Unequal Childhoods: Class, Race, and Family Life [Paperback]

Class does make a difference in the lives and futures of American children. Drawing on in-depth observations of black and white middle-class, working-class, and poor families, Unequal Childhoods explores this fact, offering a picture of childhood today. Here are the frenetic families managing their children's hectic schedules of leisure activities; and here are families with plenty of time but little economic security. Lareau shows how middle-class parents, whether black or white, engage in a process of concerted cultivation designed to draw out children's talents and skills, while working-class and poor families rely on the accomplishment of natural growth, in which a child's development unfolds spontaneouslyas long as basic comfort, food, and shelter are provided. Each of these approaches to childrearing brings its own benefits and its own drawbacks. In identifying and analyzing differences between the two, Lareau demonstrates the power, and limits, of social class in shaping the lives of America's children.

The first edition ofUnequal Childhoodswas an instant classic, portraying in riveting detail the unexpected ways in which social class influences parenting in white and African American families. A decade later, Annette Lareau has revisited the same families and interviewed the original subjects to examine the impact of social class in the transition to adulthood.

Annette Lareauis the Stanley I. Sheerr Professor at the University of Pennsylvania. She is faculty member in the Department of Sociology with a secondary appointment in the Graduate School of Education. Lareau is the author ofHome Advantage: Social Class and Parental Intervention in Elementary Education(1989; second edition, 2000), and coeditor ofSocial Class: How Does it Work?(2009); andEducation Research on Trial: Policy Reform and the Call for Scientific Rigor(2009); andJourneys through Ethnography: Realistic Accounts of Fieldwolc