Some of the advantages of testing, private schools, neighborhoods with good public schools, extracurricular engagement, and encouragement of distinctive talents are not unique to the children in the more elite families. But less privileged parents indicate that they have to be more cautious about the accompanying financial burdens, and they talk about how they make hard choices among the competing ways of securing success for their children.18 For example, one white, middle-class woman said that she wondered about the choice she had made to get a job selling real estate so that she and her husband could afford a home in an upscale Los Angeles suburb with a good school system rather than having stayed home to be more available to her child, who would then have attended what she thought was an inferior school. “Is it better to live in the right school district and be working to pay for it, [or] is it better to be home?” she asked.
And from Louisville, Kentucky, Peter Chaplin, a divorced, middle-class father with shared custody of his thirteen-year-old son, worried about a range of such accommodations—from specialized sports programs through summer camps to the possibility of private school—as he considered how to secure the appropriate advantages for his child in competition with the children of what he dubbed “hyperactive” parents, who (he believes) can ensure the best at every turn. Because he lives on an income of less than fifty thousand dollars a year from his landscaping business, it is not surprising that he worries about the financial implications of making the same kinds of choices for his son. He also doubts whether he has sufficient social and cultural capital to recognize which are the necessary—and right—possibilities:
One of the questions [I have is], what are the activities, peer groups, surroundings that one should place Sam in where he can learn [the skills he needs to be successful]? I agonize over that a lot. I agonize over it in relation to public and private school. . . . We chose not to put him in the most competitive [soccer] programs early, and then we found last year that he sort of got boxed out of getting access. And one just sort of looks at the hyperactive parents that were so driven to get their children in just the right soccer programs and so on, and you sometimes wonder, am I doing Sam a disservice by not putting him into those environments all the time and [by not taking] the time and energy to identify those? . . . We try to make a decision as to whether these things are essential or not essential. . . .
I think about that a lot, particularly in relation to putting Sam on a track where he can be successful and get into a good college. . . . We’re going to invest eleven hundred dollars next year in soccer, . . . and it’s not even the most competitive soccer echelon. . . . Summer camps and those kinds of things—that you really don’t know how beneficial they are and which ones are the good ones to do and given our financial situation, consideration of all those is always problematic. We just haven’t had the money, the readily available funds, to do that.
In the short run, Peter Chaplin, like parents both more and less privileged than himself, wants to secure educational and extracurricular opportunities for his son. In the long run, he wants his son to be able to compete with the children from the professional middle class and wend his way into a “good” college. His worries about costs, his questions about the necessity for high — powered environments, and his doubts about his own capacity to judge what matters are all echoed in the comments of other middle — and working-class parents who, as they weigh costs against an ongoing economic pinch, are aware that more privileged parents can do more for their children than they can. As is discussed in chapter 2, well-educated parents worry about these programs as well, but for them the worry centers on whether they have overscheduled, and placed too much pressure on, their children. Participation, however, often seems an inevitable accompaniment to, and basis for, ensuring that their children receive class privileges. And the capacity to afford such advantages is not the only difference between professional middle-class parents and their less privileged peers as they look toward the future.