Reading Classes: On Culture and Classism in America

by Barbara Jensen

Middle class culture, through its emphasis on means and ends that are placed farther apart as a child ages, creates a psychology based on delayed gratification that has significant rewards in education and professional work later in life. Working class people may miss out on this in childhood, sometimes to devastating effect in later life, but they enjoy a larger and roomier sense of now. Rashad, who had a lot of time on his hands, liked to start up football and baseball games with other kids on the block in the vacant lot. He was developing different skills—self-reliance, initiative, industry, how to make the best of things, negotiating peer relationships, and how to make his own fun. Lareau found that working class children “tend to take real pleasure in their playtime. The lack of adult attention and involvement in their activities leaves children in working-class and poor homes free to concentrate on pleasing themselves. The children we studied tended to show more creativity, spontaneity, enjoyment, and initiative in their leisure pastimes than we saw among middle-class children at play in organized activities” (2003, x).