Parent power: How children from privileged backgrounds out compete their underprivileged peers

How do children born into wealth out compete their peers from poor backgrounds?

An obvious answer is that they go to elite schools and benefit from their parents’ network of influential friends. However, there are other factors that help ‘silver spoon’ children get ahead in life – sometimes, at the expense of their less privileged peers. They include: Cultural Capital and Concerted Cultivation.

Cultural Capital: Cultural capital is defined as stock of social assets that can improve a person’s chances of success in life. It includes a person’s tastes, style of speech, hobbies, mannerisms, accent, etc.

Experts like Pierre Bourdieu, a French sociologist, have shown that children of the affluent draw on their stock of cultural capital to get ahead of children from underprivileged backgrounds. Children whose parents belong to the upper echelons of society are more likely to learn a second language at a young age.

Unlike their less privileged peers, they are also exposed to the enriching world of literature early in life. While their pre-teen peers occupy themselves with cartoons, privileged children spend time reading the works of eminent literary figures such as: Chaucer, Rumi, Homer, William Wordsworth, Robert Frost, Chinua Achebe, and so on.

Children of the affluent are also more likely to learn how to play a musical instrument. And when they are not strumming their guitars, chances are that they are viewing paintings in some of the world’s most iconic museums. So, before they turn 12, many of them are already familiar with the works of the greats: Diego Velázquez, Jackson Pollock, Henri Matisse, Jean-Michel Basquiat, Rembrandt, and so on.

They also hone the art of observing paintings closely- with an intelligent squint – and nodding knowingly, even if when they don’t have the faintest idea what the painting is about.

Their Instagram pages are also flush with pictures they took while eating Caviar in Moscow, or Escargots de Bourgogne in Paris. It also children of the affluent that take those esoteric wine tasting courses – where wine makers teach them how to distinguish prized ‘high elevation’ wine from their wretched, ‘low elevation’ peers.

And while these rich children tackle the serious business of wine tasting, their contemporaries from disadvantaged backgrounds would probably be flipping burgers at a ‘low elevation’ Kentucky Fried Chicken outlet.

Yet, when the universities application season rolls around, children from underprivileged and privileged backgrounds alike are required to write essays that put the breadth of their general knowledge to the test. Faced with this task, privileged children draw from their repertoire of expansive, multi-faceted experience. Their peers from less privileged backgrounds struggle to draw from an empty well.

When it’s time to pursue high paying jobs, they from affluent backgrounds may also get the short end of the stick. What would be the fate of a butcher’s child who is interviewed by a high-elevation-wine-drinking recruiter (who fervently believes that animals should not be slaughtered ‘savagely,’ but put down – mercifully – by a laser beam)?

Given their divergent worldviews, and the tendency of recruiters to hire persons they can relate with, the butcher’s child is likely to receive a follow up email that reads: “Dear Billy, it was lovely chatting with you. You strike me as a lad with a very bright future, However,…”.

Concerted Cultivation: This is an expression attributed to the sociologist, Professor Annette Lareau, describes parents’ efforts to hone their children’s talents by intentionally and systematically organising their daily activities. Children are not famous for their time management skills.

Left to their own devices, they may spend an entire day in front of a television. Concerted Cultivation entails creating a structure that enables them balance work and play.

Studies have shown that children from affluent backgrounds devote more time to high value activities in comparison to their counterparts from poor families.

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During the 1990s, Professor Lareau and a team of graduate students studied 88 families from various backgrounds – black, white, middle class, working class, poor – and then conducted in-depth observations of 12 families. This study revealed that middle-class families raised their children in a different way than working-class and poor families. Poor and working-class parents practice what Lareau describes as “accomplishment of natural growth parenting”.

Their children have long periods of unstructured time, which they spend shooting the breeze with neighbours, roaming the neighbourhood with friends, and watching TV with their families. Working-class and poor parents also tend to give orders to the children, rather than soliciting their opinions. To a large degree, children from less privileged backgrounds reach adulthood naturally without too much interference from adults.

In contrast, children from middle-class families are driven to football practice and band recitals, are involved in family debates at dinner time, and are encouraged to ask their teacher why they received a B on a French exam. In his book, The Outliers, Malcolm Gladwell also compared the parenting styles of affluent and poor parents.

According to Gladwell, “The middle-class parents talked things through with their children, reasoning with them. They didn’t issue commands. They expected their children to talk back to them, to negotiate, to question adults in positions of authority”.

Lareau concludes that parenting styles have a huge impact on future outcomes. She speculates that concerted cultivation creates adults who know how to challenge authority, navigate bureaucracy, and manage their time – all the skills needed to remain in the middle class. The working-class kids lack that training.

Regrettably, Concerted cultivation and Cultural Capital are mostly available to children from affluent backgrounds because they often come at a cost. Wealthier parents can execute Concerted Cultivation, in part, because they can afford to “buy back time” – by hiring domestic helps to take care of routine chores, while they spend time with their kids.

Poor parents (who might have several jobs) may not have the time to supervise their children. Similarly, cultivating Cultural Capital may prove challenging for poor parents. A child whose parents struggle to pay the bills is unlikely to be caught eating Escargots de Bourgogne in Paris.

So, how might we make cultural capital accessible to all? And how might we create the space for underprivileged parents to incorporate organised activities into their children’s lives?

First, where possible, underprivileged parents should find creative ways to organise their children’s activities. They may create activity schedules and offer low-cost rewards for compliance.

Underprivileged parents can also take advantage of affordable sources of cultural capital. Their children could visit low or no cost museums and other institutions of cultural enlightenment.

Thanks to technology, underprivileged children can also learn a new language online. Children from less privileged backgrounds should also be encouraged to read extensively and explore subjects outside their academic curriculum.

Parents should take a balanced approach in enacting Concerted Cultivation. The practice of Concerted Cultivation should not entail driving children into the ground with brutal schedules that leave no time for rest and relaxation. It is also not about force-feeding children with coding classes and violin lessons they loathe.

There is no shortage of miserable violinists and frustrated software engineers in the world. We do not need more. Albert Einstein famously observed that “Everybody is a genius. But if you judge a fish by its ability to climb a tree, it will live its whole life believing that it is stupid.” He was right.

Abana, a policy and communications expert, writes from Atlanta, USA