Unequal Childhoods: Class, Race and Family Life

"This is one of the best books I have ever read, period. The author managed to convince dozens of regular families from all socio-economic backgrounds to let her and her research team hang out in their homes and observe them in the course of their normal day-to-day activities. This meant researchers were in your living room, watching TV with you and your kids. They were in your dining room as you tried to help your kid with homework. They were accompanying you to your parent-teacher conference, the dentist, the grocery store. It’s hard for me to imagine anything more bizarre and awkward than what Lareau pulled off to do this research. She found that higher-income and lower-income families make radically different kinds of investments and choices related to their children. It has nothing to do with love or devotion. It has to do with the kinds of expertise and resources that upper-class parents are able to bring to this problem. You cannot read her book and come away with any other view than that child skill development—making the most of children’s potential contributions—is very hard, and is not an egalitarian activity. It is something that requires immense skill and wealth to really pull off confidently. And I think it’s an incredible contribution to make that fact so tangible and vivid in these minute-by-minute experiences that families shared with her and her research team. I found it profoundly absorbing and profoundly important. It’s rare to see both those things in the same book. It’s one of the greatest social science achievements of all time. The more affluent families were doing things quite deliberately to try to benefit their children. They were making choices to put their kids in all kinds of extracurricular activities and to manage their health and education very carefully. Through the lens of their professional skills and attitudes, they thought this was bringing value to their children. The lower-income parents were not really symmetric. There were exceptions of course, but they were often not fully aware of the implications of their parenting style, and the opportunities that their children were missing. Part of my goal in my book was to bring greater awareness of the importance of these missed opportunities so that lower-income parents can start to get a little bit angry that their children are being denied some of these opportunities."