In “Unequal Childhoods: Class, Race, and Family Life,” Annette Lareau states that a person is a cultural product and his eventual influence on his society is also cultural. While everyone starts out on equal footing in the arena of the family, the social and economic factors inherent in one’s world will dictate who or what the person will be. And, chances are, his social and economic status will largely be the same as those of his offspring.
Lareau asserts that the influence and parameters of social class shape the lives of children. Practically everything that a person does is, was, and has always been dictated by the unconscious limits of the social class that he belongs to. Moreover, children imitate the traits, qualities, and characteristics of the social class to which their parents belong. In other words, unequal childhoods will most likely mean unequal adulthoods.
A child’s social class makes him or hampers him from looking authority figures in the eye and shake their hands. Even the behavioral capacity to share space for a long period of time with somebody else or fight with siblings is fashioned from the dictates of class norms.
Middle-class parents understand the educational benefits of children’s extracurricular activities. In that class culture, investing in human capital is a norm. That is why middle-class parents go for piano lessons and choir practice more than letting their kids waste their time in front of the television set. Lareau calls this the ‘accomplishment of natural growth parents’ or those who “organized their children’s lives so they spent more time in and around the home, in informal play with peers, siblings, and cousins. As a result, the children had more autonomy regarding leisure time and more opportunities for child initiated play. They were also more responsible for their lives outside the home.” Children of these parents will demand more attention and assistance to be given them.
On the other hand, children of working class parents “played outside, creating their own games… They did not complain of being bored…also appeared to have boundless energy. They did not have the exhaustion that we saw in middle-class children of the same age.”
Lareau maintains that children replicate the class that their parents belong to. What is pivotal is parental strategy.
