In sum, in the routines of his daily life, Tyrec learned important life skills not available to Garrett. He and his friends found numerous ways of entertaining themselves, showing creativity and independence. This experience was extremely valuable, but it was also distinctly different from the more bureaucratic experience of organized activities that dominated Garrett’s life. Tyrec and his peers did not get training in the enactment of organizational rules. Nor, as I show later in the book, did working-class and poor children receive the training observed in middle-class homes in how to pressure an organization to be responsive to a child’s individualized needs. In short, the leisure activities involved in concerted cultivation had the potential to offer more payoff in the world of institutions than did the spontaneous play involved in the accomplishment of natural growth.
Tyrec and his friends did not experience their leisure time as lacking any important component. In particular, they did not seem to either want or expect adult involvement in their play. Middle-class children, on the other hand, who are accustomed to their parents’ and other adults’ regular monitoring of their activities, often feel entitled to adult attention and intervention in their play. The next chapter helps make this class-related difference clear by looking at how playtime activities are approached in the white poor family of Katie Brindle.
CHAPTER 5
Children’s Play Is for
Children: Katie Brindle
Katie told me excitedly on the phone, “I’m making a doll house! My Grandmom brought me some boxes and I am making a doll house!” When I got [to the apartment], I asked her about the doll house. She shrugged her shoulders and looked discouraged. She said, “I don’t know how to make it.”
Katie picks up the box off the Formica counter [in the kitchen] and carries it high in the air over to the living room and plops it down on the rug. She says, “Mom, will you help me?” CiCi says, “Nah.” Katie is silent but disappointed.
In middle-class homes, adults treat children’s activities seriously. A request for help is not likely to be waved aside. Since parents in these homes often are preoccupied with their children’s lives, things that are important to children can easily become major events for their parents as well. This in turn increases the pressure on children to succeed (recall how Mr. Tallinger yells to “encourage” Garrett during a soccer game). Middle-class parents follow up on children’s interests, often by enrolling them in organized activities, but also by watching impromptu skits or joining in backyard ball games or playing word games with their children after dinner. Parents usually enjoy this involvement, but they also see it as part of their obligation to their children. Parental involvement is a key component of the child-rearing strategy of concerted cultivation. As a result, middle-class children gain a sense of being entitled to have adults focus attention on minute details of their lives.
The working-class and poor children we observed, mainly nine- and ten-year-olds, were still young enough to enjoy the attention of their parents. Sometimes they would request adults to pay attention to them or to assist them with their activities. As this chapter shows, adults often (but not always) decline such requests. Generally, children accept these decisions silently, as Katie does with her dollhouse project. They do not pressure adults to cater to their wishes. A significant consequence of working-class and poor parents’ view of their children’s social lives as not particularly important and their children’s acceptance of that perspective is that the children are not trained to see themselves as special and worthy of being catered to in daily life. Children appear to gain a sense of constraint, as opposed to entitlement, in their workings with the larger world.
A feeling of constraint is not the only outcome, however. When parents follow the child-rearing strategy of the accomplishment of natural growth, providing close supervision in custodial matters and granting children autonomy in leisure matters, the children appear to take real pleasure in their playtime. The lack of adult attention and involvement in their activities leaves children in working-class and poor homes free to concentrate on pleasing themselves. The children we studied tended to show more creativity, spontaneity, enjoyment, and initiative in their leisure pastimes than we saw among middle-class children at play in organized activities.
The fact that working-class and poor parents pay less attention to their children’s playtime activities does not mean that these parents don’t enjoy seeing their children have fun. But, as we saw with Tyrec Taylor, this pleasure does not necessarily prompt parents to feel that they ought to regularly provide their children with such experiences. Nor do working-class and poor parents seem to feel obligated to attend to or follow up on children’s displays of creativity. In general, children’s leisure activities are treated as pleasant but inconsequential and a separate world from those of adults. Of much greater importance are the many steps involved in getting children through the day: getting them up, showered, fed, dressed, bundled up in winter jackets, and out the door in time for school, and then at the end of the day, making sure that they get home safely, have dinner, complete their homework, and get to bed at a reasonable hour.
These tasks often take more time, are much more labor intensive and create more frustration for poor and working-class families than for their middle-class counterparts. Trying to make ends meet through public assistance requires repeated encounters with cumbersome bureaucracies. No access or only limited access to private transportation means that even routine tasks like grocery shopping may require waiting for buses; keeping appointments with health-care professionals can involve similarly complicated logistics. In addition, in settings where resources are chronically strained, little problems (e.g., broken washing machines, an unexpected delay in a cash reimbursement) can have serious, far-reaching consequences. Both poor and working-class children are aware of the constraints in their lives, but for poor children, the effects of inadequate resources are more immediate and overwhelming.
It is important to remember, though, that even where economic conditions are the same or nearly the same, individuals may respond differently. Moreover, regardless of their economic position, families (and individuals within families) differ in terms of various other limitations (and opportunities) they face. As C. Wright Mills noted, there is an interaction between social structure and biography.1 The power of Mills’s observation is confirmed by the story that unfolds in this chapter. The Brindle family faces problems—including sexual abuse, severe depression, and HIV infection—that are not class specific and that would be challenging for all individuals, regardless of the extent of their economic security. If, however, this family had had even moderate financial resources—if the social service agencies they relied on had been able to provide even the minimum level of support required to meet the family’s basic needs—the range of choices open to them would have been greater and the consequences of those choices less potentially catastrophic. Put differently, a family’s social structural location gives them a different pool of resources to address similar life problems, but, even within a similar social class location, there are some differences in the ways that people use the resources they have in hand.