Global growth is certainly on the tips of international tongues this week, while at home, we're sorting through "toughening up" on the completely non-existent "crime epidemic," sneakily capping immigration applications under the guise of lightening the applicant backlog, and burning government documents. Cue Hitler and Mussolini associations and Christy Clark's ignorant pontificating about babies and bath water.
Underlying the above rhetoric are wild individualism and questions of social responsibility, only intensifying as does our state of environmental crisis. It seems to be increasingly trickling out of colloquial speak as well. At a training clinic on Wednesday, a pack of us ran through Ottawa's Tent City during an Occupy General Assembly. One fellow runner's comments, celebrated by cheers and laughs in the group, were very racist and so irritatingly "I Did It My Way" that I lied and told him I had a tent out there just to shut him up. It served to lessen his cruelty, which was all I could hope for on our one-hour sweatfest. I was surprised at the politics of the bunch of outgoing, athletic professionals. We get along so well.
A friend of mine (friend used loosely) recently argued that attributing causality to problems of social stratification is a classic battle of competing ideologies. I actively listened to his points.
I can't accept this. I think my attitude is how wars happen (oops), but it baffles me when folks wipe clean a 50-year body of literature that demonstrates the impact of dominant cultural repertoires on differential advantages for children and adults. Kids don't cultivate talent or foster cognitive and social skills in black boxes. In this globalized world, how can we deny the impact of institutional infrastructure on our opportunity or lack thereof?
In 1959(1959!!), prominent sociologist C. Wright Mills wrote, "The life of the individual cannot be adequately understood without references to the institutions within which his [sic] biography is enacted." - The Sociological Imagination
It's silly to me that most neoliberal precepts deny our everyday performance within a cloud of in/formal institutions. Post-war/classical liberalism, while individualist/ableist in ethos, at least nodded to structural inequality. I asked to said loose friend, were you born understanding how to impress your date with your wine decanting skills? I think not.
He didn't get it.
I don't situate this line of thought within the broader nature vs. nurture hassle, though this often becomes the misguided endpoint of pub discussion. Mine is not an abstract philosophical consideration of human nature (though I'll go there...). To me, it's a simple and intuitive acknowledgement that we percolate in a kind of bureaucratic tank that enables "upward mobility" alongside "slipping through the cracks." If we can accept this, we can get on to bickering about how to address differential advantages to children - assuming we believe it's problematic.
Illustrating the structural perspective, Annette Lareau and her team at the Uni of Cali intensely observed 12 families (of upper-middle class or working class households) in their homes. They highlight three main ways in which social class affects children's lives: the organizational structure of daily life, language use, and interactions between families and institutions. Their findings are not staggering, but serve to reiterate the perceived value of cultivating a child that, I argue, has coalesced into a moralized science of modern day child rearing with little wiggle room. This science is grounded in neoliberal notions of responsible citizen and choice.
Lareau condenses her findings into two cultural logics of child rearing: "concerted cultivation" versus the "accomplishment of natural growth." In other words, "make sure your child has a sport and an instrument," versus, "make sure your child has enough to eat and graduates high school." Assuming a playing field of substantive inequality, Lareau observes middle class parents maximizing/juggling their child's structured interactions in extra-curriculars while working class parents struggle to put food on the table, clean clothes at the laundromat, and rely on a shoddy transit system to run errands.
I paraphrase the team's condensed findings in this handy little chart (as I self-loathe my impetus to categorize):
Typology of Child-Rearing Approach | ||
Concerted Cultivation | Accomplishment of Natural Growth | |
Key Element | Parent actively foster’s kids skills/talents | Parent allows child to grow |
Organization of Daily Life | Leisure activities monitored by adults | Lots of “hanging out” with kin |
Language Use | Reasoning and negotiations between kid and adults | General acceptance of adult directives by kid |
Interventions in Institutions | Questioning of institutional authority by kid (as s/he has been trained to do) | Dependence on institutions, with corresponding sense of powerlessness/frustration/conflict |
Consequence | Sense of entitlement | Sense of constraint |
I guess the ideal would be to put the punks in piano lessons and swim club and dump them in the middle of the forest for 3 hours of afternoon chaos time. To my chagrin, what generally happens with such findings as the above is co-optation by socially conservative functionalists who interpret them to mean: we must groom our children into the left column to ensure upward social mobility. Admittedly, I'd probably do the same given the evidence. [Interesting aside, the kids on the left also fought with their siblings all the time and used the word "hate" regularly (and often to describe their siblings). The kids on the right laughed more.]
But then we are complicit in this rewards system. For now, I depart from my insistence upon structural approaches to policy and leave with this question: which is the more ethical parenting style? One that resists systemic discrimination but results in a child's structural disenfranchisement? Or one that allows the child a sense of entitlement to the coffers of the state on the foundational exclusion of other children?
So help me, if I have twins, they're going to be lab rats.
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ReplyDeleteWhat an interesting post! The findings of this study are indeed intriguing though I wonder in what year this study was conducted. There is something about the way that these two cultural logics are presented by this team that I intuitively object to. I understand that this is a theoretical approach but do these categories really have to be presented as mutually exclusive? Contemporary families are increasingly complex - blended families offer the possibility of 'blending' socio-economic backgrounds and social realities. This is so increasingly common that I wonder if it renders these generalities useless.
ReplyDeleteAlso, this analysis leaves out the issue of race. Parents might be formally or informally educated, thereby equipped with the tools to engage with their children in a way that promotes critical understanding of institutional access or functioning, and a healthy and empowering engagement with authority - or 'language use' as they put it, but face discrimination for other reasons and are thereby dependent on state institutions because they are forced to be.
Though on the other hand I understand that the unveiling of structural discrimination is the implied goal of this study... I guess I just take issue with the 'language use' and 'interventions in institutions' elements of this analysis.
As for the question you pose... I wonder how alternate schools fit into this. Waldorf, Montessori kids are perceived as primed for a future of elitism, though fall outside of the mainstream and run counter to dominant educational paradigms and structures.
Thanks for the thoughtful break from the daily grind...
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ReplyDeleteThanks for commenting! Love this. I'm guessing you removed your first comment due to grammatical error? Me too ;)
ReplyDeleteThe study is fairly contemporary -2003, and a republished longitudinal analysis in 2011 - though it's interesting that you flag this, as I had a similar sense of its dated-ness when reading. Perhaps the combination of US context and fairly typical/uncritical sociological methods makes it a little unrelatable. I agree that it is limited in its focus on class, and this makes it feel old. While Lareau nods to alternative modes of identity (mostly race, with a few mentions of gender), hers is not a truly intersectional analysis.
I completely agree that the two categories of analysis lose credibility when presented as mutually exclusive. As a theoretical framework, of course, the binaries serve to show us something about the impact of class on a major kinship organization in the urban US, but it doesn't allow for consideration of emotional and material components of blended and moving families - forms of which are, as you mention, increasingly normative. Nuclear family bias, for sure.
This said, I imagine Lareau's understanding of the many ways socioeconomic status affects parenting and childhood can be extrapolated to other family forms and consideration of how access to resources (perhaps including the affect of displacement on housing security, transportation and accessibility to basic needs and extracurricular activities) impacts a child's negotiation with institutions.
Of institutions, I value Lareau's presumption that a child's style of interacting with institutions is linked to an adult's social mobility. It's a basic recognition, but one that is often taken for granted in parenting manuals that are presented as apolitical and commonsense. But you're right - the immaterial barriers of social class (like racism) shape these interactions in ways that can't be ignored. This brings me to your language comment - I also cringed at the "language use" finding! I should explain, though, that Lareau dedicates an entire chapter to this analytic. She looks at a whole slew of language use components from how parents speak to their children who can not yet talk, to how children use whining, to the number of words parents use for directives. The nuances of sociolinguistic style fell by the wayside in my Western liberal chart-think. Sorry bout that :P
As for the alternate schools, I think that in the US this factor would be imbued with class privilege even more than in Canada (even if schools are publicly funded). I surmise that as resistant as these schools are to mainstream pedagogical techniques and disciplinary boundaries, there are factors related to social class that are difficult to measure (like increased parental involvement in student learning, and an open-mindedness in parents to being with). Where to go with this... more research.
Thank YOU for the thoughtful break :)