Social Classes

The United States, as well as most industrial societies today, has a structured social class system. A social class determines one’s position relative to the economic, social, political, and cultural resources of society. Sociologists have researched and debated the transmission of class advantages to children. Annette Lareau, a sociologist working at the University of Pennsylvania, wrote anarticle entitled Invisible Inequality: Social Class and Childrearing in Black Families and White Families, which reflects her extensive, qualitative study of 88 families. Lareau writes that the “cultural logics,” or childrearing strategies, of parents in the middle and working classes are completely different. Over the past few weeks, I replicated Lareau’s study on a smaller scale by reflecting on myown upbringing, interviewing three friends about each of their own, and analyzing the results. In this essay, I will use pseudonyms for the interviewees to protect their identities. Through this process, I have found many similarities, as well as a few disparities, between my findings and those of Lareau. Most importantly, I have gained a greater understanding of social class and how differentchildrearing strategies create advantages for some children and disadvantages for others.
Part One: Data Collection- Self-Reflection
My mother and father raised me in a suburb just outside of New York City. My mother is a white, non-practicing lawyer. She graduated from the University of Florida before completing law school at Hofstra University. She later worked for a law firm for severalyears, but stopped when she became pregnant with me. My father is also white, and is a Certified Public Accountant. He graduated from Boston University with a Bachelor’s degree and went on to pursue accounting as a career. Given the social prestige of my parents’ occupations as well as their high education levels, I can speculate that my family is in the upper middle class.
As a child in elementaryschool, my weeks were filled with organized activities, all of which were paid for and chosen by my parents. My mother picked me up from school nearly every day to take me to a scheduled activity. I had piano lessons on Mondays, tennis on Tuesdays, karate on Wednesdays, and theater class on Thursdays. On the weekends, my father coached me in basketball, baseball, and soccer in their respectiveseasons. With my days planned out for me, I never had much free time to do what I wanted, despite believing—at the time—that I was doing just that. I did not realize that, in reality, my parents were organizing my life for me.
My family discusses everything. For as long as I can remember, disagreements, fighting, and problems of any kind in my household have been settled through drawn-out,profound discussions. My parents rarely use directives when talking to my siblings and me; alternatively, they encourage reasoning and conversation. For example, if I receive a poor grade on a test, my parents—instead of sending me to my room or punishing me without discussion—sit me down and discuss why I earned the grade and how I can prevent receiving one like it again.
Part Two: Data Collection andFindings- Interviews
After reflecting upon my own family’s social class and family lifestyle, I interviewed a few friends who are students at Emory, and analyzed my findings. The first friend I met with is an Asian-American female from California named Jen who classified her family as upper middle class. When I asked Jen about her parents’ childrearing approach, she smiled and said, “Theywere always very involved…typical Asian parents.” Jen explained that she took piano, voice, and violin lessons, was a student in a weekly art class, and participated in frequent math competitions. I was exhausted just listening to her as she went through the organization of her standard week activities. Jen described the use of language in her household as “conversational and open.” She noted that...