Concerted Cultivation Research Articles

Ambivalent users. Strategic Pharmaceutical Use and Identity Management among ADHD College Students

Drawing on interview data, this article examines how college students experience "the medicated self" in the context of ADD/ADHD. We find that many ADHDdiagnosed students taking psychostimulants are ambivalent users, who actively construct how they are shaped by the behavioral effects of medicine. Pharmaceutical enhancement may be perceived by students as necessary in the context of a competitive academic ethic. In this context something akin to Annette Lareau's concept of concerted cultivation can thrive, as students themselves practice what we call concerted medicalization in an attempt to literally embody the academic ideal. However, while medicine may enable students to manage academic performance and take control of "disordered bodies", many remain uneasy about the extent to which they feel controlled by a drug. In the context of medical ambivalence, ADHD students engage in reflexive identity management and strategic pharmaceutical use to achieve some semblance of self control and self preservation during their college years. As their college education comes to a close, many prepare to return to what they construct as their "authentic", non-medicated selves as they enter the work world.

Middle-class Mothers’ Moralities and ‘Concerted Cultivation’: Class Others, Ambivalence and Excess

Drawing on a small qualitative study of mothers in the UK, this article argues that although concerted cultivation and intensive parenting are legitimated as ‘good’ parenting, these discourses have uneven effects on middle-class mothers’ moral identities. My contention is that by focusing too much on processes of capital accumulation and transmission, studies of parenting risk simplifying the contradictory effects of these discourses on middle-class parents’ subjectivities. I argue that accounting for how power is enacted on as well as by middle-class mothers provides some resources for an account of contemporary parenting that better reflects the complexity and diversity of middle-class mothers’ experiences, including their ambivalence about concerted cultivation and their fears about the excesses of the middle-class emphasis on education.

Raising Middle-class Black Children: Parenting Priorities, Actions and Strategies

The enrolment of middle-class children in extra-curricular activities is a recent trend in many affluent countries. It is part of what Annette Lareau refers to as a classed parenting style – ‘concerted cultivation’ which sees the child as a project with skills and talents to be fostered and developed. Controversially, Lareau argued that class, rather than race, was the most influential factor in determining this particular parenting style. In relation to our research with Black middle-class parents, we argue that the task for the researcher is attempting to understand how race and class differently interact in particular contexts. We conclude that a focus on Black Caribbean heritage families can further develop the concept of concerted cultivation, and demonstrate the complex ways in which, for these families, such a strategy is a tool of social reproduction but also functions as attempted protection against racism in White mainstream society.

A Test of Parenting Strategies

The status attainment literature suggests that the educational success of parents determines the educational success of their children (Blau and Duncan, 1967). However, the mechanisms by which families determine a child’s education are imperfectly understood. This article tests Lareau’s (2003) parental typology to identify the association between parenting strategies and educational outcomes achieved using the Longitudinal Study of Young People in England (LSYPE) 2004–2006. The findings suggest that class is not a convincing predictor for parenting style, but that use of concerted cultivation parenting strategies does improve the young person’s chances of achieving five GCSEs grade A*–C. These parenting strategies are also a positive predictor of how much a young person enjoys school, a teacher’s perception of their progress in school, their own perceptions of progress in school, their likelihood to apply to university, and whether they believe they will be accepted if they apply.

Consumatori ambivalenti. Uso strategico di farmaci e gestione dell'identitÀ tra studenti universitari con ADHD

Drawing on interview data, this article examines how college students experience "the medicated self" in the context of ADD/ADHD. We find that many ADHDdiagnosed students taking psychostimulants are ambivalent users, who actively construct how they are shaped by the behavioral effects of medicine. Pharmaceutical enhancement may be perceived by students as necessary in the context of a competitive academic ethic. In this context something akin to Annette Lareau's concept of concerted cultivation can thrive, as students themselves practice what we call concerted medicalization in an attempt to literally embody the academic ideal. However, while medicine may enable students to manage academic performance and take control of "disordered bodies, many remain uneasy about the extent to which they feel controlled by a drug. In the context of medical ambivalence, ADHD students engage in reflexive identity management and strategic pharmaceutical use to achieve some semblance of self control and self preservation during their college years. As their college education comes to a close, many prepare to return to what they construct as their authentic, non-medicated selves as they enter the work world.

Annette Lareau, Unequal Childhoods: Class, Race, and Family Life, Second Edition with an Update a Decade Later

Annette Lareau, Unequal Childhoods: Class, Race, and Family Life, Second Edition with an Update a Decade Later. Berkeley: University of California Press, 2011, 480 pp. $US 24.95 paper (978-0-520-27142-5) The second edition of Annette Lareau's award-winning Unequal Childhoods: Class, Race and Family Life was released in 2011, adding more than 100 pages of new material. At its heart, the second edition tells two stories--one empirical, and the other a cautionary tale of qualitative methods. In the first edition of Unequal Childhoods, Lareau demonstrated that working-class and poor families enacted the Accomplishment of Natural Growth. Their children participated in few, if any organized leisure activities, and had extensive interactions with kin. Parents used directives in speaking to children, and saw a clear boundary between the activities of adults and children. Regardless of race, working-class and poor parents did not tend to intervene with institutions on their children's behalf. In contrast, middle-class parents supported Concerted Cultivation, developing children's talents through organized leisure activities and lessons, eliciting children's thoughts, and actively intervening in institutional settings. Lareau began her data collection for Unequal Childhoods in 1989, intensively observing twelve families between 1993 and 1995. The passage of time takes nothing away from this new edition, nor does it mitigate the impact or resonance of its findings. The book's lasting contribution is Lareau's conclusion that the childrearing patterns persist over time. Unlike in the 1990s, when she interviewed schoolteachers and other relevant adults, Lareau was unable to triangulate her family interviews with other data, and did not complement her interviews with intensive visits, naturalistic observations, nor interviews with employers, college professors, or others. For the second edition, she conducted 2-hour interviews with each of the 12 young adults (6 white, 5 African-American, 1 biracial), and usually interviewed at least one parent and a sibling. The follow-up interviews with the twelve original children tell the most important story of the second edition: how their lives unfolded from the age of nine or ten. Lareau offers a detailed qualitative panel study of sorts, documenting life trajectories of the twelve children--now aged 19-21--and the larger patterns their stories illuminate. Lareau questioned whether the class-based differences in childrearing she witnessed when the children were younger persisted into adulthood. The answer is a resounding yes. Some of these youth struggled--academically and otherwise--to graduate from high school, as four of the eight working-class and poor students dropped out. Others, with talent and determination to attend college, were not able to make the transition. Working-class and poor parents desperately wanted their children to attend college, but lacked the resources, connections, and know-how to effectively help their children with the labyrinthine American college application process. Despite their and their parents' hopes for college attendance, only one of the eight working class or poor youth persisted as a college student. Six are living with family members and working full-time in a variety of jobs, with one working-class girl married and a full-time homemaker. Three out of the four middle-class children studied graduated from high school, and are attending Ivy League colleges. The remaining student, Melanie Handlon, whose academic struggles were chronicled in the first edition of Unequal Childhoods ultimately abandoned community college for cosmetology school, leaving her parents disappointed, and her mother wishing she had intervened more in Melanie's schooling. The second edition of Unequal Childhoods is a testament to the lasting effect of parents' intervention in institutional settings. Middle-class parents took it upon themselves to actively manage and monitor their children's transition from high school to college. …

Concerted Cultivation and Teachers' Evaluations of Students: Exploring the Intersection of Race and Parents' Educational Attainment

Using data from the Early Childhood Longitudinal Survey and Lareau's concept of concerted cultivation—the idea that educational and financial resources result in different cultural logics in the approach to parenting—the authors examine racial and educational differences in the relationship between parenting practices during elementary school and teachers' evaluations of students' (1) language and literacy skills, (2) approaches to learning, and (3) interpersonal skills. The authors find that both race and education affect the relationship between parenting practices and teachers' evaluations. Children in college-educated white families whose parents volunteer receive higher scores on all dependent variables, while white children in high-school-educated families receive lower evaluations the more often their parents attend conferences. Children in college-educated African American families consistently experience negative academic consequences when their parents make special requests of the school. These findings imply that parental investments do not necessarily translate into equal educational rewards.

Cultural Socialization in Black Middle-Class Families

While cultural capital is broadly documented as an important mechanism of class reproduction, there is less understanding of cultural capital within black middle-class families. This paper addresses this gap in knowledge by exploring how black middle-class parents approach their children’s socialization in the fine arts. Drawing on in-depth interviews with black middle-class parents, I develop a conceptual framework outlining how such parents adopt a concerted cultivation approach to their children’s socialization in visual art. I outline how rather than leaving their children’s artistic tastes and preferences to develop without their intervention, some black middle-class parents actively nurture their children’s appreciation and understanding of fine art by arranging for them to attend exhibitions and activities at arts organizations, and by involving them in art collecting. By elaborating how black middle-class parents socialize their children in fine art, this paper contributes to a richer understanding of cultural capital within black middle-class families, and highlights how Pierre Bourdieu’s research on cultural capital is relevant for a minority middle-class group.

Does Cultural Capital Really Affect Academic Achievement? New Evidence from Combined Sibling and Panel Data

This article provides new estimates of the causal effect of cultural capital on academic achievement. The author analyzes data from the National Longitudinal Survey of Youth–Children and Young Adults and uses a fixed effect design to address the problem of omitted variable bias, which has resulted in too optimistic results in previous research. After controlling for family and individual fixed effects, the author reports that (1) six indicators of cultural capital have mostly positive direct effects on children’s reading and math test scores, (2) the effect of cultural capital is smaller than previously reported, and (3) the effect of cultural capital varies in high and low socioeconomic status (SES) environments. Results mostly support cultural reproduction theory (cultural capital more important in high SES environments) for cultural capital indicators capturing familiarity with legitimate culture and mostly support cultural mobility theory (cultural capital more important in low SES environments) for indicators capturing “concerted cultivation.”

Lions, Tigers, and Bear Moms—Oh, My!

Pushy parenting is a central theme in Amy Chua's Battle Hymn of the Tiger Mother, but Chinese mothers aren't the only caregivers well-schooled in the business of concerted cultivation.

Too Much of a Good Thing? Gender, ‘Concerted Cultivation’ and Unequal Achievement in Primary Education

It is well established that cultural and economic resources imparted to children vary significantly by social class. Literature on concerted cultivation has highlighted the way out-of-school activities can reproduce social inequalities in the classroom. Within this literature however, little attention has been given to the role of gender in concerted cultivation. In this paper, we use data from the first wave of the Growing Up in Ireland longitudinal study to consider how both social class and gender influence the out-of-school activities of children. Moreover, we examine how out-of-school activities, class and gender impact on children’s school engagement and academic achievement. We find that while childrearing logics tend to operate within social class categories, there is an additional cultural aspect of gender in the uptake of different types of out-of-school activities. Our findings suggest the need to move beyond explanations of concerted cultivation to explain gender differences in mathematics and reading attainment.

Concerted Cultivation? Parenting Values, Education and Class Diversity

The article presents an analysis of new empirical evidence on parenting values and orientations to children’s education and social class. A survey of parents with children involved in organized activities was undertaken, followed by a series of semi-structured interviews with a sample strategically identified with reference to both social class and subjective orientations to education. We argue that within recent literature there has been a tendency towards overstating the internal homogeneity of middle-class and working-class experiences. Our data reveal diverse parental orientations to their children’s education within, as well as across, classes. We analyse this diversity in relation to varied circumstances, and draw out some implications for theories of inequality.

From the Mouths of Babes: Exploring Families' Career Socialization of Young Children in China, Lebanon, Belgium, and the United States

Families' communication with young children about work and careers has not been the focus of much systematic investigation. We contribute to family communication scholarship both by providing an overview of career socialization research involving children, and by presenting findings from a multinational (China, Lebanon, Belgium, and the United States) investigation of 800 children's discursive, cultural, and material socialization. Using a grounded interpretive approach and the theoretical lenses of intersectionalities and socialization messages, we found that children engaged in four communicative processes that intersected across cultural differences: (a) acting as designers of their own careers; (b) extracting cues to make sense of careers; (c) articulating meaningfulness based on local contexts, and (d) participating in families' concerted cultivation and/or natural growth practices.

Parent-Child Cultivation and Children’s Cognitive and Attitudinal Outcomes from a Longitudinal Perspective

This work adopts the concept of “concerted cultivation” (Lareau A. American Sociological Review 67(5), 747–776, 2002, 2003) to interpret how socioeconomic differentials in child rearing practices generate unequal children’s outcomes, distinguishing between children’s participation in organized leisure activities and children’s engagement in cognitively stimulating activities. Results show that it is the engagement in cognitively stimulating activities and not the participation in organized activities more generally that enhances children’s reading ability and the locus of control. Path analyses confirm that the selected dimensions of parent-child cultivation—parental expectations, direct stimulation, parental interactions with the school and children’s engagement in cognitively stimulating activities—mediate more than half of the socioeconomic gradient in children’s reading ability and the locus of control, even after controlling for the previous level of abilities. In addiction, the effect of parent-child cultivation is largely independent from and stronger than parental socioeconomic characteristics. The model is assessed on a large cohort sample (British Cohort Study 1970).

A Quantitative Assessment of Lareau’s Qualitative Conclusions About Class, Race, and Parenting

The authors used the Early Childhood Longitudinal Study, Kindergarten Class of 1998-1999, to test ideas from Lareau’s qualitative study of social class differences in parenting. Consistent with Lareau, a confirmatory factor analysis supported the general concerted cultivation construct—a parenting strategy that subsumes parents’ school engagement, children’s participation in extracurricular activities, and the amount of educational materials in the home. The authors also found that socioeconomic status (SES) was the major correlate of parents’ use of concerted cultivation. Contrary to Lareau, however, the authors found that racial/ethnic differences in concerted cultivation are moderately strong, even with SES controlled. Finally, this study identified a variety of other family characteristics that are related to concerted cultivation, net of SES. The findings suggest the utility of combining qualitative and quantitative approaches to understand the intergenerational transmission of social status.

Struggles for Modern Education: Egalitarian Liberalism and Its Quest For Equal Access to Opportunity

Annette Lareau’s sociological study entitled, Unequal Childhoods describes two very distinct types of parenting styles and roles. Lareau characterizes them as concerted cultivation and accomplishment of natural growth. The study documents how middle-class children are directed toward achievement at early ages and this is called concerted cultivation (Lareau, 2003.) The study details how middle-class children gain a significant advantage over other children because of their parents’ economic resources (Lareau, 2003). Using their economic prowess, middle-class parents foster their children’s skills and talents through this process Lareau called concerted cultivation (Lareau, 2003). Middle-class parents develop their children through after-school activities and verbal communication with their children (Lareau, 2003). Also, these parents tend to have more interactions with school officials and teachers. Therefore, communication plays a larger role within this paradigm, as Lareau states, “discussions between parents and children are the hallmark of middle-class child rearing. Like many middle-class parents, Ms.Williams and her husband see themselves as developing Alexander to cultivate his talents in a concerted fashion”(Lareau, 2003).

Learning in the home and at school: How working class children ‘succeed against the odds’

This paper presents data collected in individual case studies that aimed to investigate children and their families who succeeded against the usual ‘odds’ of disadvantage. Funded as an extension of EPPE 3–11 by the Cabinet Office for the Equalities Review, the study focused particularly closely upon the performance of disadvantaged children from White and minority ethnic groups. The study found that disadvantaged families often have high aspirations for their children and provide significant educational support through ‘concerted cultivation’. The paper discusses the implications for policy and for practice and argues that much of the popular criticism of state policies related to social exclusion fail to acknowledge the need to engage with the policy in action as well as in theory. It is also argued that these policies offer significant and valuable contexts for supporting efforts on the part of families and individuals to achieve success in education ‘against the odds’.

Reconsidering Culture and Poverty

Culture is back on the poverty research agenda. Over the past decade, sociologists, demographers, and even economists have begun asking questions about the role of culture in many aspects of poverty and even explicitly explaining the behavior of the low-income population in reference to cultural factors. An example is Prudence Carter (2005), who, based on interviews with poor minority students, argues that whether poor children will work hard at school depends in part on their cultural beliefs about the differences between minorities and the majority. Annette Lareau (2003), after studying poor, working-class, and middleclass families, argues that poor children may do worse over their lifetimes in part because their parents are more committed to “natural growth” than “concerted cultivation” as their cultural model for child rearing. Mario Small (2004), based on fieldwork in a Boston housing complex, argues that poor people may be reluctant to participate in beneficial community activities in part because of how they culturally perceive their neighborhoods. David Harding (2007, 2010), using survey and qualitative interview data on adolescents, argues that the sexual behavior of poor teenagers depends in part on the extent of cultural heterogeneity in their neighborhoods. Economists George Akerlof and Rachel Kranton (2002), relying on the work of other scholars, argue that whether students invest in schooling depends in part on their cultural identity, wherein payoffs will differ among “jocks,” “nerds,” and “burnouts.” And William Julius Wilson, in his latest book (2009a), argues that culture helps explain how poor African Americans respond to the structural conditions they experience.

Parental practices and educational achievement: social class, race, and habitus

A large, nationally representative database of American elementary school students was used to quantitatively assess the complex ways in which race intersects with social class, affecting parenting strategies that in turn produce various educational outcomes among children. The determinants and consequences of parental practices associated with middle‐class families – what Lareau terms ‘concerted cultivation’ – among White and African American students were examined. The findings reveal that cultural differences in child‐rearing occur along class, race, and gender boundaries.

Teaching and Learning Guide for: Childrearing, Class and the New Politics of Parenting

Teaching and Learning Guide for: Childrearing, Class and the New Politics of Parenting