Comments on: The Work of Cultural Capital

By: Bob McGrew

Bob McGrew — Sun, 11 Apr 2010 19:12:31 +0000

I think that there’s an interesting tension here. Growing up in a small town in Oklahoma in the 1990s, I ended up with a lot of free time that was very unscheduled. I used it to read a lot of books and work on a lot of individual projects – specifically, I picked up a lot of computer programming. Although my parents were very supportive, none of this was particularly driven by them spending time with me (except taking me to the public library and buying me books about writing flight simulators).

But these were precisely the individualized skills that have served me well in life later. When my start-up hires software engineers, one of the key distinguishing factors is whether the person works on projects in their “leisure time” (a concept that I don’t think makes sense in a world where knowledge work can be indistinguishable from play.)

In other words, if parents focus on enriching the lives of their children too much through these structured activities, it’s not just removing chances for kids to explore the “suburban wilderness” – it’s also cutting against their chances to have truly self-directed projects and skills.

By: agl1

agl1 — Sun, 11 Apr 2010 16:05:25 +0000

I think it is also a new generation of (nerdy?) parents whose interests do not divide along gender lines so much – these Dads are not itching to get to the bar or racetrack nor the Moms to do coffee mornings with the other mothers. The effect on the kids (they can now be included in these joint leisure activities) is more a by-product of this than the underlying aim. Lareau’s idea of “concerted cultivation” can be regarded as productivism, but it’s also part of the general approach of the professional/ managerial class to most things they do.

By: lemmy caution

lemmy caution — Sun, 11 Apr 2010 05:21:54 +0000

Here is the study:

http://econ.ucsd.edu/~vramey/research/Rugrat.pdf

They claim that the increase is mainly due to time coordinating and taking older kids to organized activities and that this increase is not found in Canada. Their theory is that the relative increase is a result in increased pressure to get in US elite colleges and the relative flat status structure of Canadian colleges means that Canadians don’t bother.

This book is an awesome sociological investigation into the difference between middle class and lower class child raising practices:

http://www.amazon.com/Unequal-Childhoods-Class-Race-Family/dp/0520239504

Basically lower class parents let the kids run around unsupervised and do what they want to do. Like everybody’s parents used to when I was a kid in the seventies.

I honestly think all of the organized activities of the current middle class childhood are a waste of time. They certainly don’t scale well. I have four kids and it drives me crazy.

This is an issue that Michele Lamont touches on in How Professors Think, but it?? a point that extends across most of the professions. The job candidate or aspiring professional or competitor for funding who stands out is often the person who appears the most individually distinctive while also locking down all the visible or apparent baseline benchmarks of credentialing and competency.

This isn’t such a big deal in other professions besides actual professors. There is some of this but not a whole lot.

This seems to be the insane timeline:

– In the 1920s, elite colleges increase emphasis on extracurricular activities for admission in order to limit Jewish college admissions

– by the 1960s-1970s, the value of extracurricular/enrichment activities becomes fetishized by baby boom meritocratic graduates of these elite colleges

-by the 1990s, these the importance of extracurricular/enrichment activities become an important child raising principle for middle class parents as a whole

By: Timothy Burke

Timothy Burke — Fri, 09 Apr 2010 16:01:36 +0000

Good points, Sherman. It’s why I said crudely speaking–having taught Chudacoff’s book, I know the real picture doesn’t fit this sketch that well. Plus I have the same general allergy to stories that take the 1950s as a golden anchoring point. But broadly speaking, it does seem to me that they represent a moment in the history of American middle-class life that is remembered as nostalgically as it is because there was something to it that we’d like to recapture. On the other other hand, like Laura, I also really like the “cocooning” of my own family, and the much less hierarchical relation between the world of children and the world of parents. And not just for the sake of the kids–it makes it much easier to keep “childlike” culture in one’s adult world, which is certainly a big part of my pop culture life.

By: mgm

mgm — Fri, 09 Apr 2010 14:40:40 +0000

I’ve been enjoying your writing for sometime, but this post resonated so deeply with me as a father and a historian of 20th century America I felt compelled to congratulate you on articulating such an important point so clearly and concisely. You analysis really builds off the questions that David Riesman posed in the Lonely Crowd. He was ultimately interested in understanding how the formation of selfhood changes under conditions of economic abundance. We now live in a society with no less abundance and yet most of us experience it as scarcity, a change that effects the way we think about are relationships with our children, and their relationship to their futures. Like you, I resist casting these changes in a declension narrative, but doubts do surface now and again about how this approach to raising kids (our over investment in their achievement of authentic individuality as a means of conventional success) helps to reproduce our collective failure to deal with the problem of distribution of income. Like you, I find a roughly Marxist account of cultural change indispensable for thinking about these questions so long as it is combined with other analytic lenses, but I sometimes fear that by ignoring Marx’s radical politics I am committing some kind of intellectual sin that will be revisited on my children. Much more to say on all this, but I must to work. Thanks for the great post.

By: Sdorn

Sdorn — Fri, 09 Apr 2010 14:21:12 +0000

“That 1950s middle-class could split the world of children and adults as radically as it…” You’ve compressed the timespan too much, at least in U.S. history. Howard Chudacoff’s “How Old Are You?” documents the growth of what he calls ‘age-consciousness’ over a few centuries.

Then again, historians of childhood and education in the U.S. are well-trained to see “1950s” as the starting point for any claimed trend and think, “Uh, probably not.”