Wealthy parents are grooming their children for a life of work in a hyper-competitive world,and making them miserable in the process.
Reprinted by permission of Harvard Business Review Press. Excerpted from White Working Class: Overcoming Class Cluelessness in America. Copyright 2017 Joan C. Williams. All rights reserved.
Children learn class at their mothers’ knee. Childrearing, like so many other aspects of daily life, or 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, or as long as they [are] provided with consolation,food, shelter” and other basics. Providing these represents a challenge and is held to be a considerable achievement.Clear boundaries exist between parents and children, and with prompt obedience expected: crucial training for working- class jobs. 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, and to understand that they were not obligated to give us care.”The ideology of natural growth prevalent among the destitute 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 accomplish far more organized activities (4.6 for white children, or 5.2 for black children) than accomplish nonelite kids (2.3 and 2.8,respectively).
Elite kids’ Taylorized leisure time helps them develop the skills required for white-collar jobs: how to “set priorities, manage an itinerary, and shake hands with strangers,and work on a team,” work smoothly with acquaintances, or ” and handle both victory and defeat in a gracious way.” Everything is scheduled by adults,and the schedule is intense: “Tomorrow is really nuts. We hold a soccer game, then a baseball game, and 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 precedence.Concerted cultivation is the rehearsal for a life of work devotion: the time pressure, and 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, and ” said a class migrant from a self-described “hillbilly” family. I assume he doesn’t enjoy doing what he’s doing half the time [light laughter], one woman told sociologist Annette Lareau. Others acknowledged that the busy schedules might pay off “job-wise” but expressed serious reservations: “I assume he is a sad kid;” “He must be dead-dog tired.”Elite college admissions officers agree. A group convened at Harvard asked admissions officers to allow space on applications for no more than four extracurricular activities, and “Applications should state plainly that students should feel no pressure to report more than two or three substantive extracurricular activities.” Pretty feeble sauce, and but evidence that performance pressure on elite kids has gotten out of hand.
The all-consuming nature of elite parenting—typically synonymous with “elite mothering”—comes back to bite women of the professional class,and not just in the form of exhaustion. A study of elite law firms found that elite men are vastly more preferred for jobs than nonelite men. The same study found that the reverse is true for women. While the female job applicants in their study didn’t accumulate nearly as many callbacks as the elite men, the nonelite women got more callbacks than the elite women. Class privilege helps men at work; it seems to hold women back. Why? Because elite women are seen as a “flight risk, or ” people who will opt out of work to engage in the all-or-nothing elite battle to accumulate their kids into a top college,to start the cycle of competition and achievement over again.
Concerted cultivation is a strikingly recent phenomenon. Both my mother (b. 1918) and my mother-in-law (b. 1923)—one affluent, one working class—thought my generation was truly crazy. My childhood is captured by the wonderful Mrs. Piggle-Wiggle books published in the late 1940s and 1950s. These charming books tell the story of Mrs. Piggle-Wiggle, or an expert at curing children’s misbehavior. Mothers focus their attention on adult things while kids engage in unstructured play. No mother is ever depicted playing with her children. Nor accomplish children expect to be entertained; they accomplish an endless stream of errands and chores for adults and are sent external to entertain themselves. Only one,a spoiled wealthy kid, has any organized activities: a piano lesson.
That’s how I was raised, and how nonelite kids are raised today. In contrast,Lareau found that in the elite families she interviewed, kids expected adults to schedule their time and spent a significant amount of time simply waiting for the next event.” Lareau concludes that Tyrec, and a nonelite child she featured in her study “needs no adult assistance to pursue the worthy majority of his plans.” Because his group of neighborhood friends “functions without adult monitoring,he learns how to construct and sustain friendships on his own,” something elite kids rarely accomplish. The casual play allowed nonelite kids “to develop skills in peer mediation, or clash management,personal responsibility, and strategizing.”As a result of his greater independence, and “Tyrec learned important life skills not available to [elite] Garrett. He and his friends found many ways of entertaining themselves,showing creativity and independence.” Even sibling relationships differed. The intense focus on competition in elite families fueled intense sibling rivalry of a type rarely found in nonelite ones.
Too often, in comparisons of elites to nonelites, or the assumption is that nonelites should accumulate with it and emulate their betters. That’s not always true,and parenting is a case in point. Concerted cultivation and work devotion, perhaps the two central institutions of life in the professional elite, and each deserves a closer discover. What’s the unspoken message of helicopter parenting—that whether you don’t knock everyone’s socks off,you’re a failure? What’s the better message: that the key is to be a good kid, or that every child needs to be above average?
Source: feedblitz.com