Negotiating Opportunity Consumption: Family Preparations for College

• In Event: 366 - Open Refereed Roundtable Session II
  In Refereed Roundtable: B. Table 25 Social Movement II

Abstract

I explore the way that parents and children conceptualize and consume opportunities as they prepare for college applications. This research contributes to work in consumer studies and economic sociology by highlighting the often-overlooked consumer decisions that parents and children make at a time when their future path is forged. Through 65 interviews with upper to lower middle class parents and their college-bound high school students, I focus on three central orientations to college preparation: strategic, character development, and ambivalent frames emerge among these parents and children. Their decision-making processes reveal consumer choices that are influenced by social class, the meaning of education, and parenting expectations, which inevitably impact their child’s social mobility. In a hegemonic culture of market thinking, whether they hire an SAT tutor or send their child to leadership camp, families operate as consumers who purchase opportunities for their children. The intimate relationship between parents and children complicates the decisions they make regarding their children’s future; there is significant emotional and relational work involved in each decision. To reconcile the parenting role within a market framework, parents and their children engage in class-specific relational work: “a set of distinctive understandings and practices” which “designate certain sorts of economic transactions as appropriate for the relation, [and] bar other transactions as inappropriate…” (Zelizer 2012:146). My participants shed light on the relationship between consumption, cultural frames, and emotions at a moment when their choices hold significant implications for their child’s ability to reproduce or exceed their own social location.

Author

• Cara E. Bowman, Boston University