Unequal Childhoods: Class, Race, and Family Life

Annette Lareau, PhD is a sociologist, researcher, and professor. She lives in the United States, teaches at the University of Pennsylvania School of Arts and Sciences, and researches Black and white American family dynamics. A prominent figure in American sociology, she has worked as the president of the American Sociological Association and wrote the book Unequal Childhoods based on her longitudinal study on the influence of class and race on American family life. Lareau also coined the phrase “concerted cultivation.”

In the 1990s, Lareau observed that the myth of the American Dream was still a prominent ideal. She sought to challenge this notion with extensive data from real American families from the middle-class, working-class, and poor class, and from both Black and white backgrounds. She found that there was little influence of race on parenting style or education level; instead, class was the institution that had the most impact on families’ daily lives, education level, language use, and ease of navigation of the education system. Her passion for uncovering truths about family life led her to pursue an extremely daring, lengthy, and arduous study. It took several years from the time of the study to the book’s publication, and Lareau’s passion project was still not complete as she pursued a follow-up study another decade later.