Deny і ng Pri vi lege

When the professional middle-class parents are asked about their approach to raising children, they definitely do not respond with reference to the mul­tiple advantages they can afford. Some of the less privileged parents, on the other hand, do speak about what is beyond their reach, about the limits that frame their consumption patterns. On this issue, recall Peter Chaplin and his struggles over whether he could enroll his child in a competitive soccer pro­gram or send him to private school. But the professional middle-class parents do not talk in terms of the range of resources available to their children—the testing for disabilities, the private school education, and the opportunities to nurture individual skills. As we have seen, sometimes parents do worry that they are too indulgent with respect to material goods. But the provision of these extraordinary resources is so taken for granted that it is not considered a part of how they approach the task of raising their children.