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.
No comments:
Post a Comment