Class Origin and College Graduates' Parenting Beliefs

Abstract

Previous studies have documented relationships between parenting beliefs and social class. Few studies, however, have examined how parenting beliefs vary among those who share a class position. Drawing upon interviews with 54 college graduates—27 parents with working‐class origins and their 27 spouses with middle‐class origins—I show that heterogeneity in college‐educated parents' beliefs cohered around class origin. Specifically, ideas of children's education and time use related to class origin, though ideas of how to talk with children did not. I discuss the implications of these findings in terms of cultural reproduction, cultural mobility, and intergenerational inequality.

Resource or Obstacle?: Classed Reports of Student–Faculty Relations

“…Researchers use a variety of indicators to determine a person's class category, including father's educational background (Silva ) and respondent's self reports (Kaufman ). I follow Bourdieuian scholars and use a holistic formulation of class which takes into account measures beyond income and includes parental education, employment, and receipt of financial assistance (Lareau ; Stuber ; Armstrong and Hamilton ; Streib ). Following Kaufman (), I also used students’ self‐assessments of class.…”

Social Class and Parenting in Mexican American Families

“…Building on this gap in the literature, Streib (2013) examined the influence of social class origins on parenting beliefs. She interviewed college-educated, middle-class couples with divergent class backgrounds where one parent was raised in a working-class household and the other raised in a middle-class household.…”

“…However, missing from Streib's analysis, and the sociological literature on childrearing more generally, is a critical approach toward social class explanations. Researchers of class-based childrearing cultural logics have argued that social class is the primary determinant of parenting beliefs and values (Calarco 2011;Kohn 1963;Lareau 2002;Streib 2013). Asserting the primacy of class neglects how larger contextual factors, such as race and ethnicity or resource constraints, may shape parenting.…”

“…Following the previous literature (Chin and Phillips 2004;Lareau 2002Lareau , 2003Streib 2013), we determined class status based on occupational and residential information collected during the interviews, such as home ownership, educational attainment, and descriptions of employment type. We classified six families as middle class and four families as working-class or poor.…”

Explanations of How Love Crosses Class Lines: Cultural Complements and the Case of Cross‐Class Marriages

“…Compared to adults born into disadvantaged class positions, adults born into more advantaged class positions are more likely to have parents who give them additional tens of thousands of dollars during their 20s and 30s (Schoeni and Ross ), subsidize their housing and further education (Semyonov and Lewin‐Esptein ), and bequeath more wealth (Aldous ). In addition, upwardly mobile actors generally do not fully adopt the cultural repertoires of those born into the middle class; they instead maintain distinct ideas of how to attend to work, use money, and raise children—all of which may shape their own and their children's class position (Dews and Law ; Granfield ; Karp ; Streib , ; Stuber ; Van Eijck ). Holding current class position constant, marriages between two adults from the same class background may then amplify inequality whereas marriages between two adults raised in different classes may diffuse it.…”