Annette Lareau

Last updated
Annette P. Lareau
OccupationSociologist, author
NationalityAmerican
SubjectSociology

Annette Patricia Lareau (born 1952) is a sociologist working at the University of Pennsylvania.

Contents

She has completed extensive field work studying the daily lives of African-Americans and European-Americans. She is also credited with the creation of the term concerted cultivation. This concept refers to middle class child rearing practices. She says that this differs from the parents of children in working-class families, who attribute much of their child raising tactics to the accomplishment of natural growth. [1] [2]

Education

Lareau is a graduate of U.C. Santa Cruz and earned her PhD in Sociology from U.C. Berkeley. She started her career at Southern Illinois University at Carbondale and also previously worked as a Professor of Sociology at Temple University, Pennsylvania from 1990 to 2005. She has served as a professor of sociology at the University of Maryland, College Park, and in 2008 joined as professor of Sociology at the University of Pennsylvania where she is the Stanley I. Sheerr Professor. During the 2005–2006 school year she moved to Palo Alto, California to complete a residence at the Center for Advanced Study of Behavioral Sciences. Lareau has been very active with organizations such as the Eastern Sociological Society, Sociology of Education journal, and the American Sociological Association. [1]

Writings

Lareau is the author of Home Advantage: Social Class and Parental Intervention in Elementary Education (1989), co-editor of Journeys through Ethnography: Realistic Accounts of Fieldwork (1996), and author of Unequal Childhoods: Class, Race, and Family Life (2003). She conducted field work between 1993 and 1995 with 10- and 11-year-old children, and followed up with them 10 years later when the children were 20 and 21 years old. [3]

Unequal Childhoods

Her field research was the basis for her book Unequal Childhoods , which explained in detail her research and interviews with 88 children and their parents. The subjects included white and black children from middle class, working class, and poor families. Through her observations she discovered differences in parenting styles that related to class distinctions. Specifically, she observed how different family circumstances influenced the children's performance and interactions in and out of school. Her findings allowed her to draw a major distinction between the parenting styles of working class / poor parents and middle-class parents. In this book, she highlights the benefits and shortcomings of raising children through either concerted cultivation or natural growth. [2]

"Concerted cultivation" is the type of childrearing that middle-class parents practice. This childrearing practice consists of parents participating in the organization of their child's afterschool activities and providing a structured life for their child. The parents generally have a better education and try to impress this upon their child on a daily basis. Parents teach their children things that are not taught in school that will help them to perform better and get better grades on tests and ultimately do better in school. The main advantage to this type of childrearing is that children are taught lessons through organized activities that help prepare them for a white collar job and the types of interactions that a white-collar worker encounters. Some examples of this type of parental teaching is engagement in critical thinking such as asking challenging questions, the use of advanced grammar, and help a stronger family support structure. The main disadvantage of concerted cultivation is that often the child becomes bored easily and cannot entertain themselves. [2]

"The Accomplishment of Natural Growth" is the type of childrearing that working class and poor parents practice, and not necessarily by choice. They are less involved with the structure of their child's after school activities and generally have less education and time to impress values upon their children that will give them an advantage in school. This type of childrearing involves less organized activities and more free time for their children to play with other children in the neighborhood. [2]

The book Unequal Childhoods includes detailed descriptions of her encounters and organized data from her analysis. She compiled a list of formal and informal activities that specific children were involved in, whether they were middle class, working class, or poor, and whether they have requested a teacher for their children. There is also information about whether or not the parents knew people who are psychologists, doctors, lawyers, or teachers. The book contains a great deal of quotes, stories of her experiences while observing, and connections that explain why particular children might act a certain way. Each chapter is an in-depth analysis of a different family, concerning the specific situation surrounding the child and how it has affected their life. From all her observations and analysis, Lareau concludes that the different types of childrearing have more to do with class than race. Through her research she has found that the childrearing ways of the middle class perpetuate inequality because of the advantages that the children have through participation in extracurricular activities, engagement in critical thinking and problem solving. These practices of more parental involvement are what perpetuate inequalities from one generation to the next. Lareau stresses the importance of parents being involved in their children's lives and talks about how middle class children benefit from having a sense of entitlement and the practice of gaining access to scarce resources. She also stresses the importance of literacy as a huge factor in a child's success. [1] [2] A second edition of the book was released in September 2011; it added over 100 new pages of text to the original version.

Data collection process

In 1989–1990 Lareau observed white and black children from two third-grade classrooms in a small Midwestern town, Lawrenceville, and interviewed their mothers, fathers, and guardians, as well as school professionals working with the children. In 1992–1993 she received a grant from the Spencer Foundation to study a third grade classroom in Lower Richmond, an urban school district. In order to do this, she hired and trained five research assistants in 1993, who would carry out in-depth interviews with the families. Lareau and her research team studied 88 African-American and white families, and later chose 12 of the 88 families for more intensive visits. During the study, they visited the 12 families 20 times each, roughly two to three hours at a time, and accompanied them on various outings and appointments. Lareau conducted about half of the interviews, and did many family visits. Lareau wrote the first draft of her book Unequal Childhoods and completed the first edition of the book by 2002. Unequal Childhoods was discussed by Malcolm Gladwell in his book Outliers.

A second edition of Unequal Childhoods was published in 2011, to which Lareau added over 100 pages. She traced the lives of the 12 children whose families were observed into adulthood. With Elliot Weininger and Dalton Conley, she also reported national data on children's participation in organized activities which affirmed the findings of her ethnographic study. [2]

Other works

In 2014, Lareau published Choosing Homes, Choosing Schools, which she edited with Kimberly Goyette. The book was published by the Russell Sage Foundation. It reports on the results of a number of studies of how residential decisions facilitate the maintenance of social inequality. On the book's back cover, Sean Reardon, Professor of Sociology and Education at Stanford University called it "a 'must-read' for urban sociologists and educational policy makers interested in understanding modern American inequality, segregation, and educational opportunity".

Awards

Lareau's first book, Home Advantage, won the Sociology of Education Award for Scholarship of the American Sociological Association. It also won the AESA Critic's Choice award from the American Educational Studies Association.

For Unequal Childhoods, she won the Sociology of Culture Section Best Book Award as well as the William J. Goode Best Book Length Contribution to Family Sociology Award, both from the American Sociological Association.

In 2004, she won the American Sociological Association Section on Children and Youth Distinguished Contribution to Scholarship Award. [2]

Lareau served as President of the American Sociological Association between 2013 and 2014.

See also

Related Research Articles

Social class Hierarchical social stratification

A social class is a set of concepts in the social sciences and political theory centered on models of social stratification which occurs in class society, in which people are grouped into a set of hierarchical social categories, the most common being the upper, middle and lower classes. Membership in a social class can for example be dependent on education, wealth, occupation, income, and belonging to a particular subculture or social network.

Parenting Process of raising a child

Parenting or child rearing promotes and supports the physical, emotional, social, and intellectual development of a child from infancy to adulthood. Parenting refers to the intricacies of raising a child and not exclusively for a biological relationship.

Social mobility Mobility to move social classes

Social mobility is the movement of individuals, families, households, or other categories of people within or between social strata in a society. It is a change in social status relative to one's current social location within a given society. This movement occurs between layers or tiers in an open system of social stratification. Open stratification systems are those in which at least some value is given to achieved status characteristics in a society. The movement can be in a downward or upward direction. Markers for social mobility, such as education and class, are used to predict, discuss, and learn more about an individual or a group's mobility in society.

Soccer mom

The term soccer mom broadly refers to a North American, middle-class, suburban, woman who spends a significant amount of her time transporting her school-age children to youth sporting events or other activities, including—though not restricted to—soccer. It came into widespread use during the 1996 United States presidential election and over time has come to take on a pejorative meaning.

In economics, a poverty trap or cycle of poverty are caused by self-reinforcing mechanisms that cause poverty, once it exists, to persist unless there is outside intervention. It can persist across generations, and when applied to developing countries, is also known as a development trap.

Sociology of the family is a subfield of the subject of sociology, in which researchers and academics evaluate family structure as a social institution and unit of socialization from various sociological perspectives. It is usually included in the general education of tertiary curriculum, since it is usually an illustrative example of patterned social relations and group dynamics.

Kyōiku mama (教育ママ) is a Japanese pejorative term which translates literally as "education mother". The kyōiku mama is a stereotyped figure in modern Japanese society portrayed as a mother who relentlessly drives her child to study, to the detriment of the child's social and physical development, and emotional well-being.

Sociology of education The study of how public institutions and individual experiences affect education and its outcomes

{{for|the journal|Sociology of Education (journal)

Educational attainment in the United States

The educational attainment of the U.S. population refers to the highest level of education completed. The educational attainment of the U.S. population is similar to that of many other industrialized countries with the vast majority of the population having completed secondary education and a rising number of college graduates that outnumber high school dropouts. As a whole, the population of the United States is spending more years in formal educational programs. As with income, levels differ by race, age, household configuration, and geography.

Rachel Sherman is an associate professor of sociology at the New School for Social Research. Her first book, Class Acts: Service and Inequality in Luxury Hotels, analyzes how workers, guests, and managers in luxury hotels make sense of and negotiate class inequalities that marked their relationships. Her second book, Uneasy Street: The Anxieties of Affluence, explores the lived experience of privilege among wealthy and affluent parents in New York City.

Socioeconomic status Economic and social measure of a persons affluence and/or influence

Socioeconomic status (SES) is an economic and sociological combined total measure of a person's work experience and of an individual's or family's economic and social position in relation to others. When analyzing a family's SES, the household income, earners' education, and occupation are examined, as well as combined income, whereas for an individual's SES only their own attributes are assessed. However, SES is more commonly used to depict an economic difference in society as a whole.

The Gilbert model was developed by Dennis Gilbert as a means of a more effective way of classifying people in a given society into social classes.

Evelyn Seiko Nakano Glenn is a Professor of the Graduate School at the University of California, Berkeley. In addition to her teaching and research responsibilities, she served as Founding Director of the University's Center for Race and Gender (CRG). The CRG is a leading U.S. academic center for the study of intersectionality among gender, race and class social groups and institutions. In June 2008, Glenn was elected President of the 15,000-member American Sociological Association. She served as President-elect during the 2008–2009 academic year, assumed her presidency at the annual ASA national convention in San Francisco in August 2009, served as President of the Association during the 2009–2010 year, and continued to serve on the ASA Governing Council as Past-president until August 2011. Her Presidential Address, given at the 2010 meetings in Atlanta, was entitled "Constructing Citizenship: Exclusion, Subordination, and Resistance", and was printed as the lead article in the American Sociological Review.

Educational inequality Unequal distribution of academic resources

Educational inequality is the unequal distribution of academic resources, including but not limited to; school funding, qualified and experienced teachers, books, and technologies to socially excluded communities. These communities tend to be historically disadvantaged and oppressed. More times than not, individuals belonging to these marginalized groups are also denied access to the schools with abundant resources. Inequality leads to major differences in the educational success or efficiency of these individuals and ultimately suppresses social and economic mobility. See Statistic sections for more information.

Concerted cultivation is a style of parenting. The expression is attributed to Annette Lareau. This parenting style or parenting practice is marked by a parent's attempts to foster their child's talents by incorporating organized activities in their children's lives. This parenting style is commonly exhibited in middle class and upper class American families, and is also characterized by consciously developing language use and ability to interact with social institutions. Many have attributed cultural benefits to this form of child-rearing due to the style's use in higher income families, conversely affecting the social habitus of children raised in such a manner. A child that has been concertedly cultivated will often express greater social prowess in social situations involving formality or structure attributed to their increased experience and engagement in organized clubs, sports, musical groups as well as increased experience with adults and power structure. While this pattern of child rearing holds no innate positive qualities, it has been linked to an increase in financial and academic success.

Working class education is the education of working-class people.

<i>White-Washing Race</i>

White-Washing Race: The Myth of a Color-Blind Society is a 2005 book arguing that racial discrimination is still evident on contemporary American society. The book draws on the fields of sociology, political science, economics, criminology, and legal studies. The authors argue that the inequalities which prevail in America today, especially with regard to wages, income, and access to housing and health care, are the effects of either cultural or individual failures.

<i>Unequal Childhoods</i>

Unequal Childhoods: Class, Race, and Family Life is a 2003 non-fiction book by American sociologist Annette Lareau based upon a study of 88 African American, and white families to understand the impact of how social class makes a difference in family life, more specifically in children's lives. The book argues that regardless of race, social economic class will determine how children cultivate skills they will use in the future. In the second edition, Lareau revisits the subjects from the original study a decade later in order to examine the impact of social class on the transition to adulthood. She covers the subjects' awareness of their social class, high school experiences and the effect of organized activities as they went through their adolescent years. She emphasizes the use of concerted cultivation, and natural growth as tools parents in different social and economic classes use in order to raise their children and by continuing her research ten years later she is able to show how these methods of child rearing helped to cultivate the children into the adults they are today.

Cultural deprivation is a theory in sociology where a person has inferior norms, values, skills and knowledge. The theory states that people of lower social classes experience cultural deprivation compared with those above and that this disadvantages them, as a result of which the gap between classes increases.

Educational inequality in the United States

Educational inequality refers to unequal access to education, and the unequal outcomes for students that result. The disparities present in academic access among students in the United States are the result of several factors including: government policies, school choice, family wealth, parenting style, implicit bias towards the race or ethnicity of the student, and the resources available to the student and their school. Educational inequality contributes to a number of broader problems in the United States, including income inequality and increasing prison populations.

References

  1. 1 2 3 UC Santa Cruz. http://currents.ucsc.edu/05-06/11-28/lareau.asp. Retrieved November 8, 2008.
  2. 1 2 3 4 5 6 7 Lareau, Annette. Unequal Childhoods: Class, race, and Family Life. Berkeley and Los Angeles, California: University of California Press, 2003.
  3. University of Maryland. She also co-edited (with Dalton Conley) Social Class: How Does it Work? (Russell Sage). In addition, she is the co-editor of Education Research on Trial (with Pamela Barnhouse Walters and Sheri Ranis (Routledge). . Retrieved November 8, 2008.