All of the families in the study—all families everywhere—face problems. Differences arise in terms of the specific kinds and amounts of difficulties, the ways in which individuals’ temperaments shape their responses to the challenges they face, and the structural resources available to families. The Brindles had more numerous and deeper psychological problems than other poor families we visited. Many of the other challenges they faced, though, were common among poor families and arose from the same basic dilemma: insufficient resources for getting children through the day and meeting their needs. The sorts of difficulties we observed Ms. Brindle trying to cope with—going to get food stamps, finding working laundry machines, dealing with landlords and problematic neighbors, and sorting out errors on the part of powerful bureaucracies—are all routine problems for families below the poverty level.
These everyday sorts of dilemmas fit the definition of social structural problems: they are created by the way the social structural system is organized. Mixed into these social structural problems are the difficulties that arise from the individual biographies of family members. Thus, in observing real families as they move through their days, what we see are the outcomes of an ongoing interaction between structure and biography. Within the sample of working-class and poor families, the structural problems were the most oppressive ingredient in the structure-biography mixture. Insufficient resources shaped where families lived, what jobs parents held (or didn’t hold), how individuals traveled from place to place, and how much and what kind of care parents could provide for young children.
In this context, it is not surprising to find that children’s leisure activities are given a lower priority. As the next section shows, however, it is not simply the press of everyday life that prompts poor (and working-class) parents to remain relatively uninvolved in their children’s play and not inclined to follow up on children’s budding interests in music, art, drama, or sports by enrolling them in organized activities. The sense of an obligation to cultivate their children that is so apparent among middle-class parents is uncommon among their poor and working-class counterparts. Likewise, the sense of being entitled to adult attention that is so prevalent among middle-class children is absent in their poor and working-class peers.
LEAVING CHILD’S PLAY TO CHILDREN
Middle-class parents often are busy, even at home. They certainly do not always stop to watch every time one or more of their children is engaged in some sort of performance, be it playing the piano, putting on a skit, or doing a dance. Still, these parents appeared to feel an obligation to cultivate their children’s talents. Often, they would meet that obligation by watching, evaluating, and encouraging their children’s at-home performances.8 At times, parents would also voluntarily participate in children’s activities, playing board and word games with them, engaging in backyard sports and helping with projects.
Working-class and poor parents also sometimes join their children in play. For example, in the white working-class Yanelli family (see Chapter 11), Billy, the focal child, and his father would sit outside on the sidewalk in front of their house and play cards while Mr. Yanelli smoked a cigarette. In Katie’s family, too, adults sometimes participate. Ms. Brindle periodically agrees to watch Katie and her cousin, Amy, perform little skits. Katie’s mother also occasionally plays Monopoly with her.
Although in all the families we studied, adults seemed willing to take time occasionally to observe a child’s activity or to join a child in a game, adults in working-class and poor families make relatively few interventions in children’s leisure activities, especially compared to the level of involvement we observed in middle-class homes. Most working-class and poor parents did not consider children’s activities as consequential or, more specifically, as something that ought to involve adult time or energy. In their view, children’s activities are something they do with one another, not with adults. Therefore, there was a separation between adults’ and children’s worlds. When working-class and poor children ask for adult participation, their requests may be seen as unnecessary and possibly annoying as welclass="underline"
Amy says out of the blue, “Katie is good at dying. She is good at dying and crying.” Katie turns and tells us, “Shoot me.” . . . Without affect or enthusiasm, Gmom (Grandmom) makes a play gun out of her fingers and aims at Katie’s chest and says (in a monotone), “Bang.” . . . Katie has backed up . . . [She] begins a slow, dramatic performance of dying, clutching her heart with both hands, then stretching both hands and arms completely outward [and then] leaning back and falling onto the day bed. She slowly slides off the day bed and onto the floor, and—as a final touch—lets her head drop and rest against her left shoulder. She lies still.
Amy is hopping up and down with excitement . . . I smile and say, “Great.” Grandmom says nothing; she looks bored. Katie scrambles up and says, “Shoot me again.” This time I shoot her with my right hand. She repeats the performance. Grandmom is [not paying attention to Katie at all but is] watching TV.
By the third time Katie asks to be shot, Grandmom looks quite annoyed, but she does not say anything. There is no fourth request because, in a move typical of young children playing informally, Katie and Amy suddenly shift gears. They retreat to the kitchen to plot a Christmas skit and then come out to the living room to perform. In middle-class homes, parents routinely praise their children’s displays of creativity. At Grandmom’s house, the skit is assiduously ignored by the adults:
Amy says to us, “I’m Santa and you (to Katie) are a spoiled brat.” Amy puts on her hat and Katie puts on her hat, and Amy says, “Watch us! Watch us! I’m a Santa and you are a child. First you’re a spoiled brat and then you aren’t.”
I am watching them, but no one else is watching. Grandmom is watching TV. (She’s looking straight ahead; Amy’s father is there, but he ignores the girls’ performance; Uncle John is also present, sitting on the couch, seemingly oblivious to everything around him.)9
When the girls escalate their demands for attention, Grandmom complies, but with a notable lack of enthusiasm:
Katie pretends to be a child coming to Santa. Amy [Santa] sits in the chair and receives her . . . Grandmom is not paying attention but is watching “Roseanne” [on TV]. Amy—indignant—reaches over and turns off the television as she says, “Grandmom! You aren’t watching!” Grandmom doesn’t say anything but focuses her attention on Amy for a little bit.10 Katie is standing next to her cousin. Katie makes little hops up and down. Amy repeats the drama: (holding up a bright red, furry Christmas stocking) she says, “This elf has a stocking with rocks in it because he has been given coal.” (She takes the rocks out and pours them from hand to hand.) Amy and Katie abruptly leave and go into [the next] room and huddle together. Grandmom does not seem at all interested in the skit.
The girls come back to the living room. In a louder, stage projection, voice they announce, “This is the first part.” Wearing Christmas stockings on their heads, they perform a short skit where Katie explains that she is “an orphan. (pause) My parents are deceased.” The orphan comes, beseechingly, to see Santa (Amy). Just as the skit is beginning to gather momentum, Amy’s father comes into the room.
[Ryan] does not look up to see what the girls are doing. Instead, he pulls out an older upright vacuum cleaner. He plugs it in and . . . begins to vacuum up the tinsel, which is underneath the girls’ feet and underneath the tree. Without looking up, he vacuums steadily . . . Amy is forced to move up the stairs to get out of the way of her father. She and Katie do not acknowledge this interruption.