for everyone.

Thus, despite both parties' best intentions and earnest efforts to make things work (and about 85% of these couples do make a serious try at a relationship), most of these fragile pairings fall apart before the baby reaches preschool age.

One major source of friction is that the couple often has nothing in common besides the baby. They don't share the same priorities, goals, or background (several of the couples profiled in this book involved one working-class person and one downright poor person, with all the culture clashes that entails), and they don't have the same expectations for their relationship.

Another major source of friction is that often "stark gender differences emerge in how [the man and woman] each thinks a father ought to respond." Women in these communities often respond to new motherhood by striving for economic stability (which, because of disparate gender expectations and norms, often means that they have to seek out full-time work while also being primary caretaker of the newborn and any other children they may have) and expecting their partners to do the same. The men, however, are seldom as quick to upend their lifestyles, and may cling to old (generally less responsible) habits for longer.

The result is that "[s]uddenly, she's set standards for his behavior that she may never have given voice to before, and he seldom sees this change coming." While middle-class men often respond by buckling down and taking on a more supportive role, "men at the bottom have a sharply different reaction. Women's demands are not met with [acceptance]. Instead, our men become bewildered, aggrieved, and enraged [...] The sudden change in a woman's expectations may, in fact, be read as a betrayal, conclusive evidence that she is lacking in commitment, willing to throw him over as soon as he fails to meet her mounting demands."

"Thus, as soon as a woman has the baby, she can easily be perceived as just one more authority figure -- the kind [these men] have been rebelling against all their lives -- who insists that he shape up and toe the line. And on the financial end she may be viewed as a mere mercenary, just out for his money [...] it is remarkable how men consistently fail to anticipate that their children's mother's expectations will rise after a birth, even if this baby is not their first."

This "makes it easy for him to blame the relationship's demise on her 'I'm the boss attitude' -- and even to extend the character assassination to the entire female half of the population."

Much of this is, of course, rooted in insecurity and the men's gnawing fear that they can't measure up. "Men on the economic edge, even in multiyear partnerships with several children together, often obsess about the younger guy with the nicer car who has a better job and might turn their girlfriend's head." There is a widespread and frequently expressed belief that "the greatest man in the world" would be overlooked by a woman "for somebody driving in a new car, a young guy."

Infidelity often springs from the same root. "[K]eeping multiple women on a string" increases the chances that at any given time, an insecure man "will be able to find at least one woman who will [...] 'ease his mind' and make him feel like a man." Fidelity therefore entails "forfeiting a significant source of esteem as well. Sometimes a marginal young man [may want] someone to believe that he is better than he really is, particularly when the level of his finances or his ability to resist the 'stupid shit' begins to fall short of the escalating demands of his child's mother, who may come to view him as a disappointment."

And so these relationships tend to founder and collapse, in part because the couple may simply be ill-suited to each other, but also often because many of the men are simply not willing to make the commitments necessary to sustain them.

Sociology Readings - Promises I Can Keep (2/2): Why Not Marry?

Notes on Promises I Can Keep, pt. 2: why lower-income women tend not to marry.

Edin and Kefalas found that poor women want very much to get married (70% of their interviewees stated explicitly that marriage was an important life goal for them), and that their ideal conception of marriage is virtually identical to the middle-class ideal: a partnership of equals that provides emotional support, companionship, and a harmonious home in which to raise kids.

The problem is that it's really hard to find a partner who can live up to this ideal when you're poor. Most of the men available to these women are bluntly described by the researchers as "low quality." Infidelity, domestic abuse, substance abuse, and criminal involvement are common; almost all of their respondents had experienced at least one of those issues in a relationship. In these neighborhoods, "good, decent, trustworthy men are in short supply."

(An interesting side note here is that because irresponsibility is more socially tolerated for new fathers than new mothers, and because mothers in these neighborhoods not only expect but welcome the responsibility of "getting serious" when babies arrive, there's actually some evidence that having a baby tends to settle girls down, but has no such effect on boys. The result is that poor moms tend to fare better, economically and behaviorally, than poor dads. The research suggests that having children is actually a stabilizing factor for these women -- it often acts as an incentive to stop fighting, abusing drugs, associating with less stable acquaintances, etc. -- and is part of why, as a group, the mothers often become more responsible and hardworking than their men.)

Compounding the economic and behavioral unsuitability of these men is the fact that poor, unskilled men have not accepted modern gender norms to the same extent that everyone else has. Many of them still expect to be treated like kings of the household, displaying an attitude of explicit sexual ownership and jealousy toward their wives that the women want no part of.

Because of all these factors, the women tend to put off marriage until they're economically stable. If the woman isn't financially dependent on her husband, she has some leverage to demand that he "treat her right," or else she'll walk. Also, "these couples live in a world where the better-off men go to the better-off women," so by improving her own economic position, a poor woman can attract a better class of man. All of this creates a powerful incentive to delay marriage until later in life (many of the women say that the ideal age for marriage is 35 or 40).

Further, because the symbolic importance of marriage as a marker of having "arrived" into the "white picket fence" dream of respectability is so great, "[f]or the poor, divorce is the ultimate loss of face; the couple must bear the reproach of neighbors and kin for daring to think they were ready for marriage in the first place." It's precisely because marriage vows are perceived as so sacred and powerful that the women don't want to risk failure and aren't willing to accept a proposal until they have complete faith in the relationship.

The upshot is that "for a poor single mother to say she's abandoned the goal of marriage is the equivalent of admitting she's given up on her dreams for a better future." But the value of the dream is so great that "the poor avoid marriage not because they think too little of it, but because they revere it. They object to divorce because they believe it strips marriage of its meaning[... and] their prerequisites for marriage reflect the high standards they've adopted."

In this context, with so few gems available amidst the duds, a man's reaction to news of his partner's pregnancy is perceived as a test of his worthiness. It's considered "better to gauge a man's worth early on than waste years investing in a lost cause."

Poor women "see little point in waiting to have children, since they do not believe that having children early will have much effect on their economic prospects later on," and "consider marriage a luxury -- one they desire and hope someday to attain, but can live without if they must."

So what policy prescriptions do the authors see working?

-- A big piece is "improving the quality of the male partners in the pool," via increased employment/job training (and addressing the host of ills that have accompanied the "war on drugs"), plus early intervention to teach relationship skills (which are generally lacking in communities that have few good role models for strong marriages), plus convincing men to delay fatherhood until their late twenties, when most of them age out of crime and delinquency.

-- Social programs that effectively address teen pregnancy among at-risk populations show promise. One of the more effective methods is engaging teenage girls in service learning, giving them "the opportunity to give of oneself and the chance to feel useful to others" via community involvement. (I think this could dovetail neatly with government-sponsored child care in, e.g., paying teenage girls to work as daycare aides.)

-- Asset creation strategies such as EITC, subsidized home ownership/car ownership/education for the poor, and higher minimum wages, make marriage more economically feasible. (The late '90s economic boom, which increased wages even for unskilled workers, spurred a drop in nonmarital childbirth rates, suggesting that when girls saw a viable economic path forward, they were willing to delay childbearing to take advantage of the available opportunity.)

-- In general, anything that effectively reduces inequality and opens opportunities for women who otherwise see no viable paths forward will tend to encourage marriage and delay childbearing.

A few years later, Edin and Kefalas wrote a whole separate book examining poor men's attitudes toward fatherhood, which is next up in the queue.

Sociology Readings - Promises I Can Keep (1/2): Teen Moms!

Kathryn Edin and Maria Kefalas's book Promises I Can Keep explores why poor women have babies so young -- often as teenagers -- and why they don't get married beforehand (or, generally, for many years after). 

Their answers were illuminating. It's not about contraceptive failures (these women know how to use contraception and mostly have decent access to condoms and pills, at least); it's not about wanting a bigger welfare check (both research data and interviewees' self-reports indicate this isn't a factor); it's not about devaluing marriage (to the contrary, marriage was a longed-for dream).

It's almost entirely cultural, and I was surprised at how conservative that culture felt to me, given that its most visible result is teenage girls dropping out of school and having kids, which conservatives generally rail against. But, in fact, the women's values and ideals seemed to me to be rooted in '80s culture warrior concepts, just transposed to a socioeconomic setting where it led to this result.

First, children are prized in these neighborhoods. They "are nearly always viewed as a gift, not a liability -- a source of both joy and fulfillment whenever they happen upon the scene. They bring a new sense of hope and a chance to start fresh. Thus, most women want the baby very much once the pregnancy occurs." Moreover, "the way in which a young woman reacts in the face of a pregnancy is viewed as a mark of her worth as a person. And as motherhood is the most important social role she believes she will play, a failure to respond positively is a blot on her sense of self."

Abortion is viewed as immoral and irresponsible (especially when it's for something "selfish" such as pursuing education); adoption is "giving away your own flesh and blood." The responsible choice, for which there is considerable social pressure, is to "deal with it" and keep the baby.

And most of these girls desperately want that baby. "In choosing to bring a pregnancy to term, a young woman can capitalize on an important and rare opportunity to demonstrate her capabilities to her kin and community. Her willingness and ability to [... rise] to the challenge of the most serious and consequential of all adult roles is clear evidence that she is no longer a 'trifling' teenager." Motherhood is viewed as the highest purpose of being a woman.

Thus, in this social context, the rewards of keeping the baby are far greater, and the opportunity costs of doing so are far lower. Keeping a baby is "the surest source of accomplishment within [the girls'] reach: becoming a mother." It's a source of pride and fulfillment. The baby represents having arrived into adult responsibility, and provides love and a strong relationship in a context where most women report little trust in their neighbors, no close friends, and weak kinship ties. The "choice to have a child despite the obstacles that lie ahead is a compelling demonstration of a young woman's maturity and high social stature," and is often the only source of meaning or purpose in the women's lives.

And they're not giving up much to get it. Edin and Kefalas note that "early childbearing is highly selective of girls whose other characteristics -- family background, cognitive ability, school performance, mental health status, and so on -- have already diminished their life chances so much that an early birth does little to reduce them farther." The research indicates that "[d]isadvantaged girls who bear children have about the same long-term earnings trajectories as similarly disadvantaged youth who wait until their mid or late twenties to have a child." In other words, they're really not losing anything.

The upshot is that these women live in a world where, unlike middle-class women, they have little opportunity to develop rewarding professional careers or identities, and no clear idea of how to get there. The only clear opportunity they have to adopt a meaningful social identity is as a mother, and because so many of them grow up raising siblings or neighborhood kids, parenting involves a familiar skillset that they're confident they can execute well. Further, the stress, loneliness, and anomie of a life that lacks direction "create a profound drive to make life more meaningful" by becoming a mother and thus having a purpose.

Take out women's ability to define themselves via education and career, emphasize motherhood as the pinnacle of femininity and the most rewarding part of a woman's life (not to mention the measure of her worth as a person), paint abortion as the choice of the selfish and immature, and what you get is a cultural context in which it makes a lot of sense for a teenage dropout seeking validation and meaning to find the purpose of her life in a baby.

So that's half the equation. The other half is why they don't get married. I'll summarize that part next time I feel like talking to myself on the internet for a while.

Sociology Readings - Unequal Childhoods (1/5): Those Entitled Kids!

I'm currently reading Annette Lareau's Unequal Childhoods, an in-depth examination of 12 families (some professional, some working class, some poor) and how their child-rearing styles led to divergent outcomes for the kids.

I'm barely past the beginning, but it's interesting to note that one of the major drawbacks she sees for the middle-class kids is that they sometimes become "entitled." So I was like: oh, that's a word you see casually flung around on the internet a lot these days, I wonder what it meant to a sociology researcher in 2003.

It turns out what she meant is that these kids grow up being unafraid of adults and willing to assert themselves. They make and sustain eye contact even as seven- and eight-year-olds. They know how to shake hands. They're not afraid to direct adults' attention to their own concerns (the example Lareau uses is of a third-grader who interrupts his doctor's standard spiel to talk about a rash that had gone unnoticed). Sometimes this shades into negative behaviors (they are, after all, still children, and can be selfish, presumptuous, or trivial in their concerns), but by and large these are kids who are brought up unafraid of authority and who thus grow up to become assertive in professional settings.

The poor and working-class kids, on the other hand, generally don't interrupt adults or carry themselves with as much confidence. Taught to be polite and respectful, they're more likely to go through interactions with adults without asserting themselves, and to feel confused and frustrated afterwards because they weren't able to get their concerns addressed effectively. These patterns often continue to hold true for them as adults. They can't move as easily into leadership or management positions, and they often feel like people in positions of authority don't take them seriously.

A lot of things clicked into place for me when I read this. It seems so obvious in retrospect, but I feel like now I have a better handle on a number of dynamics going on there. It makes more sense to me now why some adults might resent "entitled" children who are more at ease in those environments than they themselves are, and it also makes sense to me why some number of children who are taught to be assertive will go overboard in that direction and come off as poncy little princelings.

What's most interesting to me about the book so far, though, is how early and how thoroughly those soft skills are transferred along class lines. Lareau argues that there's no inherent reason that "concerted cultivation" (the intense schedule of soccer practice, music lessons, etc. that many middle-class parents do) is better or worse than "natural growth" (the benign neglect and greater freedom that most working-class and poor children grow up in), BUT modern American society places a high value on assertive individuals who navigate social structures with confidence. The less confident and less assertive, on the other hand, often have a harder time getting ahead.

So, while there's no inherent reason one parenting style is better than the other, the surrounding social structure rewards one more highly.

It's also probably worth dropping a footnote that the extreme insecurity and competitiveness of American society is the reason that you have so many exhausted and overscheduled eight-year-olds. The legacy of Ayn Rand is, in part, miserable second-graders. So that's cool.

_Random Family_

I've mentioned _Random Family_ by Adrian Nicole LeBlanc a few times in other posts, but it came to mind again today as I was reading a couple of NYT articles (about which more later).

_Random Family_ follows two women in the poorest part of the Bronx for about 20 years. It covers the people who circle in and out of their lives, their children, their mothers (not so much their fathers; fathers aren't a big part of this world), their doomed and floundering affairs with doomed and floundering men. It's clear-sighted about the weaknesses in their characters and the poor choices that they make, and they make a bunch of poor choices.

The first time I read the book, I was in a pretty uncharitable frame of mind, because when you spend all day every day dealing with people like this in some of their worst moments (i.e., after they get deservedly locked up for doing bad things -- and it's to LeBlanc's credit that she makes it clear these people get deservedly locked up for doing bad things; ain't no "but he's really innocent!" excuse-making here), it's hard to look at these lives of repeated bad decisions (and they are all lives of repeated bad decisions) and not want to yell "WHAT IS WRONG WITH YOU, WHY YOU KEEP DOING THIS."

But the second time through (and in no small part due to Peter's prodding for me to pay more attention to the surrounding factors), it became pretty clear why they kept making terrible decisions: because there weren't any good decisions that these people could make. There's only "bad" and "worse."

The people in _Random Family_ are just people. They each have some gifts: one woman is uncommonly beautiful and spirited; another is warm and open-hearted and devoted to her family. But the environment in which they live does not allow them to make good use of those gifts, and it takes advantage of their weaknesses relentlessly. It punishes them viciously for every misstep, offers them no way out, and ensures that any small mistake keeps them locked down in poverty for life.

The beautiful woman never has the chance to parlay her looks into a trophy marriage or modeling career. Her world doesn't include the kind of people who could make that happen for her, and (due to terrible role models and perverse societal incentives) she doesn't have the skills to sustain a lasting relationship anyway. The one rich man she meets (who immediately snatches her up, because she's the kind of girl you snatch up) is a violent, abusive drug dealer who eventually gets locked up and takes her down with him. But there never was a better prince that this Cinderella could have picked.

The kindhearted woman never has the chance to build a close and loving family, although it's clear that in other circumstances she would have been one of those cozy lovey-dovey homemakers whose Pinterest makes you want to stab things. Instead, the family she actually has -- a temperamental and drug-abusing mom, various unreliable boy-men, and children she can't afford or care for -- drag her down into self-mutilating madness and keep her trapped forever, because she loves them too much to ever say "no" and cut them dead.

Her sister does, and though the sister's only a minor character in the book, she's still pretty instructive. The sister is the closest possible thing to an ice-cold Ayn Randian golem of self-interest, and she barely makes it to the ranks of the struggling working poor, and it takes a tremendous psychological toll on both her and her husband to get that far. People are not meant to live in a way that turns loving social relationships into liabilities. People are not meant to choose between affection and survival. If you have to make that choice constantly for years, it eats your soul. And even then, even if you have the wherewithal to make that trade, lack of skills and schooling will ensure you only make it to the next-up rank of the exploited.

The one flaw in _Random Family_ is that it doesn't really talk about the schools available in this setting. You have to read Jonathan Kozol's _Savage Inequalities_ or a comparable exploration of underfunded (and de facto segregated) schools to get that important part of the picture. In _Random Family_, people just drop out of school casually and it seems like a total bonehead move (WHY YOU DON'T TAKE THE AVAILABLE ROAD OUT); it's only when you see how dire the available schools are, and how illusory their promise of escape-through-education actually is, that you realize "oh, that's not a way out after all." There's no reason to stay in school when the school offers you nothing useful.

Anyway, I thought about this all again when I was reading the latest Edsall thing on "What Does It Take to Climb Up the Ladder?" and, as a companion piece, this profile on three Kansas kids weighing their college choices.

And I've been thinking about it in connection with all those pieces talking about the "diseases of despair" (Case and Deaton have a new set of findings out; surprise!, less-educated white people are dying even more than they thought previously) and the hollowing of poor white communities by opiate addiction and family dysfunction, and how the pathologies of the urban inner city are moving out to those communities.

I have considerably less sympathy for the plight of heroin-addicted suburban people, mostly because they're still one generation removed from middle-class stability and are therefore at a point where it's still fair to talk about "character" and "personal responsibility" as factors here. If you grew up in a stable, loving household and you had the opportunity to go to school in a meaningful way and not everybody in your personal universe was a dead end of dysfunction your whole entire life, yeah, in my view that choice kind of is on you. You had better options. You just didn't pick them.

But the fact remains that these people's kids won't have that choice. These people's kids are going to grow up in a universe that in some respects looks more like the one in _Random Family_ than the one their parents had. Not totally -- they'll still have some advantages and some escape routes that wouldn't be available to people in the Bronx in 1992 -- but close enough that it's a similar conversation.

What that conversation needs to be, I think, is how you offer ladders up and out. How do you make good choices feasible? Because "character" and "personal responsibility" stop being adequate answers as soon as we start talking about children born into homes that won't teach those things and communities that won't reward them. "Character" and "personal responsibility" aren't answers that can save anybody in _Random Family._ Increasingly, they're not going to save the opiate-addicted ruins of the formerly middle-class.

It's a good book. I recommend reading it if you want a clear and honest picture of people often subject to stereotype as lazy welfare grifters. The fact is, they're often frustrating to read about and they do make a bunch of terrible decisions -- but it's useful to question what decisions they could possibly make that would be better, and whether it's truly reasonable to expect kids (because they're usually kids when they make the first big mistake that crimps all future options) to do better, and what We As A Society might do to improve things.

I also think it's pretty key to understanding how somebody like me can simultaneously be a Big Government Liberal and spend all day hitting people with sticks for doing bad things. Those two things aren't really in conflict, but you might need to read something like _Random Family_ to see why.