In recent years I've asked students in my undergraduate Microsociology course to come to terms with their social-class origins in a term paper.  They borrow concepts from Annette Lareau's Unequal Childhoods and Julie Bettie's Women without Class and they write personal narratives in which they press these concepts into service.  I love the exercise.  I get to see our student majors in their family context, and I learn a wealth of privileged detail about them that would otherwise remain hidden from my awareness.  My students emerge with a richer view of their own identities.  They learn how to discourse about social class, and they begin to see themselves as classed subjects rather than simply a bunch of individuals.

 They start with Lareau, who neatly summarizes her work elsewhere in this newsletter.  A beauty of her research is its utter accessibility, as she lays out her material with broad brushstrokes and bold categories.  Natural growth is the way of parents and kids in working-class and poor (wc) families; concerted cultivation is the approach for parents and kids in middle-class (mc) families.  Spontaneous, child-organized activities (typically in the company of siblings and cousins) are what wc kids do after school; adult-organized and adult-managed activities are what mc kids do.  Non-negotiable directives and scant focus on cognitive and reasoning skills are the approach of wc parents; verbal negotiation and an intense cultivation of cognitive skills and language use are favored by mc parents. And retreat from (and suspicion of) middle-class institutions are found among wc parents, whereas active manipulation of these institutions for their children's benefit are found among mc parents. The outcome of these processes is a constrained self in the typical wc kid and an entitled self in the typical mc kid.

 I ask my students to think back to age 10, the age of Lareau's target children (yes, this is not ideal science; retrospective accounts are suspect). I caution them to begin this exercise with the recognition that here they are, sitting in a college classroom, primed to graduate from a four-year university program. Regardless of their origins, they are riding a middle-class train, which means that somewhere along the way they must have acquired enough middle-class cultural capital to get on board. Exactly how that happened is the challenge of the term paper.

 Earnestly, my students stretch to fit themselves to these concepts, and many of them do so splendidly.  Most of them wind up straddling the fence, however, suggesting that in some ways their upbringing was a matter of concerted cultivation while in other ways it more closely approximated the model of natural growth. Very few students report the entire array of features that typically cluster together within Lareau's typology, and there is enormous variation across students regarding which elements of their background match up to the model and which do not. 

For example, Jane's involvement in adult-organized activities-she often rushed frenetically from one to the other-could be right out of Lareau.  But many other students recall far more spontaneous child-organized activity on their street or neighborhood, with little involvement or input from adults. Several of them report playing with nearby cousins almost every day, a pattern that Lareau found to be more typical within working-class families. 

Regarding cognitive development, again I found a lot of variation.  Jane recalls: "My mother would read novels to us every night before we went to bed, and we looked forward to it all day."  She writes of conversations "always going on" in her family and of constantly being encouraged "to use bigger words." She recalls heated and contentious verbal negotiations with her parents":  "Whatever made me think that I could talk back to the people that brought me into this world and treat them with such disrespect?  It had to have been a sense of entitlement."  In contrast, Felicia's story suggests an approach to cognitive development that was very different from Jane's.  "At my school," she writes, "we were forced to take a book out of the library every week and read it.  At home, my mom refused to fudge the forms unless I actually read the book and she had to see me doing it, and she refused to answer anything other than 'because you have to' when I begged the question 'why.' After a while I came to really enjoy reading, but all the critical thinking and language skills I developed weren't from home and definitely weren't from my friends.  My mom never asked what I was reading or what it was about.  I think she was just concerned that I read because of the importance of it in school."  Felicia recalls little in her upbringing that resembled the tendency in middle-class homes of children being catered to and treated as being special.  "My mom often treated my world as 'lesser' than her adult world.  It was a repeated process with a variety of things, and most definitely furthered a 'constrained-me.'  For the longest time, particularly later on in high school, my self-esteem was and remained fairly low because I couldn't get past that thought." 

Lareau's account of middle-class parents being ever-ready to intervene in institutions on their children's behalf likewise finds uneven support among my students.  Matthew's experience confirms the pattern, and he writes of an interesting variation. He recalls discussions with his parents about frustrations he was having within this or that activity, and his parents would then coach him about how he might intervene on his own behalf:  "I wanted to play first base on my baseball team my fifth grade year.  My parents and I talked about how I could approach the coach before the game and explain that I had played first base on my farm league team and would really like to try it.  Their interest and rehearsal of me talking with the coach enabled me to articulate what I was going to say and how I was going to say it.  These types of rehearsals followed me into the future.  I would find myself thinking about what I was going to say to a teacher or coach when I was not pleased with what was going on.  In high school and even today, I feel confident in asking for certain changes or explanations in my grades.  This confidence develops from a sense of entitlement that I deserve answers and accommodations to my personal needs."  In contrast, Jane's parents didn't quite fit the intervention and entitlement mold.  She sometimes felt they were "intimidated by people with a high education or who had a lot of power, such as doctors," and she reports that she too carries this legacy of feeling "intimidated by people who carry a lot of power." "I am almost afraid they are looking down on me because I am not as educated."  Entitlement in Jane's case seems to be mixed with more than a modicum of constraint-middle-class patterns mixed with elements that are held to be more often present among the working class and poor.

The place of extended family in some of my students' upbringing likewise muddies some of the patterns in Lareau's broad brushstrokes.  Unlike most or all of Lareau's middle-class families, who rarely had any kin within a short drive, some of my students report regular, even daily interaction with kin.  Marlene, for example, recalls that her extended family "greatly helped my parents create the middle-class environment and benefits that I came to know and the 'entitled self' that I was shaped into."  She adds, "I was read to constantly as a young child.  I remember vividly my parents, grandparents, aunts, uncles and cousins reading to me."  Sylvia offers a similar account of kin involvement, one that is tied to both her organized activities and her cognitive cultivation:  "It was not just my parents who were involved in my life," she writes.  "I remember my grandparents (both sets), aunts and uncles, and cousins were all very important.  They would go watch my baseball games, my clarinet and choir recitals, and school plays.  Any event that I was a part of, my whole family was usually there.  I think it was a lot easier because they all live on my dirt road or within five minutes of me.  My brother and I have our own bedroom at our grandparents' house, and I remember I would sleep there as often as I could. Whenever I did, my grandmother would read books to me, play games, and put puzzles together-all of which I think helped to contribute to my language use."

Here we have a few exemplars of some social-class origins of students in a Microsociology class at the University of Maine.  Most of them grew up in Maine, in small towns and little villages rather than the urban milieu in which Lareau's families were located.  That may make a big difference in how social-class patterns shake out.  Moreover, the fact that all these young adults will graduate from a four-year institution of higher education does not portend the same social-class destination for all of them.  Some will replicate the working-class origins of their parents despite their education.  Some will wind up in low-level managerial positions with very modest incomes.  A few will go on to graduate school.  And several will no doubt wind up in flashy careers with six-figure incomes.  Perhaps the differences in outcomes will all come down to how closely their families approximated Lareau's basic patterns after all.  Perhaps the students who will barely maintain middle-class status (if at all) will be the ones with many elements of working-class "natural growth" mixed into their upbringing, while the ones who become the bigger achievers will be those with the most consistent "concerted cultivation." What matters is not so much how "right" the model is in all its specifics but the fact that we have the model, plain and simple.  Because of scholars like Lareau, we are now discoursing about social class in a way that is new and exciting.