"I Was Constantly Worried About It": The Underexplored Cost of Cultural Capital

• In Event: New Approaches to Studying Cultural Capital

Abstract

Objectives
Parenting classes are designed to help parents adjust to the transition to parenthood, develop knowledge and skills, and learn up-to-date information about caring for their children. Classes are offered all over the country—in churches, community centers, schools, hospitals, and even prisons—and can serve very different populations. From a research perspective, such classes provide an opportunity to observe how parents navigate between their own knowledge, life circumstances, and practices and the “official” messages from educators and health professionals. This paper draws from an ethnographic study of parenting classes that examines the extent to which institutionally sanctioned ideas about good parenting resonate with parents in different class or race categories. It uses data collected with middle-class mothers to expand our understanding of the dark side of parents’ efforts to transmit advantage to their children.

Perspectives
Bourdieu’s concept of cultural capital—or tastes, practices, knowledge, and habits that have value in a particular field and can be used to secure advantages in other forms—provides the theoretical underpinning for this paper (Bourdieu and Passeron, 1977). Scholars have used this idea to trace the cultural mechanisms through which parents pass their class status down to their children (e.g., Lareau, 2011). I propose that parenting practices, even with respect to young children, can serve as cultural capital.

Methods
This paper draws from a larger ethnographic study of mothers’ experiences in parenting education programs. I collected the majority of the data at sites serving low-income mothers. However, in order to learn more about how class shapes parents’ experiences, I added interviews and observations at two classes serving middle- to upper-middle-class parents. In total, I conducted over 200 hours of observation and 50 interviews across 5 sites over a 3-year period. Analysis focused on parents’ responses to the classes, looking particularly at how parents understood their practices and their children’s physical, mental, and social development.

Results
I find that the middle class parents had high levels of information about parenting and were eager to comply with the authorities’ (class instructors, researchers, etc.) ideas about childrearing. While such knowledge and disposition could be seen as cultural capital in this context, it had an unexpected toll, as parents’ anxiety interfered with their enjoyment of their children’s early months.

Significance
Anxiety among middle- and upper-middle-class parents has become something of a trope in recent years. Certainly, the popular media has promoted images of overbearing mothers, worrying excessively about their children’s growth and development. Yet empirical evidence about anxiety among middle-class parents, especially of young children, is in short supply. This paper aims to move our understanding of the nature of 21st century parenthood beyond such hyperbole. Additionally, an analysis of middle-class parents’ fixation on raising their children “correctly” provides insight into the cost of efforts to transmit advantages in a society characterized by extreme inequality.

References
Lareau, A. (2011). Unequal childhoods: Class, race and family life. Los Angeles: University of California Press.
Bourdieu, P. and J-C Passeron (1990). Reproduction in education, society and culture. London: Sage.

Author

• Maia B. Cucchiara, Temple University