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...