This article needs additional citations for verification. Please help improve this article by adding citations to reliable sources. Unsourced material may be challenged and removed. Find sources: "Unequal Childhoods" – news · newspapers · books · scholar · JSTOR(April 2020) (Learn how and when to remove this message)
Unequal Childhoods: Class, Race, and Family Life
First Edition Cover
Author
Annette Lareau
Language
English
Subject
Sociology; American Studies; Ethnic Studies
Genre
non-fiction
Publisher
University of California Press
Publication date
September 2003
Publication place
United States
Pages
343
ISBN
0-520-23950-4
OCLC
315483187
Dewey Decimal
305.23 21
LC Class
HQ767.9 .L37 2003
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 (of which only 12 were discussed) 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.
After her initial fieldwork was completed, Lareau returned to the families featured in her book to examine the pathways each of their lives had followed and to determine if her original research conclusions that class influences educational and work outcomes held true. In most cases, they did. The majority of the poorer, working class participants had either dropped out of high school or not attended post-secondary institutions, or if they had, had not completed their courses. Many were working in jobs that did not require a college degree and had already been working full-time for several years, some had children and car payments to support. Some even gave money back to their parents as rent, for example, if they still lived at home. This made them appear older than the middle class participants who generally had less work experience, and the majority of whom had attended college after going through an extensive preparatory process of investigating various institutions and receiving much greater support and involvement of their parents in making their decision, both about the college to attend and the courses to take. The middle class youth were more likely to be in courses that would lead to professional type occupations like business, medicine and law.
Lareau found her earlier conclusions remained true: social class and parenting approaches significantly impacted educational and work outcomes. Middle-class families had financial and knowledge resources that working-class families did not, and that was most visible as students worked their way through high school either successfully or not, and even more so when it came time to make decisions about attending college, what institution to attend and what courses to take. Middle-class parents took a different approach to interventions in their children's lives than working-class parents and continued to play this support role and supervise as their children aged whereas working-class parents tended to stop once their children were 16–18 years old and it was felt they were old enough to make their own decisions. Lareau comments in a lecture captured on YouTube[1] that, "their lives had diverged in a profound way." Unequal Childhoods encourages us to better understand the impact social class has on our educational and life choices as such decisions as who we will marry, where we will live and how we find jobs are influenced by social class and the advantages it may or may not bring.
^Archived at Ghostarchive and the Wayback Machine: Unequal Childhoods and Unequal Adulthoods with Annette Lareau. YouTube.
and 25 Related for: Unequal Childhoods information
UnequalChildhoods: Class, Race, and Family Life is a 2003 non-fiction book by American sociologist Annette Lareau based upon a study of 88 African American...
Ethnography: Realistic Accounts of Fieldwork (1996), and author of UnequalChildhoods: Class, Race, and Family Life (2003). She conducted field work between...
on 8 April 2017. Retrieved 5 April 2017. Lareau, Annette (2011). UnequalChildhoods: Class, Race, and Family Life. University of California Press. Haveman...
3390/ijerph17249173. PMC 7764112. PMID 33302524. Lareau, Annette (2003). UnequalChildhoods. Berkeley: University of California Press. ISBN 0-520-23950-4. "Archived...
on 5 November 2019. Retrieved 5 November 2019. Laureau, A. (2011). Unequalchildhoods: Class, race, and family life. Univ of California Press. Harris, Alexes...
ethnographies of poor youth and economic inequality, such as Annette Lareau's UnequalChildhoods and Jay MacLeod's Ain't No Makin' It. In the wider field of cultural...
Parenting|year=2009|publisher=Viking Canada|location=Toronto Lareau, Annette (2011). UnequalChildhoods. University of California Press. pp. 1–3. ISBN 978-0-520-27142-5....
Oxford University Press, New York, pp. 487-511. Lareau, A. (2003). UnequalChildhoods; Class, Race, and Family Life. Berkeley, CA: University of California...
"What the Numbers Tell Us." Pp 27-40. Demos. Lareau, Annette. (2011). UnequalChildhoods: Race, Class, and Family Life. University of California Press Staff...
parenting styles can affect a child's future achievement. In her book UnequalChildhoods, she argues that there are two main types of parenting: concerted...
Class Structure. 10th ed. Los Angeles: Sage, 2018). Lareau, Annette. UnequalChildhoods: Class, Race, and Family Life. 2nd edition. Berkeley: University of...
Data.'" Lanham, MD. Bernam Press. 8th ed. 2005. Lareau, Annette. UnequalChildhoods: Class, Race, and Family Life. University of California Press, 2003...
Anisocoria is a condition characterized by an unequal size of the eyes' pupils. Affecting up to 20% of the population, anisocoria is often entirely harmless...
David. The Working Poor. New York: Knopf, 2004. Lareau, Annette. UnequalChildhoods. Berkeley: University of California Press, 2003. Doob, Christopher...
increasing average family income. Other scholarly pieces, such as UnequalChildhoods, a book by sociologist Annette Lareau, show the different parenting...
Educational inequality is the unequal distribution of academic resources, including but not limited to school funding, qualified and experienced teachers...
imperial edict, which divided the concept of incestus into two categories of unequal gravity: the incestus iuris gentium, which was applied to both Romans and...
S2CID 145327425. Kraftl, Peter (2 January 2015). "Alter-Childhoods: Biopolitics and Childhoods in Alternative Education Spaces" (PDF). Annals of the Association...
socioculturalism directly to the postcolonial condition, where there are, "... unequal and uneven forces of cultural representation". In discourse of dissent...
He fought for a separate state beginning in 1952. He often stated that unequal distribution of river water was the root cause of the separate Telangana...
Mental Health Day in 2021, the theme of which was Mental Health in an Unequal World. In 2023, Swedish social media influencer Mathilda Högberg moved...
between groups of unequal status. To demonstrate this, Duckitt created a scheme of types of realistic conflict with groups of unequal status and their...
countries, counting each person equally, life expectancy is lower in more unequal countries (r = -.907). A similar relationship exists among US states (r...
enforced inconsistently, it can lead to arbitrary outcomes, favoritism, and unequal treatment under the law. Individuals from marginalized communities may...