The Age of Concerted Cultivation: A Racial Analysis of Parental Repertoires, and Childhood Activities

• In Event: 110 - Regular Session. Performing Parenthood in Social Context

Abstract

In Unequal Childhoods: Class, Race, and Family Life (2003, 2011), Annette Lareau studied the reproduction of inequality by focusing on the links among parental social class, parental practices, and the life experiences of children. Lareau’s powerful and important claims about how the relationships among culture, parenting, and childhood activity are related to the reproduction of class inequality made visible the invisible ways in which class and inequality manifests itself in everyday cultural practices of parents and children. In this paper I argue that there is substantial opportunity to better understand contemporary parenting practices, parenting culture, childhood experiences, and social reproduction through a critical race framework that incorporates racism and racial identity. I argue that racism and racial identity plays a significant role in how non-white families raise children across class backgrounds. There is significant racial variation within Lareau’s “concerted cultivation” framework and furthermore, structural and cultural dimensions of race significantly define the current and ever salient “concerted cultivation” cultural environment of parenting and childhood. My critique and reconstruction of this important and insightful concept is based on new preliminary empirical data and other literature, but also based upon a closer and alternative reading of the ethnographic material presented by Lareau in Unequal Childhoods. The incorporation of critical race approach to analyzing concerted cultivation contributes to the development of a more holistic, nuanced and detailed cultural framework for analyzing contemporary parenting practices and childhood in the United States.

Author

• Alex Manning, University of Minnesota