Concerted and Compensatory Cultivation: An Exploration of African American Parenting Practices

• In Event: Millennium Hotel Roundtable Session 13
  In Roundtable Session: How Parents and Families Navigate Educational Contexts

Abstract

Coined by sociologist Annette Lareau (2003), the term “concerted cultivation” is positioned as a class-based parenting approach, one that is largely independent of racial dynamics. The purpose of this study is to develop a more nuanced understanding of the racialized ways this approach operates for African American parents seeking to support their children’s development. We focus on the compensatory ways that parents engage concerted cultivation around issues of race and racial socialization. Drawing from focus groups and interviews with African American parents and their children, we challenge the ways that social class and race are theorized to interact in the dominant literature and propose a cultivated and compensatory cultivation that address the race-based ways that concerted cultivation may occur.

Authors

• Lori Ann Delale-O'Connor, University of Pittsburgh

• James P. Huguley, University of Pittsburgh

• Alyssa Parr, University of Pittsburgh