Equally ironic, a set of concerns found exclusively among the professional middle-class parents has to do with precisely what it is that parents are doing to ensure their childrens success. In their efforts to secure status reproduction by preparing their children to seize advantage, parents move to neighborhoods with demanding public schools, pressure their children to do homework, nurture budding talents, and load knapsacks down with the latest consumer goods. They also then worry that have caused childhood to disappear. More specifically, they fear their children are “overscheduled,” are under too much pressure, and are overindulged. “Concerted cultivation,” as described by Annette Lareau in Unequal Childhoods: Class, Race, and Family Life, may, indeed, be the desired strategy of parents; it is not one, however, that the parents themselves see as being without problems for their children.16 Let’s take these concerns one by one.
О versch edu li ng
Consider Jean Marcus, a white woman with a masters degree in public health, whose husband is an engineer. She lives in a well-to-do Boston suburb where (when she was interviewed) the average cost of a home was almost four hundred thousand dollars and the median household income was above eighty — eight thousand dollars a year.17 She has two daughters, one who recently hit her teen years and the other who is just five. When asked about problems facing parents today, Jean answered by making reference to the broad range of activities that consume her children’s daily lives. After outlining the positive effects of this kind of engagement, which allows her to exercise control over her childrens schedules and, not so incidentally, safeguards her childrens achievement in school, she concluded on a note of bemusement:
The fact that they’re busy keeps them out of trouble, and I’ve read or I’ve heard tons that kids who play sports do much better in school and all that because they focus, they have a social group to belong to. So were really happy that that’s where Alex [the thirteen-year-old] is. When I was growing up, I didn’t do half the stuff—at kindergarten [the five-year-old’s] got four activities. I didn’t do anything. We didn’t have soccer.
Jean is not alone in encouraging these activities for their dual benefits of enabling her to know where her children are and nourishing her children’s talents. One white, professional middle-class father of two young children commented that although he thinks “kids get really overscheduled these days,” he was “finding it’s hard to avoid doing precisely that.” The white, professional middle-class mother of one child mused about the effects this “overscheduling” might have on her children: [4]
Even as parents enroll their children in these activities out of fear that their children will be left behind in the race to the top, they worry that constant busyness might disrupt what they think of as a “normal” childhood.