begins early: Annette Lareau notes that children often play with cousins and that “it
would be hard to overstate the importance of family” in white working-class lives.^88 For
decades, my sister-in-law went grocery shopping every weekend with her mother, which
I thought was bizarre until I decided it was brilliant. Now I go to Costco every weekend
with my son, but I don’t know anyone else who does anything like that. A man described
to Hochschild that he “had grown up in a dense circle of aunts, uncles, cousins, and
grandparents all within walking distance of each other.”^89 Again, there are material
reasons that make it harder for working-class people to just pull up roots and move.
Blue-state families are better off than red-state ones, who have higher rates of teenage
pregnancy and lower ages of marriage and first birth,^90 as progressives delight in pointing
out as an example of hypocrisy. But that’s not the point. Family values are about
aspiration. Until about 1980, young adults in the working class were like college grads:
they waited to have children until they were married. But now Americans who are not
college grads don’t wait.^91 Instead they behave more like the poor, who have been
having children out of wedlock for quite a while.^92
Why? Americans tend to associate marriage with the white picket fence—a stable job,
stable home, stable life. If you feel that stability is attainable, you wait until you have it
before marriage and kids. But if Americans feel that’s not a practical goal, or only an
extremely long-term and aspirational one, they tend not to marry. The decline in marriage
is a symptom of the working class’s economic decline—not, as some argue, its cause.^93
The rootlessness of the PME makes sense in their lives: they have friends and classmates
throughout the country or the world, their job markets are national or global, their family
ties are chiefly emotional rather than practical or economic—and when someone in the
professional class moves, they can maintain those emotional ties through unlimited
international data plans.^94 But both the poor and the working class of all races typically
are deeply rooted, both by disposition and necessity. You can’t provide child care for
your grandchildren via Skype.
- Why Doesn’t the Working Class Just Move to Where the Jobs Are?