CHAPTER 7
Why Don’t They Push Their Kids Harder to Succeed?
CHILDREN LEARN CLASS at their mothers’ knee. Childrearing, like so many other
aspects of daily life, is demarcated by class. Working-class and low-income families
follow what Annette Lareau, in her important book Unequal Childhoods , called the
“accomplishment of natural growth.” They view “children’s development as unfolding
spontaneously, as long as they [are] provided with comfort, food, shelter” and other
basics. Providing these represents a challenge and is held to be a considerable
achievement.^121
Clear boundaries exist between parents and children, with prompt obedience expected:
crucial training for working-class jobs.^122 Class migrants often note with shock the
disrespectful way professional elite children talk of and to their parents. Noted bell
hooks, whose father worked for 30 years as a janitor, “we were taught to value our
parents and their care, to understand that they were not obligated to give us care.”^123
The ideology of natural growth prevalent among the poor and the working class contrasts
with the “concerted cultivation” of the professional elite. “[T]he older children’s
schedules set the pace of life for all family members,” notes Lareau, and that pace was
intense. Elite children do far more organized activities (4.6 for white children, 5.2 for
black children) than do nonelite kids (2.3 and 2.8, respectively).^124 Elite kids’
Taylorized^125 leisure time helps them develop the skills required for white-collar jobs:
how to “set priorities, manage an itinerary, shake hands with strangers, and work on a
team,” “work smoothly with acquaintances,” and handle both victory and defeat “in a
gracious way.”^126 Everything is scheduled by adults, and the schedule is intense:
“Tomorrow is really nuts. We have a soccer game, then a baseball game, then another
soccer game,” said one dad. Unlike in nonelite families, children of the elite are taught
not to prioritize family: Lareau describes a child who decides to skip an important family
gathering because soccer is “more of a priority.”^127
Concerted cultivation is the rehearsal for a life of work devotion: the time pressure, the
intense competition, the exhaustion with it all, the ethic of putting work before family.
The pressure-cooker environment in elite homes often strikes the working class as off. “I
just kept thinking these kids don’t know how to play,” said a class migrant from a self-
described “hillbilly” family.^128 “I think he doesn’t enjoy doing what he’s doing half the
time [light laughter],” one woman told sociologist Annette Lareau. Others acknowledged
- Why Don’t They Push Their Kids Harder to Succeed?