Unequal Childhoods (a book recommendation and some random thoughts)

I've always felt like a fish out of water. As a child, I was an ambitious, bookish, maths-loving nerd in an uneducated, unambitious family. After buying a one-way ticket to a new country (and a new life) at 22, I wriggled my way into a different social class, becoming educated myself and making friends who themselves were educated ... and who'd never had to fight to get an education, as I had.

Recently, I read Malcolm Gladwell's book Outliers: The Story of Success and it included a whole chapter on Annette Lareau's ethnographic research into different parenting styles. The chapter was so eye-opening for me that I then bought Professor Lareau's book Unequal Childhoods: Class, Race, and Family Life (2nd edition).

Oh. My. Goodness. So many eureka moments. Lareau and her research assistants embedded themselves in the lives of twelve families, each of whom had a child aged around ten. The families were categorised as middle-class, working-class or poor, and the researchers found distinct differences in parenting styles between the groups. Middle-class parents engaged in 'concerted cultivation', looking for ways to encourage and nurture children's skills and talents, whereas working-class and poor parents' parenting style was called 'the accomplishment of natural growth', under which children were provided with basic necessities (food and shelter) and expected to develop spontaneously.

While I've long thought of my own childhood as featuring benign neglect, or perhaps half-arsedness (to use an Australianism), apparently it is perfectly normal in cash-strapped families, as mine was, not to teach your kids to ride a bike, or swim, or drive a car. Or to handle money, or negotiate, or debate issues. The research indicated a huge gulf between the groups, with the 'concerted cultivators' encouraging and supporting kids to learn, flourish, and develop, and the proponents of natural growth ... not doing those things. There are, of course, pluses and minuses of both types of upbringing. My parents were firmly in the 'natural growth' camp. Educational and extra-curricular activities were often actively discouraged, and my sister and I grew up with little hope of escaping the intergenerational mediocrity that categorised our family. On the plus side, this experience helped me become fiercely determined and hard working. On the minus side, at the age of almost 52 I'm still sussing out certain life skills that it seems are actively taught to rich kids; poorer kids have to work them out through trial and error.

Anyway, back to the book. I found it really interesting and insightful. My parents, who seemed oddly hostile to all my attempts to improve my place in the world, were probably just repeating the free-range parenting they'd grown up with. And my friends, who shower their kids with sports, music lessons, therapy, dance classes, tutoring and camps, almost to the point of overwhelming all involved, are probably just following in their own parents' footsteps. No wonder there's so little social mobility. As the Jesuit motto – often cited in Michael Apted's long-running documentary series – says, 'Give me a child until he is seven and I will give you the man.'