Last week or the week before, he came down with semi-weepy eyes [saying] that homework was too difficult. So we said, “You know, it’s like a soccer game. What do you do if you’re playing in a soccer game? Do you start crying and say you can’t do it? No, you know this is going to be a hard one, so you just try harder.” So he went back upstairs and did his homework.
Although it is less obvious to both parents and children, skills acquired in organized activities will continue to be useful when, as teenagers or young adults, these youngsters take their first jobs. In their organizational style, many of the activities in which middle-class children routinely participate replicate key aspects of the workplace. Children like Garrett, who meet and learn to work effectively with a new set of adults for every activity they enroll in, are acquiring a basic job skill—the ability to work smoothly with acquaintances.5 Most working-class and poor children, in contrast, have no opportunities for similar preemployment training. Most of the adults they encounter outside of school are immediate family members or extended family members. Some working-class and poor children interact periodically with adult neighbors, but encounters with adult acquaintances in organized settings are very rare.
The kind of team-participation skills Mr. Tallinger notes that Garrett is gaining are directly applicable to a wide range of work environments, from fast-food service to high-tech design projects. Again, it is middle-class, not working-class or poor, children who consistently gain access to these lessons in formal teamwork. Similarly, involvement in multiple organized activities is common among middle-class children. Thus, they frequently need to choose one activity over another.6 Knowing how to prioritize is a workplace skill that employers actively seek in prospective employees.
Other real-world advantages also bear noting. Unlike the working-class and poor children we observed, Garrett and his peers have broad horizons and are exposed to typically adult experiences, such as being issued photo identification cards. The cards require the holder’s signature, and this increases the boys’ excitement and sense of power:
Garrett is the fourth boy to sign. The man [in charge of the photo IDs] calls him up, “Garrett!” and then demonstrates with his finger and says, “Sign here, where it says ‘player’s signature.’ ” Other boys are crowded around watching. One boy is saying, “Sign Donald” (Garrett’s full name is Donald Garrett Tallinger, after his father), but Garrett ignores him. He signs “Garrett Tallinger.”
The Intercounty soccer team travels to out-of-state tournaments; players stay in hotels and eat in restaurants; during the games, they compete against children they have never met before. Garrett’s friends and acquaintances are similarly mobile. The school’s select chorus performs in the Midwest, the middle school’s arts group goes to Europe, and classmates fly on commercial airlines to attend specialized summer camps. Overall, ten-year-old Garrett and his middle-class peers travel more frequently and cover more distance than do most working-class and poor adults.
The experiences and skills that Garrett and others gain from their participation in activities are reinforced by their parents’ child-rearing strategies at home. Garrett’s parents have taught him and his brothers to shake hands with adult men when they are being introduced. They explicitly coach Sam to “look him in the eye” as he shakes a man’s hand. The Tallingers themselves usually make eye contact with their sons when they are speaking to them, and they expect reciprocal behavior from each of the boys. They also reinforce notions of responsibility to others. When Garrett toys with the idea of quitting saxophone, Ms. Tallinger urges him to weigh that desire against his obligations to the rest of the members of his band. Garrett decides not to quit.
Mr. and Ms. Tallinger also teach by example—both read. They regularly read the newspaper (which is often spread out over the kitchen table) and Ms. Tallinger, in particular, often has a novel in progress. Both parents use reasoning as their key mechanism of social control.7 They frequently answer questions with more questions and whenever possible guide the children through situations rather than issue directives.
Like the organizational aspects of children’s activities, these home-based practices contribute to the development of skills that have a particularly smooth fit with the behaviors and expectations of occupations and other social institutions. Thus, in their everyday experiences, middle-class children not only acquire a variety of important life skills, but they also have repeated opportunities to practice those skills. Their working-class and poor counterparts, on the other hand, typically neither participate in organized activities nor grow up in homes where the preferred approach to child rearing meshes seamlessly with the practices and values of society’s dominant institutions.
THE FRENETIC FAMILY
In the nineteenth century, families gathered around the hearth. Today, the center of the middle-class home is the calendar—the middle-class homes we visited typically had a large, white paper monthly calendar, hung on the wall above or next to the kitchen telephone. Scheduled, paid, and organized activities for children are noted (sometimes in a colored pen) in the two-inch-square open spaces beneath each day of the month. Month after month, children are busy participating in sports, music, scouts, and play groups. And, before and after going to work, their parents are busy getting them to and from these activities. At times, middle-class houses seem to be little more than holding places for the occupants during the brief periods when they are between activities.
The pattern we observed among middle-class families like the Tallingers of involving children in many organized activities and adjusting family life to accommodate those activities does not fit neatly into existing sociological approaches. Social scientists interested in determining the dominant factors shaping children’s lives are often preoccupied with a hunt for single determinants—they hope to be able to point to, for example, the overriding importance of income or education. We looked diligently for key causal elements, but across the twelve families we observed closely, what we found was a pattern of practices or strategies attached in various ways to class cultures. Among the middle class, the hectic schedule of children’s activities is not directly attributable to any single dimension of their lives, such as family income, parents’ educational levels or occupational conditions, neighborhood type, family size or gender composition, or parents’ leisure preferences. And, at least in the Tallingers’ case, the family’s emphasis on organized activities was not an effort on the parents’ part to reproduce their own childhood experiences. Mr. Tallinger’s mother was a single parent from the time he was four. As a boy, he played outside for long periods, often in “pick-up” games with other boys in the neighborhood. Ms. Tallinger, too, grew up in a single-parent family. As a child, she had long stretches of unstructured time, which did not give way to organized activities until she was older.
Moreover, neither the benefits nor the costs of the strategies I term concerted cultivation seem to be fully understood by parents. For example, the close fit between skills children learn in soccer games or at piano recitals and those they will eventually need in white-collar professional or technical positions goes unnoted. Similarly, that middle-class children have trouble adjusting to unstructured time and that they often find it difficult to forge deep, positive bonds with siblings are largely unrecognized costs of concerted cultivation. So too are the ways that one child’s schedule dominates family time, particularly at the expense of the schedules of younger siblings. Of course, sometimes parents grumble over the hectic schedules. Parents also note that they did not place similar demands on their own parents. But middle-class parents take for granted their obligation to develop their children’s talents through means including organized activities.