Peter Levine

Lareau has some of the ethnographer's reluctance to judge, to apply normative opinions. Besides, she evidently likes all the kids in her study; she depicts them all sensitively and sympathetically. Nevertheless, her findings support strong and perhaps unexpected comparative value-judgments. The poor and working-class kids are in many ways more attractive than the middle-class ones. They obey their parents' (relatively infrequent) instructions without whining--which is the bad side of negotiation. They are creative and skillful in organizing their own activities, including complex games. They are almost never bored. They fight with their siblings much less than middle-class children do--in fact, they rely on their relatives for support and entertainment, and enjoy one another's company. They play happily in groups of mixed ages. Their parents like them to have free time because they don't want them exposed (yet) to the daily grind of adult life.

In contrast, the middle-class kids are immediately bored when not provided with organized activities. They compete for attention with their siblings. (After all, when Mom is at brother's soccer practice, she's not doing anything for sister.) They constantly bargain with adults, including authority figures. They have a pervasive sense of entitlement to expensive goods and individualized services. They lack experience working with others of different ages or solving problems without adult intervention. Again, each subject is a likable human being, but many aspects of middle-class family childhood are unappealing.

Although the middle-class kids are less attractive than the poor and working-class children, their parents' investment will probably pay off for them. These children have precocious skills of verbal expression and negotiation, time-management, and public performance that will serve them well in the white-collar world. They consider themselves entitled to excellent services and demand it from adults and institutions. Their expectations and behavior are perfectly in synch with those of middle-class professionals (teachers, coaches, and physicians), who respond to their needs. As kids, they are tired and quarrelsome. As grownups, they will prosper.

This is Lareau's main argument. It fits with my own unsystematic observations in three schools where I have worked or my kids have attended. I found only one aspect of the main argument unpersuasive. Lareau sees classes as distinct, each with its own "logic," or "culture." She criticizes the more common theory that people are smoothly distributed along gradients of income and education, so that any change in wealth or years of schooling will influence outcomes. Lareau may be correct, but her data can't prove her point, because her sample was deliberately constructed by drawing from two distinct groups: upper-middle class suburbanites and poor to moderate-income urban residents. It didn't contain gradations of socio-economic status that might produce gradations in parenting styles. In one family (Chapter 9), the mother has a community-college degree instead of the advanced degrees possessed by the other suburban parents. She attempts a partial strategy of concerted cultivation with mixed results. I suspect that a larger sample would find many other intermediate cases like this one.