Middle-class child-rearing that schedules activities and coaches children to question professionals transmits an ease with institutions that schooling then rewards.
Lareau's Unequal Childhoods in 2003 contrasted concerted cultivation with what she called the accomplishment of natural growth, and found the advantage did not lie in the activities but in the practised habit of addressing adults in authority as equals and negotiating on one's own behalf. The children who had it extracted more from every institution they met.
In practice
- Two equally able pupils get different outcomes from the same appeal process, and the difference is which one has seen an adult argue with an official.
- A patient who asks the consultant three follow-up questions receives a different consultation from one who does not.
- Possible explanations
- One explanation is practice: children coached to question professionals arrive at institutions already able to do it. Another is scheduling, which teaches negotiation with adults and the management of time.
- In its favour
- Later survey work finds class differences in parenting practice, and in children's ease with institutions, broadly as described, and the mechanism is specific enough to test.
- Against it
- The study observed twelve families, and the link from practice to outcome is inferred rather than measured. Parenting style is also hard to separate from income, neighbourhood and inherited advantage.
- Standing
- Drawn from intensive observation of a small number of families; the ethnographic depth is the strength and the sample is the limit.
- Further reading
- Wikipedia
- Subject
- Learning & Education
- Essay
- Theories of teaching, and what schools are for