Unequal Childhoods: Class, Race, and Family Life

Lareau opens by introducing Garrett Tallinger, a white middle-class fourth grader, and Alexander Williams, a Black middle-class fourth grader, who both live busy and tailored lives with many different activities in modest but more than decent houses. Lareau calls this “concerted cultivation” (2), which is designing a child’s life to cultivate their talents in a specific and direct way and “eliciting their children’s feelings, opinions, and thoughts” (3). On the other side are the blue-collar neighborhoods, where Wendy Driver (white), Harold McAllister (Black), and Little Billy Yanelli (white) (all three also in fourth grade) live in public housing. Their lives consist of little or no extracurricular activities, and extended family is a major focus. The parents of these working-class families see the obligations of parenthood differently than their middle-class counterparts, believing that children should be treated as children. In this way, they are less directive in the way their children spend their free time, which Lareau calls the “accomplishment of natural growth” (3). Lareau argues that institutions such as schools are designed to use concerted cultivation. Middle-class children develop a sense of entitlement, which gives them more trust in and power within institutions, whereas working-class children often develop “an emerging sense of distance, distrust, and constraint” (3) in institutions.