How Middle-Class Parents Negotiate with Their Children on Opportunity Hoarding?

• In Event: Investment, Inputs and Hoarding: The Role of Parents and Families on Status and Achievement

Abstract

This study expands our understanding of how parents negotiate with children around educational opportunities. The literature on opportunity hoarding focuses on parents' race, class, and intersections with opportunity structures. We know less about the role of parent-child negotiations in shaping parents' decisions and practices. Drawing on observations and interviews with parents in three schools, we investigate how parents and children negotiate their choices during the enrollment phase of a selective STEM program. Although parents described a mutual decision-making process, hoarding relies on the child’s consent to cooperate. Parents use cultural and economic capital to pursue their children in the negotiation processes and describe how they cultivate their children to practice hoarding from a young age.

Authors

• Shira Klimor Maman, Bar Ilan University

• Idit Fast, Ben-Gurion University of the Negev

• Yariv Feniger, Ben-Gurion University of the Negev