INEQUALITY IN THE 21ST CENTURY: A READER

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neighborhood, and the other a nearby poor black

neighborhood. about one-half of the children are

white and about one-half are black. one child is in-

terracial. The research assistants and I carried out

individual interviews (averaging two hours each)

with all of the mothers and most of the fathers (or

guardians) of eighty-eight children, for a total of 137

interviews. We also observed children as they took

part in organized activities in the communities sur-

rounding the schools. The most intensive part of the

research, however, involved home observations of

twelve children and their families. nine of the twelve

families came from the classrooms I observed, but

the boy and girl from the two black middle-class

families and the boy from the poor white family

came from other sites. Most observations and inter-

views took place between 1993 and 1995, but inter-

views were done as early as 1990 and as late as 1997.

This chapter focuses primarily on the findings from

the observations of these twelve families since the

key themes discussed here surfaced during this part

of the fieldwork. I do include some information

from the larger study to provide a context for under-

standing the family observations. all names are

pseudonyms.

Intensive Family Observations

The research assistants and I took turns visiting the

participating families daily, for a total of about

twenty visits in each home, often in the space of one

month. The observations were not limited to the

home. Fieldworkers followed children and parents as

they took part in school activities, church services

and events, organized play, kin visits, and medical

appointments. Most field observations lasted about

three hours; sometimes, depending on the event

(e.g., an out-of-town funeral, a special extended

family event, or a long shopping trip), they lasted

much longer. In most cases, there was one overnight

visit. We often carried tape recorders with us and

used the audiotapes for reference in writing up field

notes. Families were paid $350, usually at the end of

the visits, for their participation.

A Note on Class

My purpose in undertaking the field observations

was to develop an intensive, realistic portrait of fam-

ily life. although I deliberately focused on only

twelve families, I wanted to compare children across

gender and race lines. adopting the fine-grained dif-

ferentiation of categories characteristic of current

neo-Marxist and neo-Weberian empirical studies was

not tenable. My choice of class categories was further

limited by the school populations at the sites I had

selected. Very few of the students were children of

employers or of self-employed workers. I decided to

concentrate exclusively on those whose parents were

employees. Various criteria have been proposed to

differentiate within this heterogeneous group, but

authority in the workplace and “credential barriers”

are the two most commonly used. I assigned the

families in the study to a working-class or mid-

TABLE 67.1

Argument of Unequal Childhoods: Class Differences in Childrearing

Childrearing Approach

Concerted Cultivation

Accomplishment of Natural Growth

Key Elements

Parent actively fosters and assesses child’s

Parent cares for child and allows child to grow

talents, opinions, and skills

Organization of Daily Life *multiple child leisure activities orchestrated

*child “hangs out” particularly with kin

by adults

Language Use

*reasoning/directives

*directives

*child contestation of adult statements

*rare for child to question or challenge adults

*extended negotiations between parents

*general acceptance by child of directives

and child

Interventions in

*criticisms and interventions on behalf of child *dependence on institutions

Institutions

*training of child to take on this role

*sense of powerlessness and frustrations

*conflict between childrearing practices at

home and at school

Consequences

Emerging sense of entitlement on the part of

Emerging sense of constraint on the part of

the child

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Lareau / Unequal Childhoods | 445

dle-class category based on discussions with each of

the employed adults. They provided extensive infor-

mation about the work they did, the nature of the

organization that employed them, and their educa-

tional credentials. I added a third category: families

not involved in the labor market (a population tradi-

tionally excluded from social class groupings) be-

cause in the first school I studied, a substantial

number of children were from households supported

by public assistance. to ignore them would have re-

stricted the scope of the study arbitrarily. The final

subsample contained four middle-class, four work-

ing-class, and four poor families.

Children’s Time Use

In our interviews and observations of white and

black middle-class children, it was striking how busy

they were with organized activities. Indeed, one of

the hallmarks of middle-class children’s daily lives is

a set of adult-run organized activities. Many children

have three and four activities per week. In some fam-

ilies, every few days, activities conflict, particularly

when one season is ending and one is beginning. For

example in the white middle-class family of the tall-

ingers, Garrett is on multiple soccer teams—the “a”

traveling team of the private Forest soccer club and

the Intercounty soccer team—he also has swim les-

sons, saxophone lessons at school, private piano les-

sons at home, and baseball and basketball. These

organized activities provided a framework for chil-

dren’s lives; other activities were sandwiched between

them.

These activities create labor for parents. Indeed,

the impact of children’s activities takes its toll on par-

ents’ patience as well as their time. For example, on a

June afternoon at the beginning of summer vacation,

in a white-middle-class family, Mr. tallinger comes

home from work to take Garrett to his soccer game.

Garrett is not ready to go, and his lackadaisical ap-

proach to getting ready irks his father:

Don says, “Get your soccer stuff—you’re

going to a soccer game!” Garrett comes into

the den with white short leggings on under-

neath a long green soccer shirt; he’s number

16. He sits on an armchair catty-corner from

the television and languidly watches the

World Cup game. He slowly, abstractedly,

pulls on shin guards, then long socks. His

eyes are riveted to the tV screen. Don comes

in: “Go get your other stuff.” Garrett says he

can’t find his shorts. Don: “Did you look in

your drawer?” Garrett nods. . . . He gets up

to look for his shorts, comes back into the

den a few minutes later. I ask, “any luck yet?”

Garrett shakes his head. Don is rustling

around elsewhere in the house. Don comes

in, says to Garrett, “Well, Garrett, aren’t you

wearing shoes?” (Don leaves and returns a

short time later): “Garrett, we HaVe to go!

Move! We’re late!” He says this shortly,

abruptly. He comes back in a minute and

drops Garrett’s shiny green shorts on his lap

without a word.

This pressured search for a pair of shiny green

soccer shorts is a typical event in the tallinger house-

hold. also typical is the solution—a parent ulti-

mately finds the missing object, while continuing to

prod the child to hurry. The fact that today’s frenzied

schedule will be matched or exceeded by the next

day’s is also par:

Don: (describing their day on Saturday) to-

morrow is really nuts. We have a soccer game,

then a baseball game, then another soccer

game.

This steady schedule of activity—that none of the

middle-class parents reported having when they were

a similar age—was not universal. Indeed, while we

searched for a middle-class child who did not have a

single organized activity, we could not find one, but

in working-class and poor homes, organized activi-

ties were much less common and there were many

children who did not have any. Many children

“hung out.” television and video games are a major

source of entertainment but outdoor play can trump

either of these. no advanced planning, no telephone

calls, no consultations between mothers, no drop-

offs or pickups—no particular effort at all—is re-

quired to launch an activity. For instance, one

afternoon, in a black working-class family, Shannon

(in 7th grade) and tyrec (in 4th grade) walk out

their front door to the curb of the small, narrow

street their house faces. Shannon begins playing a

game with a ball; she soon has company:

(two boys from the neighborhood walk up.)

Shannon is throwing the small ball against the

side of the row house. tyrec joins in the game

with her. as they throw the ball against the

wall, they say things they must do with the

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ball. It went something like this: Johnny Crow

wanted to know. . . . (bounces ball against the

wall), touch your knee (bounce), touch your

toe (bounce), touch the ground (bounce),

under the knee (bounce), turn around

(bounce). Shannon and tyrec played about

four rounds.

unexpected events produce hilarity:

at one point Shannon accidentally threw

the ball and it bounced off of tyrec’s head. all

the kids laughed; then tyrec, who had the

ball, went chasing after Shannon. It was a

close, fun moment—lots of laughter, eye con-

tact, giggling, chasing.

Soon a different game evolves. tyrec is on restric-

tion. He is supposed to remain inside the house all

day. So, when he thinks he has caught a glimpse of

his mom returning home from work, he dashes in-

side. He reappears as soon as he realizes that it was a

false alarm. The neighborhood children begin an in-

formal game of baiting him:

The kids keep teasing tyrec that his mom’s

coming—which sends him scurrying just in-

side the door, peering out of the screen door.

This game is enacted about six times. tyrec

also chases Shannon around the street, trying

to get the ball from her. a few times Shannon

tells tyrec that he’d better “get inside”; he ig-

nores her. Then, at 6:50 [P.M.] Ken (a friend

of tyrec’s) says, “There’s your mom!” tyrec

scoots inside, then says, “oh, man. you were

serious this time.”

Informal, impromptu outdoor play is common in

tyrec’s neighborhood. a group of boys approxi-

mately his age, regularly numbering four or five but

sometimes reaching as many as ten, play ball games

together on the street, walk to the store to get treats,

watch television at each other’s homes, and generally

hang out together.

Language Use

In addition to differences by social class in time use,

we also observed differences in language use in the

home. as others have noted (Bernstein, 1971; Heath,

1983) middle-class parents used more reasoning in

their speech with children while working-class and

poor parents used more directives. For example, in

observations of the african american home of alex

Williams, whose father was a trial lawyer and mother

was a high-level corporate executive, we found that

the Williamses and other middle-class parents use lan-

guage frequently, pleasurably, and instrumentally.

Their children do likewise. For example, one January

evening, alexander is stumped by a homework assign-

ment to write five riddles. He sits at the dinner table

in the kitchen with his mother and a fieldworker. Mr.

Williams is at the sink, washing the dinner dishes. He

has his back to the group at the dinner table. Without

turning around, he says to alex, “Why don’t you go

upstairs to the third floor and get one of those books

and see if there is a riddle in there?”

alex [says] smiling, “yeah. That’s a good idea!

I’ll go upstairs and copy one from out of the

book.” terry turns around with a dish in

hand, “That was a joke—not a valid sugges-

tion. That is not an option.” He smiled as he

turned back around to the sink. Christina

says, looking at alex: “There is a word for

that you know, plagiarism.” terry says (not

turning around), “Someone can sue you for

plagiarizing. Did you know that?” alex:

“That’s only if it is copyrighted.” They all

begin talking at once.

Here we see alex cheerfully (though gently)

goading his father by pretending to misunderstand

the verbal instruction to consult a book for help. Mr.

Williams dutifully rises to the bait. Ms. Williams re-

shapes this moment of lightheartedness by introduc-

ing a new word into alexander’s vocabulary. Mr.

Williams goes one step further by connecting the

new word to a legal consequence. alex upstages

them both. He demonstrates that he is already famil-

iar with the general idea of plagiarism and that he

understands the concept of copyright, as well.

In marked contrast to working-class and poor

parents, however, even when the Williamses issue di-

rectives, they often include explanations for their

orders. Here, Ms. Williams is reminding her son to

pay attention to his teacher:

I want you to pay close attention to Mrs. Scott

when you are developing your film. Those

chemicals are very dangerous. Don’t play

around in the classroom. you could get that

stuff in someone’s eye. and if you swallow it,

you could die.

alex chooses to ignore the directive in

favor of instructing his misinformed mother:

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Lareau / Unequal Childhoods | 447

alex corrects her, “Mrs. Scott told us that

we wouldn’t die if we swallowed it. But we

would get very sick and would have to get our

stomach pumped.” Christina does not follow

the argument any further. She simply reiter-

ates that he should be careful.

Possibly because the issue is safety, Ms. Williams

does not encourage alex to elaborate here, as she

would be likely to do if the topic were less-charged.

Instead, she restates her directive and thus under-

scores her expectation that alex will do as she asks.

although Mr. and Ms. Williams disagreed on ele-

ments of how training in race relations should be im-

plemented, they both recognized that their racial and

ethnic identity profoundly shaped their and their

son’s everyday experiences. They were well aware of

the potential for alexander to be exposed to racial

injustice, and they went to great lengths to try to pro-

tect their son from racial insults and other forms of

discrimination. nevertheless, race did not appear to

shape the dominant cultural logic of child rearing in

alexander’s family or in other families in the study.

all of the middle-class families engaged in extensive

reasoning with their children, asking questions, prob-

ing assertions, and listening to answers. Similar pat-

terns appeared in interviews and observations with

other african american middle-class families.

a different pattern appeared in working-class and

poor homes where there was simply less verbal

speech than we observed in middle-class homes.

There was also less speech between parents and chil-

dren, a finding noted by other observational studies

(Hart and Risley, 1995). Moreover, interspersed with

intermittent talk are adult-issued directives. Chil-

dren are told to do certain things (e.g., shower, take

out the garbage) and not to do others (e.g., curse,

talk back). In an african american home of a family

living on public assistance in public housing, Ms.

Mcallister uses one-word directives to coordinate

the use of the single bathroom. There are almost al-

ways at least four children in the apartment and

often seven, plus Ms. Mcallister and other adults.

Ms. Mcallister sends the children to wash up by

pointing to a child, saying, “Bathroom,” and hand-

ing him or her a washcloth. Wordlessly, the desig-

nated child gets up and goes to the bathroom to take

a shower.

Children usually do what adults ask of them. We

did not observe whining or protests, even when

adults assign time-consuming tasks, such as the

hour-long process of hair-braiding Lori Mcallister is

told to do for the four-year-old daughter of aunt

Dara’s friend Charmaine:

Someone tells Lori, “Go do [tyneshia’s] hair

for camp.” Without saying anything, Lori

gets up and goes inside and takes the little

girl with her. They head for the couch near

the television; Lori sits on the couch and the

girl sits on the floor. [tyneshia] sits quietly

for about an hour, with her head tilted, while

Lori carefully does a multitude of braids.

Lori’s silent obedience is typical. Generally, chil-

dren perform requests without comment. For exam-

ple, at dinner one night, after Harold Mcallister

complains he doesn’t like spinach, his mother directs

him to finish it anyway:

Mom yells (loudly) at him to eat: “eat!

FInISH tHe SPInaCH!” (no response.

Harold is at the table, dawdling.) Guion and

Runako and alexis finish eating and leave. I

finish with Harold; he eats his spinach. He

leaves all his yams.

The verbal world of Harold Mcallister and other

poor and working-class children offers some import-

ant advantages as well as costs. Compared to mid-

dle-class children we observed, Harold is more

respectful towards adults in his family. In this setting,

there are clear boundaries between adults and chil-

dren. adults feel comfortable issuing directives to

children, which children comply with immediately.

Some of the directives that adults issue center on ob-

ligations of children to others in the family (“don’t

beat on Guion” or “go do [her] hair for camp”). one

consequence of this is that Harold, despite occasional

tiffs, is much nicer to his sister (and his cousins) than

the siblings we observed in middle-class homes. The

use of directives and the pattern of silent compliance

are not universal in Harold’s life. In his interactions

with peers, for example on the basketball “court,”

Harold’s verbal displays are distinctively different

than inside the household, with elaborated and em-

bellished discourse. nevertheless, there is a striking

difference in linguistic interaction between adults

and children in poor and working-class families when

compared to that observed in the home of alexander

Williams. Ms. Mcallister has the benefit of being

able to issue directives without having to justify their

decisions at every moment. This can make childrear-

ing somewhat less tiring.

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another advantage is that Harold has more au-

tonomy than middle-class children in making im-

portant decisions in daily life. as a child, he controls

his leisure schedule. His basketball games are im-

promptu and allow him to develop important skills

and talents. He is resourceful. He appears less ex-

hausted than ten-year-old alexander. In addition, he

has important social competencies, including his

deftness in negotiating the “code of the street.”1 His

mother has stressed these skills in her upbringing, as

she impresses upon her children the importance of

“not paying no mind” to others, including drunks

and drug dealers who hang out in the neighborhoods

which Harold and alexis negotiate.

Still, in the world of schools, health care facilities,

and other institutional settings, these valuable skills

do not translate into the same advantages as the rea-

soning skills emphasized in the home of alexander

Williams and other middle-class children. Compared

to alexander Williams, Harold does not gain the de-

velopment of a large vocabulary, an increase of his

knowledge of science and politics, a set of tools to

customize situations outside the home to maximize

his advantage, and instruction in how to defend his

argument with evidence. His knowledge of words,

which might appear, for example, on future Sat

tests, is not continually stressed at home.

In these areas, the lack of advantage is not con-

nected to the intrinsic value of the Mcallister family

life or the use of directives at home. Indeed, one can

argue raising children who are polite and respectful

children and do not whine, needle, or badger their

parents is a highly laudable childrearing goal. Deep

and abiding ties with kinship groups are also, one

might further argue, important. Rather, it is the spe-

cific ways that institutions function that end up con-

veying advantages to middle-class children. In their

standards, these institutions also permit, and even

demand, active parent involvement. In this way as

well, middle-class children often gain an advantage.

Intervention in Institutions

Children do not live their lives inside of the home.

Instead, they are legally required to go to school,

they go to the doctor, and many are involved in

church and other adult-organized activities. In chil-

dren’s institutional lives, we found differences by so-

cial class in how mothers monitored children’s

institutional experiences. While in working-class and

poor families, children are granted autonomy to

make their own way in organizations, in the mid-

dle-class homes, most aspects of the children’s lives

are subject to their mother’s ongoing scrutiny.

For example, in an african american middle-class

home, where both parents are college graduates and

Ms. Marshall is a computer worker and her husband

a civil servant, their two daughters have a hectic

schedule of organized activities including gymnastics

for Stacey and basketball for Fern. When Ms. Mar-

shall becomes aware of a problem, she moves quickly,

drawing on her work and professional skills and ex-

periences. She displays tremendous assertiveness,

doggedness, and, in some cases, effectiveness in

pressing institutions to recognize her daughters’ in-

dividualized needs. Stacey’s mother’s proactive stance

reflects her belief that she has a duty to intervene in

situations where she perceives that her daughter’s

needs are not being met. This perceived responsibil-

ity applies across all areas of her children’s lives. She

is no more (or less) diligent with regard to Stacey

and Fern’s leisure activities than she is with regard to

their experiences in school or church or the doctor’s

office. This is clear in the way she handles Stacey’s

transition from her township gymnastics classes to

the private classes at an elite private gymnastic pro-

gram at Wright’s:

Ms. Marshall describes Stacey’s first session at the

club as rocky:

The girls were not warm. and these were lit-

tle . . . eight and nine year old kids. you

know, they weren’t welcoming her the first

night. It was kinda like eyeing each other, to

see, you know, “Can you do this? Can you do

that?”

More importantly, Ms. Marshall reported that the

instructor is brusque, critical, and not friendly to-

ward Stacey. Ms. Marshall cannot hear what was

being said, but she could see the interactions through

a window. a key problem is that because her previous

instructor had not used the professional jargon for

gymnastic moves, Stacey does not know these terms.

When the class ends and she walks out, she is visibly

upset. Her mother’s reaction is a common one among

middle-class parents: She does not remind her daugh-

ter that in life one has to adjust, that she will need to

work even harder, or that there is nothing to be done.

Instead, Ms. Marshall focuses on tina, the instructor,

as the source of the problem:

We sat in the car for a minute and I said,

“Look, Stac,” I said. She said, “I-I,” and she

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Lareau / Unequal Childhoods | 449

started crying. I said, “you wait here.” The

instructor had come to the door, tina. So I

went to her and I said, “Look.” I said, “Is

there a problem?” She said, “aww . . . she’ll

be fine. She just needs to work on certain

things.” Blah-blah-blah. and I said, “She’s re-

ally upset. She said you-you-you [were]

pretty much correcting just about every-

thing.” and [tina] said, “Well, she’s got—

she’s gotta learn the terminology.”

Ms. Marshall acknowledges that Stacey isn’t fa-

miliar with specialized and technical gymnastics

terms. nonetheless, she continues to defend her

daughter:

I do remember, I said to her, I said, “Look,

maybe it’s not all the student.” you know, I

just left it like that. That, you know, some-

times teaching, learning and teaching, is a

two-way proposition as far as I’m concerned.

and sometimes teachers have to learn how

to, you know, meet the needs of the kid. Her

style, her immediate style was not accommo-

dating to—to Stacey.

Here Ms. Marshall is asserting the legitimacy of an

individualized approach to instruction. She frames

her opening remark as a question (“Is there a prob-

lem?”). Her purpose, however, is to alert the instruc-

tor to the negative impact she has had on Stacey

(“She’s really upset.”). although her criticism is indi-

rect (“Maybe it’s not all the student . . . ”), Ms. Mar-

shall makes it clear that she expects her daughter to be

treated differently in the future. In this case, Stacey

does not hear what her mother says, but she knows

that her wishes and feelings are being transmitted to

the instructor in a way that she could not do herself.

although parents were equally concerned about

their children’s happiness, in working-class and

poor homes we observed different patterns of over-

sight for children’s institutional activities. For ex-

ample, in the white working-class home of Wendy

Driver, Wendy’s mother does not nurture her

daughter’s language development like alexander

Williams’ mother does her son’s. She does not at-

tempt to draw Wendy out or follow up on new in-

formation when Wendy introduces the term mortal

sin while the family is sitting around watching tele-

vision. But, just like Ms. Williams, Ms. Driver

cares very much about her child and just like mid-

dle-class parents she wants to help her daughter

succeed. Ms. Driver keeps a close and careful eye

on her Wendy’s schooling. She knows that Wendy

is having problems in school. Ms. Driver immedi-

ately signs and returns each form Wendy brings

home from school and reminds her to turn the pa-

pers in to her teacher.

Wendy is “being tested” as part of an ongoing ef-

fort to determine why she has difficulties with spell-

ing, reading, and related language-based activities.

Her mother welcomes these official efforts but she

did not request them. unlike the middle-class moth-

ers we observed, who asked teachers for detailed in-

formation about every aspect of their children’s

classroom performance and relentlessly pursued in-

formation and assessments outside of school as well,

Ms. Driver seems content with only a vague notion

of her daughter’s learning disabilities. This attitude

contrasts starkly with that of Stacey Marshall’s

mother, for example. In discussing Stacey’s classroom

experiences with fieldworkers, Ms. Marshall rou-

tinely described her daughter’s academic strengths

and weaknesses in detail. Ms. Driver never mentions

that Wendy is doing grade-level work in math but is

reading at a level a full three years below her grade.

Her description is vague:

She’s having problems. . . . They had a special

teacher come in and see if they could find out

what the problem is. She has a reading prob-

lem, but they haven’t put their finger on it

yet, so she’s been through all kinds of special

teachers and testing and everything. She goes

to Special ed, I think it’s two classes a day . . .

I’m not one hundred percent sure—for her

reading. It’s very difficult for her to read

what’s on paper. But then—she can remem-

ber things. But not everything. It’s like she

has a puzzle up there. and we’ve tried, well,

they’ve tried a lot of things. They just haven’t

put their finger on it yet.

Wendy’s teachers uniformly praise her mother as

“supportive” and describe her as “very loving,” but

they are disappointed in Ms. Driver’s failure to take

a more active, interventionist role in Wendy’s educa-

tion, especially given the formidable nature of her

daughter’s learning problems. From Ms. Driver’s

perspective, however, being actively supportive

means doing whatever the teachers tell her to do.

Whatever they would suggest, I would do.

They suggested she go to the eye doctor, so I

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did that. and they checked her and said there

was nothing wrong there.

Similarly, she monitors Wendy’s homework and

supports her efforts to read:

We listen to her read. We help her with her

homework. So she has more attention here in

a smaller household than it was when I lived

with my parents. So, we’re trying to help her

out more, which I think is helping. and with

the two [special education] classes a day at the

school, instead of one like last year, she’s

learning a lot from that. So, we’re just hoping

it takes time and that she’ll just snap out of it.

But Ms. Driver clearly does not have an indepen-

dent understanding of the nature or degree of Wen-

dy’s limitations, perhaps because she is unfamiliar

with the kind of terms the educators use to describe

her daughter’s needs (e.g., a limited “sight vocabu-

lary,” underdeveloped “language arts skills”). Per-

haps, too, her confidence in the school staff makes it

easier for her to leave “the details” to them: “Ms.

Morton, she’s great. She’s worked with us for differ-

ent testing and stuff.” Ms. Driver depends on the

school staff’s expertise to assess the situation and

then share the information with her:

I think they just want to keep it in the school

till now. and when they get to a point where

they can’t figure out what it is, and then I

guess they’ll send me somewhere else. . . .

Her mother is not alarmed, because “the school”

has told her not to worry about Wendy’s grades:

Her report card—as long as it’s not spelling

and reading—spelling and reading are like

F’s. and they keep telling me not to worry,

because she’s in the Special ed class. But be-

sides that, she does good. I have no behavior

problems with her at all.

Ms. Driver wants the best possible outcome for her

daughter and she does not know how to achieve that

goal without relying heavily on Wendy’s teachers:

I wouldn’t even know where to start going. on

the radio there was something for children

having problems reading and this and that,

call. and I suggested it to a couple different

people, and they were like, wait a second, it’s

only to get you there and you’ll end up paying

an arm and a leg. So I said to my mom, “no,

I’m going to wait until the first report card

and go up and talk to them up there.”

Thus, in looking for the source of Ms. Driver’s def-

erence toward educators, the answers don’t seem to lie

in her having either a shy personality or underdevel-

oped mothering skills. to understand why Wendy’s

mother is accepting where Stacey Marshall’s mother

would be aggressive, it is more useful to focus on so-

cial class position, both in terms of how class shapes

worldviews and how class affects economic and edu-

cational resources. Ms. Driver understands her role in

her daughter’s education as involving a different set of

responsibilities from those perceived by middle-class

mothers. She responds to contacts from the school—

such as invitations to the two annual parent-teacher

conferences—but she does not initiate them. She

views Wendy’s school life as a separate realm, and one

in which she, as a parent, is only an infrequent visitor.

Ms. Driver expects that the teachers will teach and her

daughter will learn and that, under normal circum-

stances, neither requires any additional help from her

as a parent. If problems arise, she presumes that

Wendy will tell her; or, if the issue is serious, the

school will contact her. But what Ms. Driver fails to

understand, is that the educators expect her to take on

a pattern of “concerted cultivation” where she actively

monitors and intervenes in her child’s schooling. The

teachers asked for a complicated mixture of deference

and engagement from parents; they were disappointed

when they did not get it.

Conclusions

I have stressed how social class dynamics are woven

into the texture and rhythm of children and parents’

daily lives. Class position influences critical aspects of

family life: time use, language use, and kin ties. Work-

ing-class and middle-class mothers may express beliefs

that reflect a similar notion of “intensive mothering,”

but their behavior is quite different. For that reason, I

have described sets of paired beliefs and actions as a

“cultural logic” of childrearing. When children and

parents move outside the home into the world of so-

cial institutions, they find that these cultural practices

are not given equal value. There are signs that mid-

dle-class children benefit, in ways that are invisible to

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Lutfey and Freese / The Fundamentals of Fundamental Causality | 451

them and to their parents, from the degree of similar-

ity between the cultural repertoires in the home and

those standards adopted by institutions.

REFERENCES

anderson, elijah. 1999. Code of the Street. new york, ny:

W. W. norton.

Bernstein, Basil. 1971. Class, Codes, and Control: Theoret-

ical Studies Towards a Sociology of Language. new york,

ny: Schocken.

Hart, Betty and todd R. Risley. 1995. Meaningful Differ-

ences in the Everyday Experiences of Young American Chil-

dren. new Haven: yale university Press.

Heath, Shirley Brice. 1983. Ways with Words: Language,

Life, and Work in Communities and Classrooms. Cam-

bridge: Cambridge university Press.

Lareau, annette. 2003. Unequal Childhoods: Class, Race, and

Family Life. Berkeley, Ca: university of California Press.

NOTES

1. elijah anderson, Code of the Street, new york: W. W.

norton (1999).

68. Karen Lutfey and

Jeremy Freese*

The Fundamentals of

Fundamental Causality

Weber’s ([1921] 1968) concept of “life chances”

highlights both the diverse consequences of social

standing and their probabilistic character. The most

poignant kind of life chance affected by socioeco-

nomic standing may also be the most literal: the

probability of staying alive or dying. Lower socioeco-

nomic status (SeS) is associated with worse health

and higher mortality rates at virtually every age

*The ideas, issues, and theories considered in this brief commis-

sioned piece are examined in greater depth in the following

publication: Karen Lutfey and Jeremy Freese, “toward Some

Fundamentals of Fundamental Causality: Socioeconomic Status

and Health in the Routine Clinic Visit for Diabetes,” American

Journal of Sociology 110:5 (March 2005), pp. 1326–1372, pub-

lished by the university of Chicago Press. The article printed

here was originally prepared by Karen Lutfey and Jeremy Freese

for the fourth edition of Social Stratification: Class, Race, and

Gender in Sociological Perspective, edited by David B. Grusky.

(Robert and House 1994), and this association has

persisted across historical periods in which risk fac-

tors and disease profiles have changed radically (Link

et al. 1998). We use ethnographic data to examine

the association between SeS and adverse health out-

comes among persons with diabetes.

We draw specifically on Link and Phelan’s (1995;

Phelan, Link, and tehranifar 2010) concept of SeS

as a “fundamental cause” of health. Fundamental

causality is not just about what causes an outcome

like ill-health, but about what causes the causes of ill-

health. That is, the concept is not about the specific

proximate mechanisms responsible for a persistent as-

sociation, but rather about the fact that some meta-

mechanism(s) are responsible for the generation of

multiple concrete mechanisms that reproduce a par-

ticular relationship in different places and times. The

metamechanism provides what we refer to as a dura-

ble narrative (Freese and Lutfey 2011) about why the

SeS-health relationship should be robust to changes

in health threats and treatments—an explanation of

why a similar association would be observed in di-

verse sociohistorical contexts.

a fundamental relationship between two vari-

ables such as SeS and health implies the potential

for a massive multiplicity of mechanisms connecting

the two. no individual mechanism is so dominant

that it alone is responsible for the bulk of the ob-

served association between SeS and health. Rather,

as proximate causes of health change, the standing

conjecture is that these will, on balance, sustain the

overall relationship between SeS and health. Differ-

ential resources provide a possible metamechanism

(Link and Phelan 1995). The ways resources can in-

fluence health are flexible and varied, allowing the

possibility that, when one uses ethnographic meth-

ods to consider in a concrete setting how different

resources might lead to different outcomes, many

potential mechanisms will be revealed.

Diabetes

Diabetes is a major cause of morbidity and mortal-

ity in the united States, and its prevalence is in-

creasing dramatically (Centers for Disease Control

and Prevention 2011). Diabetes incidence, compli-

cations (Booth and Hux 2003; Robbins et al.

2001), and mortality have all been shown to be

related to SeS. Because diabetes complications are

known to be linked to average glucose levels (Diabe-

tes Control and Complications trial Research Group