But unfortunately I do need to get into this, but I do appreciate questions. Feel free to follow up with me after class, office hours, etc. Okay, here's the thing we're going to go through. We're not going to get through all of these today, most likely just the first two, maybe some of this, hopefully, but time tells me probably not. This is one of my favorite chapters.
We did finish culture last class, but I do need to do a brief bridge into it by talking about some of the stuff that we didn't quite get to. No, we did. We skimmed over the end.
last class. So let's remind ourselves of these three things. Values and norms are related, right?
And they relate to where we're going. So these are more attached to the culture thing. Values and norms are critical elements of culture.
We have how we sort of expect people to behave. For example, my favorite example of this as a norm. So norms aren't always explicit. Oh yeah, let's put that point. They're informed by values often, not always.
That's important. They're not always informed by values. I'll give you examples in just a minute. But often they are. So we can think of a norm, any norm that is informed by values.
I'll start. Maybe etiquette at the dinner table. Like having specific dinner table etiquette. I mean like holding your silverware a certain way or putting your napkin on your lap, elbows on the table, that kind of thing. Not everybody has those norms, but it is a norm in some households, right?
Some of you maybe had norms like that. Anybody feel like they have fairly strict dinner table norms with their family? A couple people, yeah.
So we can think about those things as being informed by values. Maybe they value respect and cleanliness, or they value order and politeness. These are traits. and behaviors that we value and so it affects what our norms look like.
So it's related but some of them aren't really that way. They're usually unspoken and implicit, not always, but let's think of an example. You might get a dirty look if you cut in line, but there's not necessarily like a rule written up that says, hey, don't cut in line, right?
My favorite example is if there are people in the elevator going to a different floor and you're getting on. Do you stand and face the door or the wall? Which way are they going to be standing? Shout it out. Towards the door.
Towards the door. So it would look kind of strange if you got in and just stood facing the wall when everyone else is facing the door, right? It's a norm. It's not written anywhere.
There's not really a values there. It's just... It's just a norm.
It's just what you do. Anyway, it's related to culture, of course. Some cultures are going to be different in terms of those types of things. And then, of course, when we formally codify a norm, we're going to call that a law. Note that this is not a formal definition of laws.
Laws are more complicated than that. But we do call norms that have been codified in a society as laws. Make sense so far?
Do we follow it? We've got values, norms, laws. Values are our moral beliefs. They inform what we think is appropriate behavior.
That's a norm. Appropriate behavior given a context, right? So it's normative for you guys to come to class and face this direction, take notes.
listen to me, answer questions, etc. It's normative for me to do what I'm doing right now. Normally, I wouldn't be talking to this many people if I didn't have to, right? So it's a norm based on the setting and the institution, right? So norms are critically attached to institutions, which we covered in the past.
So normally I do this discussion, but lately, and I think at Pepperdine it's always a little odd, people at my previous institution were more ready to answer this question. I feel like you guys are a little shyer with it, but maybe this, maybe Elkins here will be a little different. I'll try to make this quick though. How have the norms surrounding dating changed over the last century or last few decades?
And then how about in recent years? And do we think that it's connected to changes in values at all? Give me one change, at least in this respect. Either from... Yeah.
Like what the point of dating is. Because traditionally, like when my grandparents were dating, it was just getting married. It's not really like...
Anything else going on? Yeah. So, I feel like it can be more open-ended, or even just like a long-term dating, or... 100%, yeah, you're actually getting into something that scholars in marriage or family have identified as a change from like a more...
from a more institutionalized to a more companionate to a more individualized way of treating dating and marriage. Like, yeah, in your grandparents'age, my grandparents'age, like, uh, everybody did it, and you probably did it really early, you guys are probably... I get married right after college. I know some people do still, but in general, that's not the norm in the United States. As you saw in Chapter 1, I did that brief activity on the median age at first marriage is like 30-ish.
28 to 30, slightly younger for women, slightly older for men. But anyway, in the past, it wasn't like that, as you point out, because it was a bit more institutionalized. It was more expected. The courtship period, it wasn't really about you.
It was more about like... just something you did. You had to have kids.
Your family expected you to have kids. It was just normative for you to get married. You had to get that family moving, right? You need somebody to take care of the household if you were a guy back in the pre-women's economic independence. And for women, you needed to have economic independence, so you needed a man. we can say maybe not the best situation in the world but that's how it worked and now then it moved in like the 50s and 60s it's starting to move more to a companionate thing where it was about finding the love of your life and marrying them but it was still earlier and now it's a bit more individualized it's still like that but it's also you want to find somebody who like really fits your goals and is like gonna be going with you and like have a similar ambition right maybe you want somebody who's similarly educated or has similar goals in life kind of true what else any other examples oh wait no sorry let's get to the second question with that is this because of a change in value Are we becoming too selfish or something?
We're shifting, like you said, we're shifting in how we do the writing since the fish can still be accomplished outside of that. Right, exactly. That's certainly one element and one explanation.
Anyone have another one? I agree with that one too. Because we're getting too selfish.
We don't value the institution of marriage the way we should. Perhaps. Yeah.
A little bit of cost. Cost? Yeah, yeah. So, and even like, cost of a wedding.
So, that might be time. So one thing we have noticed is that it seems to be until... seem to wait until they are economically independent before getting married these days.
It didn't used to be that way, right? In fact, the people who are most, it used to be the opposite of this, but nowadays, the people most likely to get married are the highly educated. It used to be the other way around.
The highly educated were more likely to be single and pursuing their own individual goals and getting married later, but now it's like those are the people who can afford a wedding and can afford to start their life. And, yeah. Might signal a change, so in this case it's not about values, it's more about the economy, but it might be tied to values too. Anyway, something to think about.
Okay, so norms and values, why is that relevant here? How do we get them? How do we come to acquire our understanding? Why do I know not to face the wall in the elevator? Is it biologically ingrained?
Is there something in my DNA that's about elevators specifically? Probably not, I would assume. Did early humans have an elevator gene? Probably not. It's through this, we assume.
These things come about through socialization. We learn to understand. It's not on the subject, we know this.
We understand how to behave because it has been quote-unquote taught. I don't like that. I don't hate it. But as a sociologist, I don't love it when people say society teaches this and that.
Because it's not really teaching you. You're just learning because it's going on. It's not specifically instructing it. But it's still kind of correct because you are learning how to behave from how the rest of society seems to behave. What's normative in society.
Right? You might want to get married early, but other people are grounding upon it, and so you're changing your behavior. Or you might want to be screaming right now and running around, but everybody else would not take too kindly to that.
So socialization is the process by which individuals internalize values, beliefs, and norms of a given society and learn to function as members of that society. And classic example, children taught to raise their hand when they went to speak in school, right? It's not something you automatically know.
You might see other kids doing it if you're shy, or you might answer a question out loud, and then the teacher says, hey, we raise our hands, right? Classic example. So that's direct conditioning. But socialization isn't always taught directly like that.
Sometimes it is, sometimes it isn't. When your parents told you as a kid not to do things a certain way, and to do it in a... It's socialization. But also just you observing the way they behave, observational learning, is also socialization. You're seeing how other people, your parents, your siblings, your friends behave.
You're learning to do it that way. We can consider socialization the largest contributor to our development and personality outside of biology. So it's the thing that is more learned and less ingrained in us, if you will. It begins very early.
Some say it begins before the kid is even born. Let's think about how can someone be socialized before they're even born? How am I to parent? Start to direct the socialization of their kid.
Yeah. Maybe, but that's not quite what I'm thinking about. I'm sort of getting somebody more acclimated to society.
Yeah. Ah, yes, you're wrong. Great track. Somebody build off of this.
In what way? Yeah? Like, if they build, like, a mercury, like, with a certain color scheme.
Ah! Is that what you're gonna say? You can ask them at the end of the video.
Right. Yeah, so, it... Gendered prepping the nursery in a gendered way with colors and decorations, right? So blue for boys, pink for girls, I don't know, something like that. And then picking different decorations based on that.
That's kind of what I'm getting at. I don't know if it really counts as socialization there, but that's... The book is also saying that, so I'm like, let's think about it for a second. It is a way in which at least parents are kind of setting up the socialization of their kid.
And we're not saying it's good or bad. We're just saying that's how it's going. We might say that it's a combination of biology and social interaction that make us who we are. We can get some really interesting discussion out of this question.
I will start to do that in a second and hopefully I get some good engagement with it. So, let's talk about this for a second. This makes the human nature question kind of interesting, even if you don't really realize it, right? So, what is human nature?
It's kind of a stupid question, in my opinion, because it's too broad. It's not specific. Humans, if we have one nature, it is not something we can easily parse out. The best way we can say it is that it's this weird blend of biology and socialization, or organic material, organic equipment, and social interaction, the environment in which we are raised, the people in which we are raised around, the society in which we are raised, or were raised.
Whoops. Give it a second. Sorry.
Press the wrong button. So anyway, human nature, blend of organic equipment, we'd say interaction shapes us, it'll be up there in a second, and without some degree of society, the human part of human nature would not develop. So, quick story about this, and I think it's in the text as well, it's a little dark, I apologize, so constant warning for neglect, but what happens if a child is really, is neglected in a really bad way?
Heard a whisper of it. They might act out. Act out, you said? They might. Yeah, that's not really what I was looking for, though.
Let's say someone's really neglected, like, yeah. Yeah, they may not, they'll almost definitely not learn to speak properly. They're neglected really badly. Yeah? Lots of socialization?
Yeah, so definitely lots of socialization. And what we're getting at is that like, I'll give you an example to illustrate what I mean by really bad neglect. So this is a very famous example, a very dark example of Anna, who was a child denied human contact. So her mom would leave her in a dark room.
Oh, here's that second part of this. Leave her in a fairly dark room and would just kind of come in to feed her. She just kind of dropped food off for years.
So the thing about humans that is different from a lot of other animals and a lot of other mammals especially, is that we can't function on our own. I don't know if you've ever heard people joke about like the difference between a Human baby and like a baby deer Like it was a now disgraced comedian Chris D'Elia did a really good bit on this of like a human baby Is born and is completely useless like you can't do anything at all But a baby deer pops out and is like I'm ready to go to work. I'll make you a sandwich You know, it's like very different type of thing Anyway, human babies in order to grow up and function developmentally and even be healthy need significant social interaction. Even if they don't get enough warmth and enough skin to skin contact with their mom, they will be developed.
developmentally harmed by that. They need significant... We as humans are fundamentally social.
It is so deeply ingrained in us. There's no truly individual human. We rely on socialization all the time.
Even if we have been socialized properly and got the socialization we needed as a kid, if we lose it, there are physical health consequences from loneliness and isolation. Humans, like, we cannot function without society, without other people, without community, without relationships. So the thing with Anna, from birth, kept in the attic, left in the dark, alone. When discovered, she could not speak. She could not use her...
limbs or walk. She couldn't even walk. It's not just that she was not socialized or couldn't use language well, she couldn't use her body without, because humans we need to be taught these things. We learn these things from our parents and others. Eventually, nurses got her to speak, to make speech-like sounds.
She eventually gained more control of her body, but she never developed to the level of children her age, and she did not survive for very long. So yeah, human baby without sufficient socialization and human contact is literally, as of, biologically harmed, not just socially. So let's think about this social versus biology piece for yourself.
Have you ever been compared to a relative or a parent? Reflect on, I'm not gonna make you write this one down, but I do want the brain gears to be running. Speculate on whether the behavioral trait is learned or biological. Anyone have a... Raise your hand with one, I can help us walk through it.
I think it can be a bit of both. What? I think it can be biological. Yeah, but what can be? Any of your traits.
Yeah, you're right, absolutely. getting at, but I want specifics because there's going to be a range, right? So some things are going to be way more bio and some things are going to be way more social and they might all be a little both. So I agree with you.
Sorry. But my point is I want some specifics, some specific comparisons that have been made about yourself or someone you know. Yeah.
...which is interesting because biologists, you know, very much in the... Yeah, so that's a really good example. There have been a number of examples like that identified.
Famously, one way that scientists look at this, both biologists and sociologists, twin studies, right, if we can follow twins of the exact same parentage in biology. but separately and see how they develop differently, we can kind of parse those things out. That's really interesting, right?
So even we know certain elements of personality can be passed through. So maybe that propensity for cooking is something to do with like what kinds of things they find enjoyable and relaxing. There might be some sort of big five personality component in there. Maybe, right? Some things are a little bit of both and people kind of get it wrong.
My favorite example for that, and it's a little dark, but alcoholism. So scholars for a long time have noticed that children of parents who are alcoholics are more likely to be alcoholics. Which suggests, maybe, that there's some sort of trait there, like some sort of gene or personality dimension that might lead people to be more... Likely would be enjoy it more or like be more dissatisfied with life naturally, so they need to like Alter their psychology or their current consciousness state a little bit, right?
But what else could it be? They could explain that That trend that children of parents Right, but yeah, absolutely Yeah, yeah, that's kind of the bio side. Do you want to get the social side? No?
That are also passed down, yeah. Yeah, so there's a lot of different neurobiology that could be going on here. Absolutely. Yeah, sorry.
It could just be a child watching his parent, his or her parent... Just adapting, this is the way that... It could be normalized.
Yeah. It's normalized in that household. It's a regular thing.
Versus a child who's raised in a family that's like, no, don't do that, we don't do that. It could be that, you know. Is that what you're going to say? What else? On the social side?
Oh, come on. We could talk about this all day, the different social things that could go on. Poverty predicts alcoholism, right?
Your parents are more likely, your children of parents who are in poverty are also going to be in poverty. It's like a rule. For the rest of their life, statistically. And I saw a hand, were you going to say something? Yeah.
I was just going to say, like, if you're living in a successful environment, Yeah, absolutely. There's third things going on, like poverty, like different stressors in the environment that are going on that are influencing both people, right? Maybe they're just in a really stressful community or family or even political event.
Maybe they're refugees that have access to the internet. to alcohol for some reason, and are also, both parents and offspring are dealing with issues that are leading them both to be, it has nothing to do with biology, they're in the same situation. There's a bunch of things we could explain.
This is always a difficult question, and it's really interesting to think about, right? Like, your dad was an angry person, you're an angry person. Yeah, I could go on with this one. I have some good examples, but I think we're getting bored of it.
So I'm going to jump to the next thing. Theories. This is not going to be as theory-heavy as some of this class will be.
But we're going to talk about some of the major ideas. This will be pretty straightforward, I think. The most basic stuff. Oh man, I just said straightforward and then I forgot what I was about to show you.
Never mind, not that straightforward. Uh, this self. So how do we get a sense of self? So this is something that has a lot to do with socialization, and sociologists have been, especially sociological social psychologists in the early 20th century were positioned well to try to answer this question. So George Herbert Mead, which is a name I've given to you before, I'll bring him up again, he really came up with this distinction between what he called the I and the me.
So every one of us has an I and a me. The I is our sort of sense of agency and power. and desires, like what we want to do, and whether or not we can do it. But I don't need to think about myself as a person in society, as a person that's being perceived by others. I could just, I want some coffee, so I'm going to take a sip of coffee.
Earlier, when I was going to class, I wanted to refill my coffee cup, but I was late to class. If I did not have a me, I would have just gone and done that, gotten a coffee, and then come back. to class. The me is this part of you that reflects back on you or is able to see yourself as a thing that is perceived by the I and by other people. So it's a weird distinction but it's an important one and hopefully you can get it.
It's an infant has a bit of a sense of the I. They're hungry or want attention, they can cry and try to get those things, right? They have at least some sense of wanting something. They have a sense of self as far as I'm a being that is going, it's like a forward thinking thing, right? But they're not thinking about themselves as a thing.
Which is what the me is. So as they get a better sense of what a person is and that there's other people who also have an I and a me, they start to develop a better sense of themselves. It's reflexive, if you will.
The other is those other people. The ability to develop a sense of others is also something that infants don't quite have yet. And children start to develop as they age and as they're socialized. Which is just the sense that you guys are not just all NPCs.
Some of you are. But, no, just kidding. Most, but like, the idea...
that if I was operating in the world as though you all were, just features of my environment that acted a certain ways, but it wasn't really because you were like me. I'm the only real person. That's because I don't have a fully developed sense of the other.
So if you see somebody behaving like that, like narcissistic personality disorder is kind of like that. That they have an insufficiently developed sense of the other. It's not just that they're a jerk, I mean they probably are behaving that way, but somebody with real narcissistic personality disorder, they have a mental deficiency. I think they're not able to process the fact that other people have the same Like sense of self and desires and abilities as they do like yeah So this is kind of the setup I gave this image of the baby with the hands of the eyes because they can't be seen right now right because they can't see, right?
They haven't developed a sense that other people can perceive them as a separate thing. So that's kind of what I'm trying to get here. So, Charles Horton Cooley, Charles H. Cooley, was one of the two big early symbolic interactionists.
He wouldn't have used that term, but retroactively we do that for him. He developed one of the earliest, earlier theories of the social self. See, there should be earlier theories or earliest theory.
I misspelled it. Cooley theorized in his book Human Nature and the Social Order in 1922 that the self emerges from our ability to assume the point of view of others and imagine how those others see us. So he's saying our sense of self, our self-concept is not just what we think and feel and what we think about ourselves, but also how we imagine other people are perceiving us.
And we call that the looking glass self, where we assume the point of other people, see ourselves as though it was a mirror. see other people. I'll use the term, you don't need to know this one, but if you ever take social psych with me, I call it, I don't call it, it's called reflected appraisals.
So it's the sense that like you, what you think other people think about you. So I might think that you guys think I'm a little bit much and that's fine, but that's a reflected appraisal. Maybe I think that you all think that I have good taste in coffee mugs, right?
That's a reflected appraisal. And that's part of the looking glass self. If that affects how you see yourself too, you might be, you know, maybe at base you didn't think you were all that athletic or all that good at stuff. But everybody else around you is acting as though you are and is telling you that you aren't really good at things.
And so that can affect how you think about yourself and your confidence level and all that. Anyway, that's the looking glass self. I'm moving too slowly.
Does that make sense so far? I know we're falling asleep, but we'll get through me at least. So this is the guy that came up with that whole I-me distinction that we just talked about.
But he also developed a theory, a socialization, we'll call it the... developmental theory of socialization. He's the guy who said what I said earlier, that infants know only the I, but through interaction they learn about the me and other.
And then eventually, children, slightly older children, Get a better sense of the generalized other, about society broadly, about Pepperdine students broadly. You might put on your outfit in the morning and not just be thinking, well, some of you are going to be thinking about very specific people seeing you, but maybe you're just thinking about how the general community is going to perceive you. I'm going to the grocery store.
I might put on my hat thinking, or not thinking, do I care about what the people at Ralph's or Trader Joe's think about me? You know sense of the generalized value whether or not we've encountered these people have placed before I'm going to pull up a graphic to illustrate these things. There's two other terms here that we have not used, that we will in the future. In between the other and the generalized other is significant others, which is people that are very influential.
I don't just mean partners, although that counts too. But in this context, significant other means close friends, family, and romantic partners. That looks like this. Here's your significant others, the people that are around you more often and have a bigger impact on you. You, the I and the me, the self.
This is a term we'll talk about next chapter, chapter 5, reference groups. Then the generalized other is your broader sense of people. In this case, the reference group is also generalized other, but that's confusing.
Following so far? The big thing me to add on to this to explain the development of our socialization and our sense of the other and the generalized other. For him, he thought that children got socialized, learned these things best through play and games. So he stressed the importance of play and games.
There are different things in this context. Play is more freeform. It's just like what really young kids are doing. And games have structure, they have rules, they have positions.
So think of the difference between kids kind of randomly playing house with each other. and deciding who's mom and who's the kid, and stuff like that, right? That familiar to you guys? Seeing some...
Yeah. Anyway, it's kind of freeform. They're kind of making rules up as they go, right? You can imagine that, I'm sure. most of you did something like that when you were young.
Games have rules. And now you're imagining you as a kid, third, fourth grade, playing soccer with your friends. Now we've got a game. The big difference between these two things Is that they both involve roles. First of all, they both involve roles.
You're the mom, I'm the dad, he's the kid in playing house. And in the soccer game, you've got a goalie. Offense and defense, you've got different roles. Imitation.
Distinguishing between you and other people. And the big thing that the move from play to games does is you have to start to really think about what the other people are doing. And your sense of other is advanced by this.
Sorry. You can think about it for yourself. I'm not going to ask you to share it for this one. So you develop roles and in a game of soccer you have to start to predict.
The kid starts to imagine what the other people are going to do. It matters what they're going to do. It matters what the goalie is going to do if you're trying to score.
It matters what the defense is going to do if you're trying to score. You know what I'm saying? This is stuff you have to start to pay attention to, and it gives kids a better sense of, according to Mead, it gives them a better sense of roles and of the other, of other people, and the generalized other. Okay, the last thing we're going to address today is going to be a quick run-through of these agents of socialization. So how different institutions in society, and really just collections of people, but sometimes in our modern society there are institutional forces at play, mold functional members of society.
So how we're socialized, and who is doing it. So when we say an agent, we mean the thing that's doing it. our sense of agency is our sense of our ability to do something, right? Or to do stuff generally.
An agent of socialization is the thing that is socializing us. So when we're really young, the primary agent of socialization is our family, right? Our parents, our siblings.
And then we get a little older, typically in US society, we're then put in school, which we can think of as the second agent of socialization. Now we're confronted with teachers and peers in an institutional setting, and that institutional setting is really important. It's not just the fact that we're around other peers.
That becomes more relevant in adolescence, where you move into a situation where the primary agent of socialization is peers, where you start to care less about what your family comparatively, where it starts to matter less how you're being socialized by your family and your school, and more free-form friendships. So families. Original source. Primary unit of socialization.
Should make sense. Some quick facts about that. Yeah. Socialization in the family can be affected by various demographic things and structural forces, if you will. For example, men that also cycle out of home, right?
An emotionally responsive caregiver is very important for child sexualization. Having married parents helps, unfortunately. Well, unfortunately for folks who don't have that situation, but it does help statistically. Divorced parents... is typically not good for socialization, although it's not a rule, it's just a trend.
Or they score lower on measures of academic success, at least. Poverty, parents in poverty, mothers in poverty are more likely to use fiscal punishment statistically, for example, in their social. Socialization in their conditioning which is associated with all kinds of bad things Even mild physical punishment is associated with developmental issues and poorer scores later on Yeah, child abuse does not help people Schools, peers, and teachers serve as a new reference point in a specific social setting removed from families.
This is really important. It's the fact of the matter, or the fact is, that they're put into a setting where their family's socialization might not match up perfectly with everybody else for the first time. And it's in a structured environment where teachers and the institution kind of monitor that socialization and try to make sure it operates a certain way.
So if a kid comes in too late, he may not understand when to raise their hand or how to interact with other kids appropriately or what the various rules and policies the school has. And he might not know what the other kids expect from him or her. So schools are a very important agent of socialization.
And then later on in adolescence. early adolescence, peers kind of take over. So it's your friends become more and more important as you get closer and closer to adulthood.
The last thing on this note, I'm going to jump back to family socialization and show you a video of an interview, which we haven't done yet, I don't think. But this class, you're going to see a number of interviews. Social class and family socialization. Parents of different social classes seem to socialize their children differently. It's not a rule, it's a trend, it's an observation.
Middle class parents seem to be more likely to push independence and self-direction in their children, whereas working class parents prioritize obedience to external authority. Comparative. What we're going to watch is sociologist Annette LaRose discussing her ethnography. We're not going to watch the whole thing, but she is a very, very influential sociologist, partially for this work among a bunch of others. We've learned about what an ethnography is.
I'm going to get away from this, but I'm going to put it up so you can still take notes if you're looking at it. Thank you. called unequal childhoods in which you describe very different child rearing regimes for poor households in the United States as opposed to middle class or upper middle class households.
Could you describe the difference? approaches to child rearing and the pluses and minuses of each approach? Yes, in my book Unequal Childhoods, we found that all parents really want their children to be healthy and happy and that's universal.
But in the study we did observations and we visited families in their home, usually every day for three weeks. We also did interviews with 88 parents. And half of our parents were white and half were African American.
The children were 10 years old. What we found was that middle class parents saw their children as a project. They saw them as seeking to develop their talents and skills. And so they, in many ways, customized their daily life.
They reasoned with them. They answered questions with questions. They enrolled them in many organized activities. And they also supervised their schooling and their doctor visits.
They intervened. And through that, they created a sense of entitlement for their children, for middle-class families. And by middle-class families, we mean people who have a cult. When you say sense of entitlement, but we don't mean it strictly what it actually means, but that they recognize that they do deserve things sometimes. College degrees, not so much on income, but on education and the kind of jobs they have, professional jobs.
The working class and poor families differ. The white and black families also wanted their children to grow and thrive. But for them, rather than treating their children as a project, they used scarce resources to help their children be safe, to have good housing, to have clean clothes and food. And then they presumed that their children would spontaneously grow and thrive.
So for them, the working class parents, they gave them directives. They said, don't do that. They didn't answer questions.
questions with questions. The children watched TV, they played with their cousins. They hung out. They were not involved in many organized activities.
And the working class parents depended on the experts, the perfect doctors and the teachers, to supervise their children. They didn't try to supervise them themselves. middle-class parents had a different way of raising children than the working class and poor.
There were differences between working class and poor families. There were food shortages in poor families that there weren't in the blue collar families. But in this area looking at how parents raised the children, the working class and poor children, were very similar, and the white and black children were very similar.
So the white middle class boy, who in the book we call Garrett Challenger, had a very similar life to the black middle class boy, Alexander Williams. There was a huge difference between the experience of Alexander Williams, the middle class boy whose dad was a lawyer and mom was a high-level professional, and the boy, Harold McAllister, who grew up in a poor home who was African American. And you have different terms. of these two different child rearing strategies.
That's right. In unequal childhoods, I call the middle class strategy concerted cultivation. It's a gardening analogy. In the working class and poor family, I call the accomplishment of natural growth.
So just as wildflowers are gardening. You see that? ...analogy. In the working class and poor family, I call the accomplishment of natural growth. So just as wildflowers are beautiful and hothouse flowers are beautiful, these are different strategies.
But it's not the intrinsic... of the strategy that matters. What matters is that children enter institutions and those institutions have rules, rules of the game.
So middle class families in the book, Alexander Williams is having dinner and his dad is washing the dishes. and he has to do a rhyme. And they're talking about it, and his dad's joking.
And they begin to talk about the word plagiarism and copyright. Well, plagiarism is a word that would appear maybe on an SAT test or an achievement test. And here it is after dinner, an African-American middle-class family is being taught that word. In the working-class and poor families, there was much more silence. It was a friendly silence, but there was simply less talking.
People sat around, and they were together. And so the working-class and poor families, the children did fewer words. when they enter kindergarten. But knowing how many words is a very important predictor of what reading group you'll be in.
Learning how to read is, you could say, the 800-pound gorilla of schooling. Reading is central for academic achievement. So there's certainly more to see his question there.
You went back to these families in the future. She followed them up when they went through high school and early college. Of course, she found the differences you'd probably expect, unfortunately. This is one of our ways of explaining why social class gets intergenerally.
intergenerationally transmitted. There's a bunch of reasons, but this may be one of them. It's like teaching children, socializing children differently in terms of strategies to advance through things. So the big difference, like she noticed, is not that one is better than the other inherently, or one is even smarter than the other. In fact, there's pros and cons to both, which I'm not going to get into too much detail, but they exist.
The point is, the first one, which is primarily the middle class, and we assume upper middle class as well. more prepared for institutions, like the ones you're navigating right now. We're more likely to push back on teachers to dispute a grade. For example, I can't stand it, but it is associated with better success for those students who do that and those who do not. So trying to be taking more control, understanding how to navigate these institutions is a big predictor of success.
So we'll get into that a bit more next time, but I'm going to cut us off there and let you go. But yeah, let me know if you have questions about any of this with the assignment. Kind of just something to write in.