Social Class and the Allocation of Parental Responsibilities

Abstract

The purpose of this paper is to trace the effects of middle- and working-class parents' ideologies of child rearing upon the division, between mother and father, of responsibilities for the support and constraint of the children. Our previous research has shown decidedly different emphases in middleand working-class parents' values for their children. According to these studies, the dominant motif of middle-class parents' values is that the child develop his own standards of conduct: desirable behavior consists essentially in the child's acting according to the dictates of his own principles. By contrast, the dominant motif of working-class parents' values is that the child's actions be reputable: desirable behavior consists essentially in his not transgressing parental proscriptions (7). Faced with the decision of whether or not to punish a child's misbehavior, middle-class parents look to the child's motives and feelings. Working-class parents look, instead, to the act itself; their attention is focused on the direct consequences of misbehavior (8). The middle-class child is more apt to be punished for loss of self-control, the working-class child for disobedience. We assume that inherent in parents' standards for their children are conceptions of their own responsibilities as parents. Specifically, it seems to us that middle-class values imply a parental obligation to be sensitive to the child's thoughts and feelings; working-class values imply a parental obligation to make clear to the child what rules are to be obeyed. We should therefore expect the ratio of support to constraint in parents' handling of their children to be higher in middle- than in working-class families. Bronfenbrenner's recent review of the past 25 years' research on parent-child relationships strengthens this expectation: Over the entire . . . period studied, parent-child relationships in the middle class are consistently reported as more acceptant and equalitarian, while those in the working class are oriented toward maintaining order and obedience. Within this context, the middle class has shown a shift away from emotional control toward freer expression