pktechgirlbackup | Entries tagged with unequalchildhoods

So if poor/working class parents practice "natural growth" and middle class parents practice "concerted cultivation", what do Chinese mothers practice? I'm going to go with "forcing the motherfucking flower to bloom." Excerpt, about a woman's daughter's failure to play a fairly difficult piano piece at age 7:

Back at the piano, Lulu made me pay. She punched, thrashed and kicked. She grabbed the music score and tore it to shreds. I taped the score back together and encased it in a plastic shield so that it could never be destroyed again. Then I hauled Lulu's dollhouse to the car and told her I'd donate it to the Salvation Army piece by piece if she didn't have "The Little White Donkey" perfect by the next day. When Lulu said, "I thought you were going to the Salvation Army, why are you still here?" I threatened her with no lunch, no dinner, no Christmas or Hanukkah presents, no birthday parties for two, three, four years. When she still kept playing it wrong, I told her she was purposely working herself into a frenzy because she was secretly afraid she couldn't do it. I told her to stop being lazy, cowardly, self-indulgent and pathetic....

I rolled up my sleeves and went back to Lulu. I used every weapon and tactic I could think of. We worked right through dinner into the night, and I wouldn't let Lulu get up, not for water, not even to go to the bathroom. The house became a war zone, and I lost my voice yelling, but still there seemed to be only negative progress, and even I began to have doubts.

This apparently isn't a parody, but I'm not convinced it's not a deliberate exaggeration to drum up publicity for her book, especially since her parents were Philipino by nationality, she was born in the US, and she married a white (Jewish?) man. The attempt worked, I'm on the library waiting list for it now. I'm withhold comment on her actual parenting style until then, but I do want to comment on this:

, Chinese parents believe that their kids owe them everything. The reason for this is a little unclear, but it's probably a combination of Confucian filial piety and the fact that the parents have sacrificed and done so much for their children. (And it's true that Chinese mothers get in the trenches, putting in long grueling hours personally tutoring, training, interrogating and spying on their kids.) Anyway, the understanding is that Chinese children must spend their lives repaying their parents by obeying them and making them proud.

By contrast, I don't think most Westerners have the same view of children being permanently indebted to their parents. My husband, Jed, actually has the opposite view. "Children don't choose their parents," he once said to me. "They don't even choose to be born. It's parents who foist life on their kids, so it's the parents' responsibility to provide for them. Kids don't owe their parents anything. Their duty will be to their own kids." This strikes me as a terrible deal for the Western parent.

Her husband could be quoting me, because I've said the exact same thing several times. And yes, it is a bum deal for the parents, which is why I fully support a wide variety of birth control methods. But that's not actually a counterargument to "this was a result of your choice, not theirs." There's a special level of hell for someone who makes herself miserable to make you miserable and then expects you to pay her back for it later on. Yes, good parenting involves a certain amount of things that incidentally make your children miserable, and they will in turn make you miserable for that, but there is something sinister about measuring your success as a parent by how miserable you made them, and then translating that back into them owing you. If you don't like the deal- and I'm not particularly fond of it myself- don't have kids.

Good news everyone: I finished Unequal Childhoods and will be going into another nonfiction fast for a bit, so I will maybe be shutting up for a bit, except actually I finished last week and was waiting to post this till I finished the posts I'd held in reserve (yes, this was me pacing myself), and I keep coming up with new things to say, so maybe not.

If there's one piece of good news in the book, it's the dearth of an influence of race. Black families in the study had to deal with slightly more crap than their white counterparts, but in general, being SES trumped race. Middle class families practice "concerted cultivation", which means signing your kid up for 5 million activities, encouraging him to use words as magic spells, and vigorously fighting educators on his behalf, and poor and working class families practice "natural growth", which means giving your kid lots of autonomy to go out and play, expecting obedience to adults, and a lot of deference from you to authority figures. This surprised me because every other study I've read (see Black Picket Fences for an example, but I've read it in many other places) report black middle class families doing less concerted cultivation than white middle class families. Either this study is a fluke, or the difference lies in the definition of middle class: most studies use income level, but UC used the social status of the parent's job (interesting/high autonomy/requires education=middle class, boring/low autonomy/doesn't require education = working class, none = poor. Note that this means you can end up with a working class family having more money than a middle class family, if the working class parent has a high paying union job and the middle class parent is an arty type. But I don't think that was the case for any of the focal families). Further proof that the S is in SES for a reason.

There's also a number of interesting tidbits about teachers in the book. I have friends who are teachers (and are reading this), so I want to make it clear that I know not all teachers are like this, but in general: aaargh. The teachers at the poor school complain about parents who don't care and don't do enough. The teachers at the rich school complain about parents who are too quick to intervene and over schedule their kids. And that's okay. People like things that make their job easier. I complain about my devs not documenting even though it's a basic fact of my job. But somehow when teachers do it (not all teachers, but not just the ones in this book either), it takes on this edge of sanctimony. They're not suggesting you do more/less/different because it would make their job easier, no, they're suggesting it for the welfare of your child, you over protective/neglectful bitch. And it is always the mothers they're complaining about.

The author mentions that no poor kid would ever take food (from their family, in their family's house) without asking a parent first. This is one of those things that simultaneously made me understand something a new light, made perfect sense as soon as heard it, and would never, ever have come up with on my own, event though it made perfect sense as soon as I heard it. It may also be my new definition of poor.

At the end of the book, the author admits you can't make poor/working class parents act like middle class parents by giving them money, but nonetheless thinks we should do that. She also suggests things like scholarships for extracurriculars, which I think is a fantastic idea and have contributed to organizations that do just that, but I wish she didn't assume the government is the one to do it. I wonder if providing an advocate would do any good- someone to go to the dentist with the family and explain to the mother what "tooth decay" means (actual example from book), to yell at the school if a kid's special needs testing feel through the cracks (again, actual example), and maybe slip in a $25 registration fee for band now and again. So like Treehouse, but without requiring the kids to go into foster care. I'm already on board with extracurriculars at schools, including publicly funded ones, but this is just another reason for it.

My post on scheduling seems to have attracted attention mostly for the scheduled to the breaking point middle class versus abandoned lower class, which is a topic worthy of investigation, but not what I was going for. Luckily, I've thought of a better anecdote to illustrate it.

My mom signed me up for swim classes when I was fairly young- 6, maybe? Our immediate neighborhood (say, four blocks worth) was middle class but the surrounding area was not, and the YMCA drew heavily from the poor/wc group. The first day of swim class, I had the following conversation with my instructor.

instructor (angry): YOU DID THAT WRONG. DO IT THIS WAY.
me: okay.
instructor (even angrier): DO NOT TALK BACK TO ME.

I don't even think I complained, my mom saw it and switched me to a different class. But from the fact that that guy was employed, I assume someone was letting him teach their kids. By moving me solely because the the instructor was mean to me, my mom taught me that my feelings are important and needed to be respected, even by adults, things I generally think are good, although g-d knows some parents go overboard with it. Obviously this isn't the only way to teach kids that lesson, but it's part of a larger package where middle class kids grow up in a world where their words are magic and poor kids don't.

When kids are learning to talk, they go through a stage where they lie. Badly. You could say that this is because they're vicious sociopaths, and they are, but I don't think that's what's going on. I think that kids learn language not as a descriptor but as a way of manipulating the world. And when you're that young, the world == your parents. Babies don't say "ju-" for the sheer joy of naming something, they say it because it gets them juice faster than indiscriminate crying. So when they learn that they get in trouble for breaking lamps, and are asked if they broke a lamp, of course they say no. They're not attempting to deceive any more than pushing a lever to get the food you want is an attempt to deceive. This is why kids often put swearing and lying in the same mental category- they're both words that come out of your mouth that you get yelled at for. At this stage, talking is basically a magic spell.

Unequal Childhood talks a lot about the difference in verbal instruction between middle class and poor/working class parents (once again, the working class parents act a lot more like poor parents than middle class parents): middle class parents treat their children as conversational partners from birth, give them a lot more explicit language and vocabulary instruction, and plain out talk to them more. But the differences don't stop there. Middle class parents are more responsive when their kids do talk. They're more likely to change a meal to suit their kids' tastes, more likely to buy a kid something they ask for, more likely to ask how the kid's day went, and hella more likely to view a kid's complaint about a teacher as a call to action on their part. This teaches middle class kids that their will affects the world. Middle class parents are also much more tolerant of kids negotiating/talking back/giving them new data/weaseling out of shit, which, again, teaches kids to manipulate the world through words. So poor kids are not only taught fewer spells, they grow up in a world where said spells are less effective. And since expectations influence the success of spells, they're in a downward spiral against the idea of trying.

You can't fix this out of context. One hour a week where someone asks about their day and lets them choose the ice cream flavor isn't going to undo the damage of constantly being silenced. I treated my tutoring student in typical middle class fashion- ask about her day, let her choose whether we took the stairs or the elevator, didn't come down too hard on her when she got distracted- and I think it may have cost me some respect. So there needs to be some sort of transition state so the kids get the sense that there are being listened to because they are important, not because the adult is an idiot. And you can't wave a magic wand and change parental behavior, because by definition poor parents are operating under more constraints than middle class parents.

It's not even clear we what the ideal mix of behavior would be. The P/WC kids in the study were generally far better behaved, politer to adults, and easier to manage than the MC kids, which surprised me. I think there's three issues here: 1. I dealt with poor kids when I was a kid myself, and the study doesn't say anything about behavior to other kids. Those of you dealing with a wide spectrum of kids as an adult are invited to weigh in here. 2. middle class kids learn to phrase disobedience much better, so it doesn't feel abrasive (to me, who was very much raised in the school of manipulating your parents with words*), but scores the same on a study sheet. 3. The study was done on 4th graders, but our impression of the behavior of kids of a given class is really based on the behavior of teenagers of a given class.

In fact, it wouldn't surprise me if the initial pain of teaching children to manipulate the world is crucial to getting those polite middle class office workers we love so much. Running throughout the book is the theme that poor kids either follow rules or break them, middle class kids manipulate them or use them to their advantage. Maybe the problem isn't that poor parents "aren't strict enough", it's that their strictness means kids never learn how to manipulate the world in a socially acceptable way.

Next step: investigate this language-as-magic thing in Deaf and ASD culture, because I bet there's some interesting data there.

*My parents in fact said outright to seven or eight year old me that you don't get strong, capable women from cute, compliant girls, and they wanted to raise a strong capable woman. They knew the trade off they were making and they were happy about it, although I'm sure there were times the thought of having a stupid child with a healthy fear of adults sounded very pleasant.