An Analysis Of Robert Putnam's Our Kids

Poverty. Unemployment. Potential foreclosure. Words all too familiar to Americans everywhere. The PBS Frontline documentary, Two American Families, is the heartbreaking, yet hopeful look at the struggles of two Milwaukee families, the Neumanns and the Stanleys, over roughly two decades, 1991 to 2012. While ideally the concept of meritocracy would indicate the efforts of these hard working families should influence their social standing, the reality of social stratification remains, with their wealth, power, and prestige, or lack thereof, used to cement their place, and primarily that of their children, in society.

Emmett Till, a 14 years old, African American boy from Chicago, was brutally murdered for allegedly flirting with a white woman on August 28, 1955, while he is visiting family in Money, Mississippi. In the same year, the Civil Rights Movement in America begin. Starting in 1955 to 1965, The Civil Rights Movement were characterized by countless protests and demonstrations demanding equality for black people in the United States. This movement happened in many places at United Stated: Selma, Birmingham, Albany, and Montgomery. According to the history of American, The Civil Rights Movement made a lot of progress toward the Achievement of equality between races, like the Freedom Riders, Children’s Crusade and Segregation in the schools in Birmingham.

Some problems associated with living in a neighborhood with a high percentage of the population living in poverty include increased crime rates, poor education, health problems and psychological distress. The concentration of people in high poverty neighborhoods magnifies the problems faced by the poor. This is because it leads to the concentration of the ills associated with poverty. Children in these neighborhood do not only lack basic needs but are also exposed to an hostile environment that holds numerous temptations and does not provide positive motivation (McConville & Ong, 2003). In addition, because schools are distributed geographically, children from high poverty neighborhoods attend the same schools and this result in low performance. This concentration also intensify the shift of the middle and higher income families away from these neighborhoods thus creating a gap between social needs and the financial base necessary to address these issues. The concentration of poverty is important because it has an impact on the distribution of income which might undermines the social fabric and may restrict opportunities for others (Jargowsky, 2003).

In Annette Lareau’s short story “Unequal Childhoods: Class, Race, and Family Life”, she presents two types of child rearing and the very first one she identified was “concerted cultivation”. This type of approach is highly demonstrated in middle class families where the parents encourage and facilitate their children’s abilities by involving them in structured activities, to shape their reasoning skills, and intervening on their behalf with authoritative figures. The author makes careful observations that “middle-class parents challenge children to formulate questions for doctors, teach them to shake hands and look adults in the eye, broaden their vocabularies, and model how to demand action from social institutions” (Lareau). The next child

Writer Gregory Mantsios in his article “Class in America”, talks about these things, and how wide the gap is between the rich and the poor and also discusses how the rich continue to get richer, while the poor continue to get poorer. Mantsios gives his readers the profiles and backgrounds of three hard-working Americans, two of them are white males, whose family background as well as education played a role in their success, while the other person is a black woman who is just above the poverty line despite her work as a nurse’s aide. Through these profiles, Mantsios article shows exactly how sex, race and shows how your parental and educational background of a person can play a role in the things that you achieve. Mantsios also talks about one’s performance in school and the level of school completed can suggest whether or not class that person may belong in.

Unequal Childhoods is a book detailing an ethnographic study conducted by the author, Annette Lareau, examining the impact of how social class makes a difference in family life, more specifically in children 's lives. The key argument that Lareau makes in her study is that the socioeconomic backgrounds of individuals, especially children, will determine how children cultivate skills they will use in the future. In her groundbreaking study, Lareau utilizes a microsociological approach to examining the relationship between socioeconomic class and children’s cultivation of skills, by studying 88 different families, both middle-class and lower-class, and later conducting a more detailed and intense study of 12 families. Annette Lareau is a graduate of U.C. Santa Cruz and earned her PhD in Sociology from U.C. Berkeley. She started her career at Southern Illinois University at Carbondale and previously worked as a Professor of Sociology at Temple University, Pennsylvania from 1990 to 2005 as well. She has served as a professor of Sociology at the University of Maryland, College Park. Annette Lareau today is a high-acclaimed sociologist at the University of Pennsylvania, where she is the Stanley I. Sheer Professor.

Traditional homes were founded on the premise that there were two married parents in home owning, mortgage paying with a car in the driveway cookie cutter advertisement. Life in today’s world is not as pretty or as a slick advertising copy from the 50’s and 70’s would have you believe. Social class can be the difference in livelihood based off of economic status and also varies greatly by zip code, even within the same state over a period time. Today this disparity in wealth and economic fluidity is something still vitally affected by social class; often traditionally associated with a lack or abundance of money or privilege of a higher social standing by one’s peers or society in general.

The type of social environment that you are born into will affect the rest of your life. Our Kids by Robert Putnam describes the lives of 20 kids around the United States and the type of social environment they had growing up. The main topic of Our Kids is how socioeconomic status relates to upward mobility and unequal opportunity in society. Previously, people from all socioeconomic classes were experiencing upward mobility during the Golden Age of Capitalism, but nowadays only the upper-middle class and the rich are experiencing upward mobility.

In The Missing Class: Portraits of the Near Poor in America (2007), Katherine Newman and Victor Tan Chen explore the lives of several urban, working families who live above the official poverty line, but who are one catastrophe away from it. Entrenched within the stories of these families’ lives, the authors explore themes and key issues which permeate many discussions of poverty, including gentrification of neighborhoods, credit card debt, lack of health care, childcare and education challenges, and the complex web of family relationships which serve as a support system for those who need it most. Yet, this book also tells the story of how we, as a society, ignore the near poor, preferring to focus on those living below the poverty line

The series Untold America: Divided Chicago delves into the issues surrounding urban poverty in Chicago. It showcases various community members from public school students, to school district administrators, and other community organizers. Overall, it offers a credible and realistic analysis of some of the problems in Chicago and also provides insight on the ongoing work to alleviate and solve them.

Annette Lareau is the author of Unequal Childhoods, she study African Americans and white families to understand the impact of how social class makes a difference in family life, specifically the children lives. This book talks about how the social class will determine how children will use their cultivate skills in the future. Through her research, she finds the differences in the parenting styles of twelves families, which all the kids was in the third grade. While reading the book Lareau found that middle class parents practice concerted cultivation, and working class and poor parents practice accomplishment of natural growth.

Matthew Goldberg Unequal Childhoods Essay SOCI308 “Unequal Childhoods” Unequal Childhoods” by Annette Lareaus brings forth ideas and issues in relation to class, race, and family life. The topics bring a unique perspective in how individuals look and perceive different social classes. Lareaus also talks about the childrearing approach and how they relate to classes in ways such as concerted conservation and accomplishment of natural growth. These approaches are different in the way they affect and show certain classes.

Children just starting school experience different forms of hierarchy at early ages, primarily differences between social and economic classes, but easily can be labeled victims. There are numerous arguments that support the awareness between the upper, middle, and lower classes, and these arguments are often talked about. There are also specific theories and ideologies that follow the sociological and psychological actions of the victims. The poorer communities are less fortunate, following a cycle, representing the breaks of education and limited community support. With the American Democratic system, public issues are often ignored in the systematic association of poverty. Issues such as health, privacy, and protection are common, and education is pushed to the side. Plausibly, these issues represent a wider picture of the vast issues in America, and economic

All of the protagonists’ experiences are based on living in a lower socioeconomic status. Researchers named Selina Mcoy and Emer Smyth found that “The middle-classes have more to lose by not staying on in education since they risk social demotion, whereas young people from working-class backgrounds may see less benefit to staying on at school”,3 thus revealing that living in poverty or having a lower socioeconomic status is, therefore, difficult to have a good quality education. Researchers whose names are Heather Wyatt- Nichol, Samuel Brown and Warren Haynes discovered, “The widening gap between the rich and the poor contributes to economic segregation among neighborhoods, perpetuating the problem of inequality in the education and criminal justice system” (190)2, thus explaining the hardship the protagonists faced in their personal experiences. It is evident their lower socioeconomic status affected their education, and it is a crucial theme

Amy Goldwasser in her article “What’s the Matter with Kids Today?” believes our fear of technology should be disregarded and that technology actually makes kids into reporters and documentarians. Goldwasser calls on parents of teenagers to allow their children to be exposed to some technology because it can influence them to write and witness the importance of speech. The first rhetoric device Goldwasser uses is a rhetorical question: “So much so that we can’t see that the Internet is only a means of communication, and one that has created a generation, perhaps the first, of writers, activists, storytellers?” (Goldwasser). The author highlights the simplicity of the Internet so that it does not sound as dangerous as it is made out to be.