ATLANTA, SEEN FROM A DISTANCE, is a shining example of the rise of the New South, the jewel of the Sun Belt. Once the (fictitious) hometown of Rhett Butler and Scarlett O’Hara, Atlanta has been transformed into an affluent, sophisticated, and global metropolitan area, the ninth largest in the United States. Since 1970 no American metropolis has grown more rapidly. Atlanta has a strong, diversified, twenty-first-century economy, and is home to the headquarters of Coke, UPS, Home Depot, CNN, Delta Air Lines, and the U.S. Centers for Disease Control.
Affluent Atlanta is epitomized by Buckhead, a residential and commercial district of great wealth on the north side of town, where an urban core of high-rise condos, shopping districts, and restaurants is set amidst shady neighborhoods, golf courses, and million-dollar homes. The district is 95 percent white, with a median household income of roughly $150,000 and a child poverty rate of almost zero. It evokes contemporary Southern gentility, blending white pillars and lemonade with luxury office space and Jimmy Choo.
Just 15 minutes south along Peachtree Road, virtually in the shadows of Atlanta’s downtown skyscrapers, lies one of the most drug- and crime-ridden ghettos in America—an area of boarded-up houses, barred windows, and concrete playgrounds, where idle men cluster on street corners. Here the population is 95 percent black, with a median household income of $15,000 and a child poverty rate of about 75 percent.
Throughout its history, Atlanta has been plagued by racial division.1 By 1970, de jure segregation was gone, but white flight into the suburbs was well under way. Between 1960 and 1980, the white share of the central city’s population plunged from 62 percent to 33 percent, while between 1960 and 2000 the fraction of the metro population living in Atlanta itself fell from 37 percent to 9 percent—the most centrifugal dispersion of any major metropolitan area in America. By 1970 the city had become the black center of a white doughnut, effectively maintaining de facto segregation in schools, housing, and much of social life.
By the early twenty-first century, Atlanta had the largest, most rapidly growing gap between rich and poor of any major American city.2 That gap is heavily racial, of course, but within the black community itself, class and income differences have also grown. Atlanta has long had a strong, educated black upper class and middle class, and a rich black cultural heritage. Even under Jim Crow, a black elite emerged from the churches, universities, and black-owned businesses. During the Civil Rights movement, Atlanta’s black politicians became among the most visible in America, and all of the city’s mayors during the last 40 years have been black. Today the city is home to some of the largest black-owned firms in America, the largest concentration of black academics in the country, and (reportedly) the largest number of black millionaires.3 Black commentators often refer to the city as the “Black Mecca.”
Metro Atlanta’s black population has grown dramatically in recent years. Between 2000 and 2010, the area received an influx of nearly half a million new black residents, by far the largest anywhere in the country. In 2008, metro Atlanta surpassed metro Chicago in total black population, and is now second only to New York City.4 Of all black adults in greater Atlanta, 26 percent have a college degree, a higher figure (relative to other races in metro Atlanta) than in any of the other top ten metro areas. Many of the new, well-educated black Atlantans are, in fact, immigrants from the North, and an increasing number of them now live in mixed-race suburbs. The proportion of metro Atlanta blacks living in the city of Atlanta plunged from 79 percent in 1970 to 15 percent in 2010, as middle-class and working-class blacks fled the increasing dangers and desolation of the central city.5 The more affluent of these new black suburbanites live in quiet, comfortable, mixed-race neighborhoods, while the less affluent live in suburbs with more than their share of bail bond billboards and pawn shops.
Those blacks who remain in Atlanta itself are desperately poor. Indeed, the racial concentration of poverty is greater in central Atlanta than in the central city of any other of the top ten metro areas in the country.6 Large swaths of southern and western Atlanta itself are over 95 percent black, with child poverty rates ranging from 50 percent to 80 percent. Violent crime (concentrated in those areas) is rampant, with Atlanta consistently at or near the top of the central city ratings for the ten largest metro areas in America (first in 2005, third in 2008, second in 2009, second in 2012).
De facto racial segregation is more pervasive and intense than economic segregation in greater Atlanta, and skin color alone continues to affect residents’ life chances. Nevertheless, the black community itself is increasingly polarized along economic lines.7 The combination of continuing racial segregation and growing economic segregation has meant that the black upper class and middle class in Atlanta are increasingly separated both from their white counterparts and from poor blacks. Relatively speaking, Atlanta has more black college graduates and more concentrated black poverty than any of the other ten largest metropolitan areas in America. In that sense, metro Atlanta seems on its way to encompassing three cities, two of them prosperous and two of them black.
Greater Atlanta also has the second-lowest rate of intergenerational social mobility of all major American cities, just behind Charlotte, North Carolina.8 Racial disparities are certainly an important part of the story, but class disparities within each race are also important. We can open an interesting window on class differences in child development and parenting across America by meeting three black families from Atlanta, each representing a different slice of the socioeconomic hierarchy, and each illustrating a distinctive type of parental involvement and support for their children. Together, these three stories illustrate the interplay of economics, family structure, and parenting that affects the prospects of kids from different class backgrounds, whatever their racial background.
We’ll first meet Desmond and his two younger siblings, the confident children of an upper-middle-class black family who moved about a decade ago from the Northeast to a comfortable, racially mixed suburb southwest of Atlanta.9 A recent graduate of one of the South’s best private universities, Desmond is on his way to a successful professional career, buoyed by the intensive, loving, conscientious support he has received from his parents, Carl and Simone.
We’ll then move on to Michelle and Lauren, raised (along with two older brothers) in a series of mostly poor, mostly black suburbs by Stephanie, a tough-loving, hardworking single mom. As part of the 2000s exodus of middle- and working-class blacks fleeing the ghetto, Stephanie repeatedly moved her family further out of the city in search of better schools and safer neighborhoods.10 Her approach to parenting is very different from Simone and Carl’s and reflects the realities of her much less affluent circumstances.
Finally, we’ll meet Elijah, an affable, soft-spoken, reflective young man who grew up largely unsupervised amidst extraordinary violence in the impoverished black ghettos of New Orleans and Atlanta.11 In his preteen years, Elijah was mostly abandoned by his biological parents (neither of whom we were able to speak with), and his story allows us to appreciate how being socialized mostly by “the street” savagely constricts opportunity.
Simone, Carl, and their son Desmond greet us at the door to their sprawling home in a lovely suburban neighborhood of manicured lawns and large brick houses, three stylish cars parked in the driveway next to a basketball hoop. Simone, a teacher just returned from work, wears a tweed business suit, while Carl and Desmond lounge on the couch in tennis shirts and shorts. All three are strikingly fit, their words welcoming, their body language relaxed. (Desmond’s two siblings are not at home during our visit.)
Simone grew up in an upwardly mobile, middle-class family in the New York City area. Her family started out in Harlem, moved through increasingly comfortable parts of the city, and finally crossed the river to a New Jersey suburb. Her father was recruited out of NYU to become a manager at Merrill Lynch; her mother was a medical secretary. “I don’t think I ever really had a want for anything,” Simone reflects. Her parents were happily married for more than 50 years and became what she describes as “amazing grandparents,” part of a strong extended family. (Even in his 20s Desmond talks to his grandfather weekly, and his younger brother does so virtually every day.) Simone went to private and Catholic schools, and then attended the City University of New York, where she got a BA in industrial psychology.
Carl was born in Suriname to a black father and a Dutch mother, and as a youngster immigrated to New York. His father had worked for Alcoa, but like most immigrants, Carl says, his parents “had to start from scratch.” In New York, his mother got a job at the U.N., while his father eventually built his own warehouse business. His parents were married for 33 years and then divorced amicably. Growing up in this family was “fantastic,” Carl recalls. “Most everything [I have today] is because of my mom and dad,” he says. The family always ate dinner together, with “pretty solid discussions” of school and news events, and they made religion an important part of their life. “We had a lot of friends that came to our home,” he says, “and to them we were the perfect family. We were the only ones that had our mom and dad.” Carl says that he went to “the worst high school in Brooklyn,” but that his parents always expected him to go on to college. “I didn’t really have much of a choice,” he says. “ ‘You have to go to college’—that was ingrained in us.”
Simone and Carl met at CUNY. She was 20 and he was 21, and two years later they were married. She wanted a husband who was trustworthy and a reliable provider, and he was both. Before marrying, they talked to a mentor from church who encouraged them to wait five years before having children, and they took that advice to heart. Simone worked for nine years at a law firm in the city, moving swiftly up the ladder from receptionist to paralegal, but shortly after Desmond arrived, she became a stay-at-home mom.12 “We were so blessed to have this beautiful little boy,” she says. “It put things in perspective. You don’t think about yourself so much.”
At about the same time, Carl began work as an IT manager for a major Wall Street firm. Speaking of his career, he says modestly that “it’s respectable. Work has always been a place where I’ve done well, definitely.” He has always taken pride in his work and made a point of bringing his kids into the office. “Every couple of months,” Desmond recalls, “my dad would take one of us to his job. He was always with the computer, showing me the ones and the zeroes. I’m fascinated. I don’t know anything about it, and he was always telling me about it.” These visits reflected Carl’s priorities for his kids: “To help them to educate themselves to the best of their abilities,” he says, “and surround themselves with people who are productive and not destructive.”
Desmond recalls that education was a priority for his mom, too. “She used to give me these workbooks, like Hooked on Phonics,” he says, “and I would sit at the table before dinner, or maybe after dinner, and do work.” The emphasis his parents put on education made Desmond take for granted that he would continue his education after high school and become a professional. “I always thought that I was going to be a doctor, scientist, something like that,” he says, “and I knew that college was the way to go to get to that point, so I always assumed that I was going to do it.”
Simone brought Desmond up very purposefully. “I just always wanted my children to be ahead of the game,” she says. “I didn’t want anyone else raising my kids. We went to the ‘Mommy and Me’ class at the library. I tried to expose him to as much stuff as possible. There was a great hands-on museum by where we lived, and we would go. I was always arranging playgroups. When he got older, he did a sport every season. He played soccer all the way through high school. He played basketball. He took piano lessons. I even wanted him to do tap dancing, but my husband said no. I was very careful with what they ate. He wasn’t allowed to eat the meat at McDonald’s. They weren’t allowed to drink soda. We were very strict about what went into their system.”
Simone and Carl ensured that their kids were in good schools, and even comparison-shopped for kindergartens. During Desmond’s early years, the family lived in northern New Jersey, just across the Hudson from Manhattan, but when Desmond was nine, they moved further downstate, to get Desmond into a better school system, even though it meant a grueling two-hour commute for Carl. “Not that our school system was bad,” Simone says, “but I just didn’t want him in the public schools [where we were living].”
Carl became increasingly annoyed that the long commute cut into his time with the kids, and after five years they decided to move to Atlanta. Simone recounts how they settled on the location of their new home. “I wanted Desmond to go to this local high school, because it’s a really good school, and it’s diverse. I didn’t want him in an all-white school. I bought this house sight unseen, because all I cared about was the school. I figured if the high school was good, the feeder schools would be good.”
Once her kids were in school, Simone explains, she committed herself to being more involved with their schoolwork than her own parents had been. “I would go to meetings at Desmond’s school,” she remembers, “and I would be able to tell them, ‘Okay, this is where he’s having a hard time, and this is what we need to work on.’ I knew just as well as they did what was going on. In the summer, I put this workbook together, and one day it would be math, and the next day it would be reading. Every time was a learning lesson.
“They would have some cards with the presidents on them,” she recalls, “and we would go to Florida sometimes, and I would have them do the flash cards in the car—I love flash cards. We would go somewhere [and I would ask], ‘Why do you think we’re going here?’ We went to the Anne Frank house. We read the book before we went, so they would know who Anne Frank is. I read to them a book about a boy that grew up in a housing project and played basketball, totally different from how they grew up. I would read to them at night, the three of them.”
Desmond recalls the same experiences with both annoyance and appreciation. “My mom would give us supplemental work and books to read in the summertime,” he says. “We were in Florida and Universal Studios and sun outside, and I’m reading a book inside. It was the most atrocious time of my life. I had these math books, and every once in a while I’d look in the back to see the answers and pretend like I did some work. My mom would just watch me do it. Then she would say, ‘You finished so quick, do the next page,’ and I’m like, ‘Why am I still doing work if I’m getting everything right?’ She’s like, ‘Because I saw you cheating in the back.’ My mom introduced me to The Hardy Boys, and I actually did like them. My dad was more practical. He would tell me to read the newspaper or look at the news every once in a while. Then he would ask, ‘What did you learn?’ ‘Uh, I don’t know, I can’t remember.’ [But] that’s one thing that saved me from a lot of difficult times in school. Those were great times, man.”
Today, Desmond loves reading. “It’s weird,” he says. “I never liked reading growing up. For some reason, I thought it was so difficult to find something that I was interested in reading. But now I do. Reading makes me feel smart.”
Simone involved herself in her kids’ school lives. Desmond’s elementary school had a rule that once a child had left, he couldn’t return, even if he had forgotten something. Desmond had a bad habit of forgetting his homework, so every afternoon Simone would show up at school and make him go through his book bag, to ensure he was bringing home everything he needed. After a couple of weeks, he learned to check himself. Simone also was an active volunteer in her kids’ schools: she started the PTA at Desmond’s kindergarten and became the PTO president of his elementary school.
Desmond recalls having a lot to say at family dinners when he was in elementary school. “I thought that everything that I noticed during the day was pretty important,” he says. “I actually learned a lot from those conversations that we had at the dinner table.” In general, Simone and Carl consider conversation and listening to be tools for educating their kids. “Spend that time with the kids,” Simone says, explaining their philosophy. “Even if you don’t feel like doing something, do it with them—just a little thing, like taking them to the grocery store with you. The kids remember that. Even when my daughter talks to me now about minor events in her life, I don’t want to listen to all the stories, but I try to listen.”
Carl echoes that sentiment and notes with pride how engaged he and Simone are with their children. “Nowadays,” he says, “you must be involved with your kids more. When they struggle with their music lessons, find out why. Desmond [now 22] still calls every day, though he has [other obligations], so you have to let go a bit. But it is an extremely strong relationship. If I look at other people, the way they are with their kids, I’m just so thankful.”
On issues of discipline and autonomy, Simone and Carl work together. “Always a team,” says Simone. “If I wanted Desmond to do something or not to do something, we would always decide together—never that conflict where we’re arguing in front of him.” When problems arise, they try to be at once sensitive and firm. “As a parent,” Carl says, “that’s probably the most unpleasant thing, because you have to mix it with tough love. Often you have to drill it into him: ‘This is what you need to do; this is what you have to do.’ Sometimes that’s when you pull that parental card and say, ‘This is it.’ Of course, as they get older there’s less of that. So now if I see something, I’ll say, ‘You are doing that. Explain to me why you are doing that. Have you thought of this?’ ”
Simone has a nuanced and balanced approach to discipline. “I don’t think I’ve ever necessarily punished Desmond,” she says, “never had a privilege taken away or punished him, because I always felt like I want home to be somewhere where they look forward to coming. It’s a sanctuary. Now, if you do something wrong, you’re going to hear about it. But I don’t think I ever have punished them or taken a privilege away. I’ve never said, ‘No TV for a week.’ ”
Carl also always tried to foster a sense of autonomy in his kids. Even when he wants to encourage them in a particular direction, he limits his involvement. “Have them decide somehow on their own what they [want] to do,” he says, describing his approach. “All I would do is expose them to as many things as possible.” When Desmond was undecided about a medical career, rather than tell him what do to, Carl arranged for him to speak to some medical professionals and attend a six-week seminar.
Simone is warm, but she can also be tough and interventionist. An episode from Desmond’s high school years in Georgia illustrates this facet of her parenting, as well as her ability to navigate tricky issues of race. While taking an economics exam, Desmond glanced at some index cards he had put on the floor. They were notes for his next class, but his teacher accused him of cheating. Desmond called his mom on his cell phone from school, and she immediately came to the classroom to ask what had happened. After discussing the situation with Desmond and Simone, the teacher agreed that he had misread it. “I can understand why you would think [that he was cheating],” Simone told him. “I would think the same thing. If you want to give him a zero on the test, because he should have been smarter than that, then I will back you 100 percent.” The teacher declined the offer, calling Desmond “a good student.” Desmond later complained to Simone that the teacher had been prejudiced. “No, he’s not,” she responded. “You have to use common sense. Why would you put cards there and be looking down? Put it in your binder under your desk. You have to be smart.”
Religion has been a pervasive influence for Carl. He lists his life priorities as his spiritual life, his work, his family, and his exercise, in that order. Desmond, in turn, describes how religious community and religious beliefs have permeated his life. “We’re a very spiritual family,” he says, “and we pray before we eat. On Sunday, I didn’t really pay attention unless it came to praying. After church on Sunday we would meet, and my dad would ask me, ‘Desmond, what did you learn in church today?’ And I said, ‘About God,’ and he was like, ‘What else?’ ‘About Jesus.’ And that’s the end of the conversation. But when you come home, it starts to manifest a little bit differently, and you ask yourself, ‘Why did you pray for that? Explain it a little bit more.’ I got a really strong faith background, established myself individually in what I believe, and [asked myself] if I agree with everything that my parents have instilled.
“Most of my friends were involved in the church. When I was 12, I auditioned for a small group called the Joy Singers, and that’s where I made some of my strongest friends. We sang every Wednesday night and Saturday night. We’d go to sing at youth camps and things like that. It made me confident in what I believed, made me open enough to talk about it should someone want to talk about it and confident in myself to hold it back if no one wanted to talk about it.”
Simone also placed a strong emphasis on religion in raising her kids. “Desmond is a strong, Christian young man,” she says. “I want him to be a godly man, in everything that means. I’ve told my boys that a girl that you date, that you’re going to be ‘involved with,’ you may not want to be with her for a long term, but that’s [going to be] someone’s wife. So make sure you’re very respectful. If you don’t like her, don’t mess around with her. My kids probably didn’t know until they were in middle school that you could have kids when you’re not married.”
One telling illustration of the family’s closeness emerged late in our conversation with Desmond, when he offhandedly raised an issue that his parents had not mentioned: that in the seventh grade he had developed diabetes. “It was a big deal,” he says. “Changed the way we ate, changed our whole lifestyle. My whole family adapted with me, which was really helpful for me, because I definitely struggled. It’s a battle every day. We started eating a lot more fish. We saved the ethnic dishes with sugar and fat for special occasions. My family really drew closer around that.”
In many respects, Carl and Simone are like conscientious, educated parents anywhere. But race has been a daily factor in their lives—and their parenting. “I was raising black boys,” she says, “and I’d always felt like black boys had it harder, so I always wanted them to be a step ahead. So I would say to Desmond, ‘Honey, if you want an A, you can’t get a 90 and expect you’re going to get an A. You have to get a 95.’
“Incidents of racism do happen—not lots, but they do happen. Even though Desmond had a 4.0 average and was ranked eighth or ninth in his class, a college counselor suggested tech schools and two-year colleges. Another time Desmond asked a teacher for directions to his new chemistry class, and the teacher made some negative remarks. When I spoke to the school counselor, he said, ‘Oh, yeah, I can see him saying that. He probably looked at Desmond and didn’t realize that he was smart.’
“Society will look at a black boy . . .” She pauses and then begins again. “My middle son was home from college, and it was raining, he was going out, and he put his hood on. I said, ‘Where you going with your hood on? Put a baseball hat on.’ I’m very realistic: ‘You’re smart, you have everything going for you. If you have to work a little bit harder, oh, well.’ ”
Going away to college made Desmond reflect a lot on the importance of his family. “Freshman year was difficult for me,” he says, “because I didn’t really realize how much my family [mattered to me]. When I came home from my first day of classes, I just wanted to talk to my parents about the first day of school. I was like, ‘Wow, I want to go home now.’ The way my parents interact is what I try to mimic in myself, especially when they argue, or when they’re discussing something that has happened on TV. Every time I have time to think to myself, I think about what they would do, how they would like me to act. Every once in a while I’ll mess up, and it helps me grow a little bit better and learn a little bit more.”
Toward the end of a subsequent conversation, Simone reflects on her life as a parent. “I really do have so much to be thankful for,” she says, “but I will tell you that you never stop parenting.” Just then Desmond, now interning with the Centers for Disease Control in Florida, calls her for advice about some missing car keys. Afterward, she points to her phone and says, “Proof perfect, right? You always are there for that support, that advice, that voice of reason. As a parent, it never ends.”
• • •
Simone and Carl are nearly a continent away and a race apart from Earl and Patty in Bend and Chelsea’s parents, Wendy and Dick, in Port Clinton. But all three couples belong to America’s upper middle class, and their parenting styles are strikingly alike. In their intensive investments of time, money, and thoughtful care in raising their kids, the three families are much more similar to each other than they are to working- and lower-class families of their own race living a few miles away in their respective communities. We next turn to one of those working-class families in metro Atlanta.
We meet Stephanie and her daughters in the dining room of their large tract home, located in a new development on the outskirts of Atlanta. The room has a generic, “model home” feel, complete with plastic flowers, but Stephanie fills it up with her big smile and her outgoing, maternal, good-humored personality. She wears the uniform of the hospitality business where she works as an office manager, her name stenciled above the pocket. Lauren (21), her older daughter, tall and graceful, projects a confident, elegant aura, and Michelle (19), her younger daughter, curvier than her sister, wears a pink velour sweat suit and restlessly checks her phone. (Stephanie’s two sons no longer live at home.) Stephanie, self-conscious about her education, apologizes for her limited vocabulary. “I use a lot of wording, and [my daughters] will correct me. Even though I get mad, I like that.” It quickly becomes clear, despite her apology, that she is a strong, reflective mother.
Stephanie grew up in Detroit, where her mother had fled after leaving Stephanie’s abusive, alcoholic father, in Georgia. Her mother worked as an RN and “shacked,” as Stephanie puts it, with Stephanie’s stepfather, who worked on the line at Chrysler. Though they lived in a decent neighborhood, both her mother and her stepfather were alcoholics, and Stephanie fell in with a rough crowd from the projects. In junior high, she became a gang member and enjoyed getting into fights. “I sliced up a couple of people back in the day,” she recalls. “I went to juvenile several times for being disobedient and fighting. If it’s something I wanted, and they won’t let me have it, I’d go and snatch it, or cut their hair. I don’t know why I was bad. Sad to say that, but I was a bully.”
As a result of her behavior, Stephanie was frequently suspended from school and suffered the consequences at home. “My parents would beat the hell out of me and make me read a book. I got a D in seventh or eighth grade and I really got a bad whupping. When I came home with two Es, a D, and two Cs, I was under punishment for a whole summer. No TV, no nothing.”
When Stephanie wanted a ten-speed bike, her mother refused, because she was still under restriction. So Stephanie and her friends took matters into their own hands. “We went and stole it, come back and spray paint the bike in the color I wanted, and parked it in the alley,” she says. “We didn’t have to steal it, but we did. It was fun! Thank God my kids went the other way. As I got older, I made sure my kids had a better life.”
Stephanie was 15 when her mother died. She moved in with an aunt in Detroit. “My aunt pushed me more than anybody,” she recalls, “so that’s why I respected her more.” She continued to misbehave, however, and when she was in the 12th grade, she says, her aunt kicked her out for “being sassy, running off at the mouth, driving cars without a license, smoking pot.” Moving to Atlanta, Stephanie got her GED in an adult education program and soon became pregnant with a son—“I was gambling,” she says with a laugh. She married the father and would eventually have three more children with him: another son, and then Lauren and Michelle.
In retrospect, having her first child was the turning point in Stephanie’s life. “When you have a baby,” she says, “it makes you more responsible, because you got to take care of that kid and you got to take care of yourself. I wasn’t thinking about a career path. I was just thinking about getting a dollar. I started getting focused when I got about 25. ‘What you really want to do in life?’ I started my goals off with my son. I wanted to make sure I was still going to the day care with them, so I would know who was teaching them, and then we just kept a roof over their head.”
Given the uncertain economic prospects and uncertain loyalty of her husband, Stephanie arranged her life on the assumption that she alone was responsible for the economic security of her children. So her first priority was to find a job. She began working at Popeyes and then Hardy’s Supermarket, but she wasn’t earning enough to pay for gas and electricity, so she found a new job, at Zale’s department store. One of her managers there spotted her customer-friendly, hardworking disposition and promoted her successively to cashier, department manager, and store manager. By the time Stephanie had had all of her children, she was working 40 hours a week and making what she considered “good money”: about $35,000 a year, or twice the poverty level for a family the size of hers.
During those years, her husband began fooling around with another woman and then moved out—proving that Stephanie had been right to arrange her life on the assumption that she alone had to provide for her children. She eventually married again, to a forklift driver, and now says she has “a good marriage” with him. He has children of his own from a first marriage, however, and Stephanie and he have agreed that he is not responsible for her kids.
Fifteen years ago, Stephanie took a job with her current employer, where today she works as an office manager at a major branch. “I love customers,” she says. Her sunny, outgoing disposition, coupled with her strong work ethic, has allowed her to build reasonable financial stability for her family. “If we wanted something, she always got it,” Lauren says, “everything from laptops and iPads to clothes.” (But “not designer stuff!” Stephanie insists.)
Michelle has similar memories about how her mother provided for her. “I did not worry with my mom, not at all. But my dad has so many children, you gotta get when you can, or he ‘don’t have it right now.’ My mom said she never asked anybody to do anything for us, ’cause she’ll do it. She did it by herself, and that’s how she want us to be.” She fondly remembers her 13th birthday, for example. “I got a bike,” she says. “It was a nice day, and I was just riding around in the cul-de-sac. We had a little pool party and trampoline. It was nice.” Michelle is very aware of her relative good fortune. Comparing her family with the fractured, destitute family of an acquaintance from the ghetto, she says, “I’m not saying we’re rich, but compared to his family, we’re rich.”
She recognizes, too, just how hard Stephanie has worked to ensure a good life for her family. “My mother is my hero, my foundation,” she says. “Everybody else is just there. She works every day. She worked herself up by herself. She still does it by herself, even if she has somebody by her side. She’ll always say if he ever leaves, she can still pay her mortgage. My mom’s husband’s son had three children, and he done ran from all of them. Men will claim they’re a man, but they run from their responsibility.”
Lauren has learned a similar lesson. “You cannot trust people,” she says. “You need to have your guard up at 100 percent every time, because you don’t know who you’re around and what they’re capable of—family, everyone.” Not surprisingly, Stephanie feels the same way. “I agree 100 percent,” she says. “I learned in life that the only person you can confide in is yourself.”
If Stephanie’s first priority as mother was to provide for the material sustenance of her growing family, a close second was their physical safety. “When we was coming up,” she says, referring to her own childhood, “you could walk the streets at night. But now walk the streets at night, you have pistol, a Uzi, or something.” Their immediate neighborhoods were not so bad, but a few blocks away, she says, it was “getting rough.” So Stephanie laid down the law for her kids. “You couldn’t walk around at night,” Lauren recalls. “We had to stay on our street.”
“That’s the rule,” Stephanie explains. “You stay on our street so I could watch you. Our subdivision was a dead end, so if you came into the subdivision, the neighbors know you don’t belong there. I sheltered my kids a lot in Fulton County [where they lived when the girls were preschoolers and the boys were in middle school]. I didn’t want them around the roughnecks, so I sheltered them. But still one of my sons”—the younger of the two—“got out and then into the rough life.” Stephanie refers to this son as her “challenge child—the most difficult one,” and describes having to “call the police on him” when he lost his temper at home. How easily he slipped out of Stephanie’s grasp and into the “rough life” (from which he has still not emerged 15 years later) is a reminder of the thin margin of safety for parents in Stephanie’s situation.
Because she grew up in Detroit with a near-constant threat of physical violence, Stephanie has developed a tough love approach to mothering. “Were your parents warm parents?” we ask. “Lots of hugs or were they—” Astonished at our naïveté, Stephanie interrupts. “No, we don’t do all that kissing and hugging,” she says. “That’s other races’ stuff. I’m not kissing and hugging my kids. I love my kids to death, but I’m not a touchy-feely person, like the Beavers. In real life, that doesn’t happen. You can’t be mushy in Detroit. You can’t be soft. You gotta be hard, really hard, because if you soft, people will bully you. If you go to Detroit, don’t be soft. You gotta be hard. Be a thug!” Her stern admonition delivered, she relaxes, laughs, and adds, “That’s how you got to be. I smile all day at work, but when it come down to my household, I’m strict.”
Stephanie’s approach to discipline, not surprisingly, is very different from Carl’s and Simone’s. All of her kids got “whuppings.” A particularly unsettling illustration of her approach comes from Michelle’s first weeks in preschool. When Michelle was left at school, Stephanie recalls, “she howled at the top of her lungs all day every day, for probably 30, 60 days straight.” Eventually, Stephanie says, the school called the Division of Family and Children Services, worried about mistreatment at home, but they investigated and found nothing. The five-year-old Michelle wanted to stay with her dad, who had just left the family, and Stephanie agreed. But after two weeks of whupping by her father, Stephanie continues, Michelle was still “hollering at the top of her lungs. So I say, ‘This is going to have to stop.’ Went to the school, called Michelle. She came out, took her in the bathroom, wore that ass out. She went to class and had no more problems.”13
“And grew up to be a bully,” Lauren softly adds.
As a hardworking single mother, Stephanie struggles to cope with demands on her time and energy, and this has affected her style of parenting in many ways. Parent-child conversations over dinner, for example, were uncommon. “We’re not a sit-down-and-eat family,” Stephanie says. “We didn’t do that. You got to the table, you ate.” “When it’s time to eat,” Lauren adds, “it’s whoever wants to eat. It wasn’t everybody sit at the table, like a party or something.” “We ain’t got time for all that talk-about-our-day stuff,” Stephanie explains.
Exhausted from long hours of cheerfully helping difficult customers, Stephanie goes to bed early. Lauren confesses that this allowed her to get acquainted with vodka at night with her siblings. On the other hand, when Lauren was a star basketball player in high school, Stephanie rushed home from work to serve as unofficial “team mom.”
Stephanie’s concern about her children’s education mirrors Simone’s, although it is subject to different constraints. Stephanie twice moved away from the encroaching ghetto in search of better schools and safer neighborhoods. As Lauren says of the neighborhoods where she grew up, “they got better and better.” Of course, those moves were enabled by Stephanie’s hard-fought climb up the economic ladder.
Stephanie is unsure about whether she read to her children when they were young, but Lauren insists that she did. Stephanie knows that at least she got them library cards, “because,” as she puts it, “a kid needs a book in the hand every day.” In general, she is proud of her girls’ education, although her measure of success differs from Carl’s and Simone’s or Wendy’s and Dick’s. (“They didn’t skip school,” she says.) As her economic situation has improved, she has felt able to offer her daughters an education at one of the nearby community colleges. Lauren has taken up her offer. Michelle tried it for a year but dropped out. “I’m not really a school person,” she says.
Stephanie has developed a strong philosophy of parenting, based on her own experiences. “My mom was an alcoholic,” she says, “and I wasn’t choosing the same path. I go to work every day. I motivate my kids. I push my kids to go to college. I push them that if you need a shoulder to lean on, that’s what I’m here for. I’m that support system.
“I try to do constructive criticism to get my children where they need to be. And you can only coach them. The coach take you to the field. He can only coach you to your bases. It’s up to you to get that concept to where you need to go, first base, second base, and third base, and home. I try to show them in life that it’s hard out here. Just because I make it easy for you, it’s not easy. It’s hard out here, so if you got children and you can’t provide for them, don’t make babies. And if you make babies, you got to take care of them.
“I’m not my children’s friend! I’m the best of parents to my children. A parent don’t need to be their kids’ friend. They need to be their parents, so they can guide them in the right direction. Far as you calling me, ‘Girlfriend, let me tell you what happened last night,’ we don’t do that here. You respect me as a parent, I’ll respect you as my child. You need guidance. That’s what I’m here for.
“Parenting is hard. It is so much work to have four children. You constantly on the move. You got to make sure they got that bath, got to make sure they got food, make sure they get on that school bus. They did good, though. I’m proud of them.”
In terms of preparing her children for the twenty-first century, Stephanie’s hard work and sacrifice have yielded mixed returns so far. Her older son (whom the girls call “everybody’s golden boy”) seems on the road to a decent life. He took courses from an online adult education school, and according to Stephanie, he is “doing real well, chasing that dollar.” Her younger son (her “challenge child”), by contrast, was suspended from high school for an entire year, though he did eventually graduate and now works with his dad in a recycling center.
Lauren, Stephanie’s older daughter, has mostly stayed on track. “I knew I was going to be straight,” Lauren says, “unlike my siblings. I’m not ghetto.” She turned down an athletic scholarship to play basketball at Kansas, despite strong urging from her coaches and her mother. “It was just getting too rigorous for me,” she says. “I wanted to do something with juveniles.” She will soon finish a degree at a nearby community college, but, unfortunately, funding for juvenile probation officers has been cut. The result, she says, is that she has to “go where the money is, which is with adults, which I did not want to do.” She is dating a young man from the neighborhood, whom Stephanie calls “a good kid.”
Stephanie calls Michelle another “challenge child.” Michelle concedes that she hasn’t been easy to raise. “I wasn’t the worst child,” she says, “but I wouldn’t say I was a good child. I have my troubles in school. I had speech problems and a reading comprehension problem growing up. I just thought it was like a get-out-of-class thing—‘Go to another class’—but now I realize it actually helped. I used to struggle with math and social studies. I got in trouble in middle school, because everybody else was acting out.”
Despite her strong commitment to her kids, Stephanie is sometimes simply unable to help them over important hurdles. “I’ll ask her for help [with homework],” Michelle says, “and she’ll help me as much as she can, but she couldn’t do it.” Michelle struggled to pass the social studies test for high school graduation. “I had to take it six or seven times,” she says. “It was very stressful, but I passed on my last try. My mom was supportive.” “How?” we asked. “She would pray about it,” Michelle says, “and talk to God.”
Stephanie wasn’t happy when Michelle dropped out of community college. “When I stopped going, it was a big deal with her.” Michelle took a temp job but quickly quit, because, as she puts, it, “I had to stand in one spot for ten hours, and my feet was hurting.” She gave her mother a different explanation. “I just told her they didn’t need me,” she says.
Michelle now hopes to attend a local trade school and imagines herself working as a day care teacher. For now, she spends her days hanging out with a high school dropout from the inner city. Stephanie dislikes him. “He’s a lazy bum,” she says. “He came up in a rough environment. That type of life I shelter them from, see. And then for her to go into a relationship like that kind of mind-boggles me. That ain’t the life I chose for her.”
Given limited resources and a challenging environment, strong parental commitment and tough love is sometimes not enough.
Neither Stephanie nor her daughters believe that racial discrimination has limited their opportunities, perhaps because the barriers they encounter every day are more economic than racial. Michelle was once pulled over for an unpaid parking ticket and put in a holding cell for 45 minutes, but she resists the idea that racism was behind the cop’s actions. “Maybe he just trying to meet his quota,” she says. “But I don’t think he was being racist. I don’t think people are racist. I think black people have certain white people they don’t like, and I think white people have some black people they don’t like.”
Lauren claims that racism was not a factor as she grew up. “Living in Georgia, you would expect that,” she says. “But I never experienced racism, except by black people that’s saying stuff about each other.” She adds, “Out here [in the mostly rural, majority-white area where they now live], we never experienced it, because everybody got along with everybody. I’ve never seen racism, even in Clayton County.”
Stephanie agrees with her daughters. “To me,” she says, “it’s not black people–white people. It’s black people against black people. First time somebody do something, I don’t care what color they are, they just use ‘racism.’ It’s just a word that’s out there that people use.”
Stephanie claims she didn’t even teach her kids to watch out for racism as they grew up. “I ain’t got time for that,” she says. “There’s just too much energy disliking a different race. They did nothing to you.”
Times have changed since Stephanie herself climbed the economic ladder. However admirably adapted it is to the environment in which she lives, her tough love parenting—privileging obedience over imagination, “whupping” over reasoning, and physical safety over verbal skills—is not so well adapted to the new economy as the “concerted cultivation” employed by Simone and Carl.14 Nevertheless, Stephanie takes hard-earned satisfaction in what she has managed to do for her kids. “I think I have brought them to where they’re at now—respectable. We have our ups and down, but respectable. And then I know that you have to go out there, either go to school or work for what you want in order to have it. Ain’t nothing free in life. Nobody ever gave me anything in life. I said once I got to where I were now, I wasn’t going back. I put God first, and everything else behind me could stay back, but God, my husband, my children. It’s my path, and I hope that I did a good job with them.”
We encounter Elijah in a dingy shopping mall on the north side of Atlanta, during his lunch break from a job packing groceries. The shoppers and sales clerks around us are without exception black or Latino. Elijah is thin and small in stature, perhaps five foot seven, and wears baggy clothes that bulk his frame: jeans belted low around his upper thighs, a pair of Jordans on his feet. Elijah leans back in his seat, resting an elbow on a chair next to him. After some initial reluctance, he speaks calmly, his demeanor relaxed and comfortable. He gesticulates frequently, maintains eye contact, and is a talented raconteur. Despite describing traumatic and even incredible experiences, he speaks in a casual, objective tone, recounting facts rather than soliciting sympathy. At the end of the interview he tells us, “I kinda enjoyed talking about my life.”
Elijah was born in 1991, in Nürnberg, Germany, where his parents were stationed with the U.S. Army. His mother had grown up in Georgia, his father in New Orleans. All Elijah remembers of his time with them is “a lot of abusive arguments.” While he was only an infant, both parents became involved with other partners. “They couldn’t live together for nothing,” he says. By the time Elijah was three or four, his mother was back in Georgia with a new boyfriend, and Elijah had been left with his paternal grandparents in the deeply impoverished, mortally dangerous New Orleans projects. His recollections of his childhood, first in New Orleans and then in Atlanta, are surreal.
“They say my granddad got 36 kids,” he says. “I heard strange noises in the bedroom when I was young, and I know he wasn’t fighting. He came out in his underwear, and I said, ‘Hey, Pa, what’s that noise?’ And he was like, ‘Oh, that was me and your grandma. We were wrestling.’ I didn’t realize until I was 11 years old that my granddaddy was having sex with his girlfriend.
“I seen him get drunk and beat the mess outta my grandmother. I don’t think no child should see that. I got beat by my granddaddy, but it was me being a knucklehead. I be up in the projects looking at my cousin smoking weed, selling it. I seen my granddaddy drunk naked one time. I was so disgusted I didn’t go home for a week.
“I had a cousin named James. He was crazy. I seen him shoot at people, but I ain’t never seen him kill nobody. And he be the one that taught me how to rob. When I first got up here [in Atlanta], I was robbing people. I was robbing them little Indians in my apartment, them little Muslims. I used to know how to go through the balcony and do the little key thing with the hanger to unlock the door. He taught me that, my cousin James. I don’t know whether he dead or alive, ’cause when I left New Orleans he was serving 25 to life for first-degree murder.
“I was closer to him than to anybody, closer than my own daddy. When he tell me to go rob somebody for their money, and I give it to him, he give me like $50. He told me to go steal some shoes. I stoled it, and when somebody tried to come after me, he be shooting at them so they wouldn’t try to catch me or take me to juvey. I’m just six or seven years old. I don’t know no better. I’m like, ‘That’s what you gotta do. I’m in the ’hood.’ That’s what I’m good at. When you living in New Orleans you gotta be brave and be strong, and just stand on your own two feet. Don’t let anybody try to punk you out.”
Elijah’s neighborhood in New Orleans was “real violent,” he says. “If I was hearing somebody get shot, I’m living right next door to the killer. Dead bodies all the time. People being kidnapped and raped and killed and murdered. Who wants to be around that? I’m seeing crackheads walking around the street, homeless, poverty. I hated it. I didn’t like where I was from.
“I was ashamed of who I was, because I go to school and white folk used to pick on me. A lot of racism, too. The only people I used to get into a fight with [were] white people. Not black people. If I was fighting the black people, it was because of my cousin. My cousin told me to do it, and I do it. But I loved to fight back then. It the adrenaline you get, that ’hood mentality. So it was rough living. I hated it.”
Elijah explains what he means by “ ’hood mentality”: “Like, bullies used to come to school and take somebody for they lunch money: ‘I want your lunch money.’ With me, in New Orleans, I be like, ‘I want all the money you got. I want your new shoes. I want your clothes. I want everything.’ My cousin James can do it way better than me. He won’t do it with his fists. He have a gun to your head and be like, ‘Look, you don’t give me this money, I’m gonna blast your head off.’ I want him to do it, too. I never seen nobody in my family actually murder somebody. But I don’t want him to do it.”15
As a preschooler, Elijah became gradually inured to homicide. “When I was four years old,” he says, “I seen this pretty little girl, rolling on her little scooter, die in the drive-by. Just out of nowhere. The next thing you know, I see her jump crazy with blood, shot through the forehead, nose, and all this right here [gesturing], bleeding all up on the mouth. And I’m shocked, I’m scared. I ain’t never seen nothing like that before. It made me cry.”
Later, Elijah heard a man in the alley get shot. “That scared the fool outta me,” he says. “Every time my grandfather would take me to see a scary movie, it wouldn’t scare me at all, because I seen worse. ‘Go outside, I’ll show you what’s scary.’ ”
Finally, death came to his own doorstep. “I remember waking up one morning and going to look for my grandfather. I unlocked the front door, and I seen him standing over a dead body right outside of our doorstep. I ain’t know what to say at first. I just ran to my room and went back to sleep.”16
Elijah isn’t sure where his parents were during his time in New Orleans. All he knows about his father in those years is that he left the Army and returned to the States. “Dad was a rolling stone,” he says, “before he got saved.” Elijah does not recall meeting his father until he was ten. “Shoot,” Elijah says of that encounter, “it was good to see him for the first time.” For those missing years, Elijah can provide only occasional glimpses of his father—serving time in prison, fathering children in Texas and Louisiana, and eventually becoming a street preacher south of Atlanta.
Meanwhile, his mother ended up back in Charleston, South Carolina, with her new boyfriend. When he was ten, Elijah was sent to live with them for a year. He found Charleston tame compared to New Orleans. “It wasn’t too much action,” he says, “because I used to the violence, the drugs, the shootings. So I would just come outside and wait for something to happen, and just get ready for some action.”
After that year in South Carolina he returned to his paternal grandparents in New Orleans, where he would remain for several more years. During this period he saw his dad again. “This time he was in jail,” he says, “and he told me why he was in jail. I liked to cry. It was hard holding it in, but I really had to hold it in, because he just looked me dead in my eyes and said, ‘Everything gonna be all right.’ And you know how fathers and sons are: I believe my dad, because when I’m around my dad, I feel I ain’t got no worries. Everything is really gonna be all right.”
When Elijah turned 13, his mother insisted that he move from New Orleans to Atlanta to help care for the year-old twins that she had had with her latest boyfriend—the result of “a little casual sex,” Elijah says, “from what I hear.” The boyfriend refused to care for them. “I didn’t like this guy too well,” Elijah says, “because, ‘You up there having sex with my momma, got her pregnant, and now you can’t take care of your kids, and I gotta be the one out here baby-sitting.’ They were a handful, and I ain’t never dealt with kids before. So that would partially keep me away from the trouble that was on the street.”
But only partially. Elijah did get into trouble during his first year in Atlanta—for arson. “I got locked up in juvie for some dumb junk,” he says. “I did it, though: I ain’t gonna lie. It was fun burning down that lady house [laughs]. I burnt down her house, because she called me a ‘Negro.’ I was like ‘Okay, you . . .’ I was young, wild, and crazy. I was ready, I was out there, I was real horrible then.”
Within a week, Elijah’s father got Elijah released, but then administered some justice of his own. “My dad came and put up a lot of money,” he says, “and got me out and beat me senseless. That was the worst beating I probably ever went through [laughs]. I couldn’t sit down for a good little week just getting beat like that. I was like, ‘Oh man, I am never gonna burn nobody house again [laughs].’ ”
Elijah’s mother and father both came down on him hard after the arson. “My mom and dad double-teamed me,” he says, “and I didn’t feel too good. She was fussing at me, and my dad was like, ‘You actin’ like the devil. You need to stop doing all this bad stuff.’ And I’m like, ‘Man, all right, I give up.’ I go to school and stop skipping.”
After school, Elijah would come home and watch TV. “I never had that many rules,” he says, “because—I think it was the lack of discipline, because I didn’t have my dad there physically. When I talked to him on the phone, he encouraged me, and ministered the Word of God to me, but my mother was just really going hard on me, verbally abusive to me, and I never kinda understood that.
“It’s the same old, same old: ‘Shut up talking to me. I don’t wanna hear that crap.’ Man, she is cussing at me, calling me just dumb and stupid. ‘You gonna be just like your daddy—no job, living with your mother.’ Don’t get me wrong. My mom’s not a terrible person. It’s just the way she grew up, and that’s how she got used to things. Her father is the reason why my mom is like the way she is.”
Elijah offers another interpretation of his mother’s punitive behavior. “At one time she had two jobs, and that’s probably the reason why when my mom come home to me, she be frustrated. When you come home as a mother, and you see bills on the table, and you see the dishes ain’t washed, and you see your son’s room not cleaned up, and you see everything messy, I think that’s why she’s so angry. She angry at me a lot of times, and I can’t blame her. But, at the same time, it’s a limit that you speak to your child. When you cussing at your child all the time and just really going hammer, that really breaks . . . that really discourages your child.”
Elijah describes 2006 (when he was 15, two years after the arson incident) as “the worst year of my life”—which is saying a lot. He’s vague about why it was the worst year, but he calls it “a hellish point” between him and his mother. “My dad looked at me as like America’s Most Wanted,” he says. “My mom just looked at me as some nut that was born out of her stomach, and I’m going to my dad house and getting a whupping all the time.”
Later, he reflects on how he would want to treat his own kids. “Tell ’em the right things,” he says. “If my son gets rowdy and acts like a thug, like I used to do, and then starts robbing people, I just speak good words over his life. I mean, don’t get me wrong: I’m gonna beat him, I’m gonna teach him what’s right from wrong. But I’m gonna say good words over him. If you tell your child that he ain’t gonna be nothin’ but a low-down dirty-rat scoundrel, your child is gonna be a low-down dirty-rat scoundrel. You gotta believe that one day he’s gonna be a fantastic person.”
Elijah had a lot of trouble in school. He was expelled at least once for skipping class. He got “horrible” grades. Even just graduating sometimes seemed out of reach. “I felt really stupid,” he says. “That graduation just ain’t no joke. So I just set my mind on the book, so that I could get out of high school. And I didn’t pass. I even went to summer school for it, and I still didn’t pass. In total, I took the graduation test four times, and then I got it right.”
Elijah graduated at age 19 and quickly slipped back into a life of drugs and drinking that eventually made his mother kick him out of the house. “I got high and drunk every night,” he says, “chillin’ out with the homies from midnight to eight in the morning. My momma couldn’t tell me nothing. But after my little drug problem, and when I got kicked outta my momma house, it all came to sense. ‘I’m 19 years old. I gotta stop doing this. I can’t live my life like this.’ ”
Two years later, Elijah is still uncertain about the path forward. Since graduating, he’s lived sometimes with his mother, occasionally with his father in south Georgia, and sometimes crashing with friends. “Last year,” he says, “I got kicked out of my mom’s house, so I went to live with one of my friends. He was on drugs, smoking weed and popping pills, going to the club and having sex. Man, that was crazy. I’m up there just losing my sanity. I don’t know what to do, ’cause I’m like, ‘Should I be a saint or a sinner, a loser or a winner?’ And at that time I was trying to get my life together. So I left my job to go live with my dad. I was trying to do this church thing and believe in God. It ain’t work, ’cause after five weeks with my dad, I went back doing the same thing. I started cussing, just thugging it out, being the old me. My mom and my dad try to pressure me into go into the Army, and I’m like, ‘I don’t wanna join no Army. That ain’t me. You didn’t do good in the Army.’ My dad got lazy and quit the Army. Why do that?”
Elijah tried for a few months to make a living selling knives door-to-door—but doing the job successfully required contacts and a car, and he had neither.17 “It was real new to me,” he says, describing the work. “Shoot, I’m from the ’hood. I don’t know anything about this. You gotta dress up every day, you had to be high-class to get that job. I coulda done good, but I didn’t.” Eventually, he returned to his job bagging groceries at Kroger’s.
Elijah has disparate dreams about his future. In one of them he is an evangelical preacher, working in partnership with his dad. “We gonna have plenty of money,” he says, explaining this dream. “I’m gonna have my own church, because my dad, he’s a preacher and he like to teach the Word of God. We talk a lot about the Word of God. Just a real good father-and-son bonding.”
Another future he envisions for himself is more secular and ultimately more compelling. “I’m a hip-hop head,” he says, “so I wanna produce music. That’s my dream. I wanna be a DJ. That’s my dream right there, to have my own record label. I’m at a point now where I just don’t care. I’m about to go ahead and save up some more money and get my own apartment and go to school. Nowadays I’m trying to get another job right now, and trying to fulfill that dream of being one of the greatest rappers of all time. I don’t never normally tell nobody this, but all I do is write and listen to music. So that’s what I see myself doing: being a rapper, living the high life.”
After 21 violent, tumultuous years of life, Elijah is a self-sufficient survivor, though just barely. He still seems addicted to the adrenaline rush of violence that he first experienced as a six-year-old in New Orleans. “I just love beating up somebody,” he says, “and making they nose bleed and just hurting them and just beating them on the ground.” At the same time, he seems to recognize that he needs to keep his urge to be violent in check. “I try to keep it under control,” he says, “because people think that weird and crazy. I don’t want to go that route now, because I’m more mature now. I’m forever saying I don’t live that life no more. I go to work, go to church and home. So God don’t want me to beat nobody up no more. I’m pretty sure.”
The troubles in Elijah’s personal life obviously had roots in his parentless early childhood in New Orleans, but that turbulence accelerated with “the different transitions I had to go through, a lot of different experiences that I wasn’t used to.” On the other hand, he seems genuinely committed to improving his situation. As he puts it, “I ended [up] trying—becoming a champion of all my problems. Being a problem solver, and just believing that I can do everything.”
He admits that he’s still “going through a lot of personal issues” with his parents, but nevertheless he seems hopeful. “All I do is go to church,” he says. “I have fun, chill with my friends, and just trying to be a good all-around American citizen.”
• • •
The three families whose lives we have just glimpsed are obviously not representative. (Sadly, because of racial disparities in economic well-being and incarceration, Elijah’s story is more typical of black youth than Desmond’s story.) But the differences among these three families do help us understand the troubling class-based disparities in parenting that have emerged and grown in America in recent decades. These three families happen to be black, but the class disparities they demonstrate are at least as marked—and are growing at least as rapidly—among white families.
These changing patterns in parenting have great significance for children’s prospects. I begin with a close focus on the latest scientific research on brain development in young children, which clarifies exactly what aspects of parenting help and hurt most in terms of a child’s cognitive and socioemotional development. I then zoom back to a wide-angle view of class differences in parenting practices nationwide over the last several decades to explore how and why those class differences have grown, to the relative disadvantage of poor kids.
Recent research has greatly expanded our understanding of how young children’s early experiences and socioeconomic environment influence their neurobiological development, and how, in turn, early neurobiological development influences their later lives. These effects turn out to be powerful and long-lasting. “Virtually every aspect of early human development,” write the authors of a landmark study by the National Academy of Sciences, “from the brain’s evolving circuitry to the child’s capacity for empathy, is affected by the environments and experiences that are encountered in a cumulative fashion, beginning in the prenatal period and extending throughout the early childhood years.”18 The bottom line: early life experiences get under your skin in a most powerful way.
The roots of many cognitive and behavioral differences that appear in middle childhood and adolescence are often already present by 18 months, and their origins, we now know, lie even earlier in the child’s life. Neuroscience has shown that the child’s brain is biologically primed to learn from experience, so that early environments powerfully affect the architecture of the developing brain. The most fundamental feature of that experience is interaction with responsive adults—typically, but not only, parents.
Healthy infant brain development requires connecting with caring, consistent adults. The key mechanism of this give-and-take learning is termed by specialists in child development “contingent reciprocity” (or more simply, “serve-and-return” interaction.)19 Like serving in a game of tennis, the child sends out some signal (for example, by babbling), and when the adult responds (for example, by vocalizing back), detectable traces are left on the developing circuitry of the child’s brain. Much of this learning is preverbal, of course. However, research has shown that the foundations of both mathematical and verbal skills are acquired in the earliest years more effectively through informal interaction with adults than through formal training.20 This interaction is classically illustrated when a parent, while reading to a toddler, points at pictures and names them and the child is encouraged to respond.
Cognitive stimulation by parents is essential for optimal learning. Children who grow up with parents who listen and talk with them frequently (a practice that Simone and Carl followed regularly) develop more advanced language skills than kids whose parents rarely engage them in conversation (as happened with Stephanie, who explained, “We ain’t got time for all that talk-about-our-day stuff”). The brain, in short, develops as a social organ, not an isolated computer.
Neuroscientists and developmental psychologists have identified an especially important set of brain-based skills that they call “executive functions,” that is, the air traffic control activities that are manifest in concentration, impulse control, mental flexibility, and working memory. These functions, concentrated in the part of the brain called the prefrontal cortex, allow you to put this book down when your cell phone rings, make a mental note to pick up the kids after soccer, and then resume reading where you left off. Deficiencies in executive functions show up in such conditions as learning disabilities and ADHD.
Under normal circumstances, with supportive caregivers, executive functions develop especially rapidly between the ages of three and five. However, children who experience severe or chronic stress during that period—precisely when Elijah was living with his inattentive grandparents in the terrifying violence of the New Orleans projects, and when Stephanie deployed the only tool (whupping) she could think of to stop Michelle’s howling—are more likely to have impaired executive functioning. This, in turn, leaves them less able to solve problems, cope with adversity, and organize their lives.
One important implication of this research is that skills acquired early in childhood are foundational and make later learning more efficient. Thus, experiences in those years are especially significant. Conversely, as the child ages, the brain becomes less able to change. One consequence of this fact is that early intervention is more powerful and cost-effective than intervention during adolescence.
Intellectual and socioemotional development are inextricably intertwined from an early age. Research has shown that so-called noncognitive skills (grit, social sensitivity, optimism, self-control, conscientiousness, emotional stability) are very important for life success. They can lead to greater physical health, school success, college enrollment, employment, and lifetime earnings, and can keep people out of trouble and out of prison. These skills are at least as important as cognitive skills in predicting such measures of success, and may be even more important in our postindustrial future than in the preindustrial and industrial past.21
So on the positive side of the ledger, the child’s interaction with caring, responsive adults is an essential ingredient in successful development. On the other side of the ledger, neglect and stress, including what is now called “toxic stress,” can impede successful development. Chronic neglect, in fact, is often associated with a wider range of developmental consequences than is overt physical abuse.22 Beating kids is bad, but entirely ignoring them can be even worse.
Intuitively, we know that neglect is not good for a child, and abundant evidence from neuroscience helps explain why: neglect during early childhood reduces the frequency of serve-and-return interactions and produces deficits in brain development that are hard to repair. A landmark randomized study of Romanian orphans who were institutionalized at an early age found that extreme neglect produced severe deficits in IQ, mental health, social adjustment, and even brain architecture. Most of these impairments turned out to be reversible when children were placed in home settings before the age of two, but they were increasingly difficult to repair when placements occurred at later ages.23
The effects of toxic stress on brain development can be equally appalling. The stress response itself (that is, sharp increases in adrenaline, blood pressure, heart rate, glucose, and stress hormones) represents a highly effective defense mechanism, fashioned by evolution to help all animal species deal with immediate danger. Moderate stress buffered by supportive adults is not necessarily harmful, and may even be helpful, in that it can promote the development of coping skills. On the other hand, severe and chronic stress, especially if unbuffered by supportive adults, can disrupt the basic executive functions that govern how various parts of the brain work together to address challenges and solve problems. Consequently, children who experience toxic stress have trouble concentrating, controlling impulsive behavior, and following directions.
Extreme stress causes a cascade of biochemical and anatomical changes that impair brain development and change brain architecture at a basic level.24 Stress caused by unstable and consistently unresponsive caregiving, physical or emotional abuse, parental substance abuse, and lack of affection can produce measurable physiological changes in the child that lead to lifelong difficulties in learning, behavior, and both physical and mental health, including depression, alcoholism, obesity, and heart disease.
Scientists have developed the Adverse Childhood Experiences Scale to measure the incidence of a selected list of events that can produce toxic stress.25 (See Table 3.1.) Exposure to one or two such events in childhood is not typically associated with bad adult outcomes. However, as the number of negative experiences increases, the rates of lifelong adverse consequences escalate. Summarizing the results of many studies, the Nobel Prize–winning economist James Heckman writes, “Early adverse experiences correlate with poor adult health, high medical care costs, increased depression and suicide rates, alcoholism, drug use, poor job performance and social function, disability, and impaired performance of subsequent generations.”26
1. Household adult humiliated or threatened you physically
2. Household adult hit, slapped, or injured you
3. Adult sexually abused you
4. Felt no one in family loved or supported you
5. Parents separated/divorced
6. You lacked food or clothes or your parents were too drunk or high to care for you
7. Mother/stepmother was physically abused
8. Lived with an alcoholic or drug user
9. Household member depressed or suicidal
10. Household member imprisoned
As a child, Elijah experienced at least eight of these ten stressful events, so his very survival is extraordinary. To be sure, some kids (like Elijah) seem resilient even in the face of severe, chronic stress. Innate resilience can be overrated, however, because the wear and tear of chronic stress can have adverse physiological effects even on kids who seem to be beating the odds.27 This is sometimes called the “John Henry effect,” after the pile driver who hammered hard enough to beat a steam engine, but “worked so hard, it broke his heart; John Henry laid down his hammer and died.”28 Statistically speaking, Elijah is living on borrowed time.
Kids at any socioeconomic level can encounter such adverse experiences, of course, but those who grow up in low-income, less educated families are at considerably greater risk. Even kids living at twice the poverty level (i.e., the level that Stephanie described as “good money”) are two to five times more likely than their less impoverished peers to experience such trauma as parental death or imprisonment, physical abuse, neighborhood violence, and drugs or alcoholism in the family—all experiences that have been shown to have negative consequences, ranging from depression and heart disease to developmental delays and even suicide. As those experiences tend to cumulate, the overall impact can be very large.29
The toxic stress that undermines child development is itself typically a reflection of considerable stress in the lives of the parents—both severe (such as clinical depression) and the pile-up of daily hassles. Maternal stress during a child’s first year is especially disruptive of infant-mother attachment and caregiving. And it’s a vicious cycle: the results of childhood stress (for example, acting out or ADHD) often increase stress on parents, further worsening their parenting behavior.30
Biopsychiatrists at the Harvard Medical School have shown that mothers who frequently abuse their children even verbally can impair the circuitry of those kids’ brains. “Young adults exposed to parental verbal abuse,” the study reported, “had elevated symptoms of depression, anxiety, and dissociation.”31 This research confirms what we might call “Elijah’s hypothesis”: “When you cussing at your child all the time and just really going hammer, that really breaks—that really discourages your child.”
On the other hand, a sensitive, responsive adult caregiver can minimize the effects of even significant stress on a child.32 Laboratory studies have confirmed this in animals. McGill University neurobiologist Michael Meaney, for example, has demonstrated that newborn rat pups that had been licked and groomed frequently (which is the typical way in which mother rats nurture their newborns) display lower stress hormones, and grow up to be smarter, more curious, healthier, and better able to deal with stressful situations than newborn rats licked and groomed less frequently. Meaney and his colleagues then ingeniously demonstrated that the link between maternal behavior and pup behavior was not merely genetic. In a carefully designed study, they had genetically high lickers and groomers raise genetically vulnerable pups (that is, the offspring of mothers who were low lickers and groomers), and those pups grew up to behave more like their foster mothers than their biological ones: they were less prone to stress and flourished as adults.33
Providing physical and emotional security and comfort—hugging, for example—is the human equivalent of a mother rat’s licking and grooming behavior and can make a great difference in children’s lives. When Chelsea’s parents in Port Clinton comforted her after the suicide of a close family friend, they were, in effect, “licking and grooming.” Parents who have a warm, nurturing relationship with their children can help them to build resilience and buffer stresses that would otherwise be damaging.34 Psychologist Byron Egeland found, for example, that among low-income mothers and children in Minneapolis, children who had been more warmly nurtured at age one did better in school than their less well nurtured peers and were less anxious and more socially competent years later.35
These early cognitive and socioemotional capacities (especially self-control and determination) in turn predict how well children do in school. A long-term randomized experimental study in Montreal shows that improving children’s social skills (for example, taking turns and listening to others) and social trust as early as seven years old can powerfully enhance opportunity.36 When kids and their parents are given a “dose” of sociability, in other words, the kids stay in school and out of jail, and do much better economically over the long run. Conversely, a childhood “dose” of social isolation and distrust, such as Elijah and Kayla received, significantly compromises their prospects.
The fundamental social significance of the neurobiological discoveries that I’ve just summarized is that healthy brain development in American children turns out to be closely correlated with parental education, income, and social class.37 Consider some recent findings.
• Growing evidence indicates that children who grow up in poverty are at higher risk for elevated levels of cortisol, a frequently studied stress hormone. Poverty seems to contribute to a context of chaos that impinges on children’s physiology.38
• A recent study found that the part of the brain responsible for emotional regulation was impaired in adults who had been exposed to the stresses of poverty as children years earlier.39
• Canadian researchers found differences in the brain waves of children from lower- and upper-class backgrounds that suggested the former had more difficulty in concentrating on a simple task, apparently because their brains had been trained to maintain constant surveillance of the environment for new threats.40
• Another recent study reported MRI evidence of slower brain growth and less gray matter in a small sample of young children living in poverty compared to children from more affluent backgrounds, though more research is needed before this finding can be generalized.41
• Kids from upper-income, well-educated homes benefit from richer verbal interaction because their parents have larger vocabularies and use more complex syntax.42 In a landmark study, child development specialists followed 42 families in Kansas, carefully observing the families’ daily verbal interactions one hour each month over three years. They estimated that by the time the children entered kindergarten, the children of the professional families had heard 19 million more words than the children of working-class parents, and 32 million more words than the children of parents on welfare.43
• According to one national study, 72 percent of middle-class children know the alphabet when starting school, as opposed to only 19 percent of poor children.44
In short, college-educated parents are more likely than high-school-educated parents to volley when their kids serve, and kids from more affluent homes are exposed to less toxic stress than kids raised in poverty. Moreover, class-based disparities in cognitive, emotional, and social capabilities emerge at very early ages and remain stable over the life course, which implies that, whatever the causal factors, those factors operate most strongly in the preschool years.45 Of course, this does not mean that later interventions are useless, still less that the class-based disparities are God-given or predetermined, but it does suggest the importance of focusing on early childhood development.
Ironically, the new research findings tend to amplify class differences, at least in the short run, because well-educated parents are more likely to learn of them, directly or indirectly, and to put them to use in their own parenting.46 As we’ll see, a class-based gap in parenting styles has been growing significantly during recent decades. Simone and Stephanie both clearly love their children, but as their stories and the scientific research make clear, when it comes to parenting, love alone is not enough to guarantee positive outcomes.
In the last 60 years, ideas about best practices in parenting have undergone two broad waves of change, in accord with the evolving views of developmental psychologists.47 After World War II, the runaway best-seller Baby and Child Care by the famed pediatrician Dr. Benjamin Spock taught parents of the baby boom that children should be permitted to develop at their own pace, not pushed to meet the schedules and rules of adult life. Parents were encouraged to relax and enjoy their children. Beginning in the 1980s, and at an accelerating rate since the 1990s, however, the dominant ideas and social norms about good parenting have shifted from Spock’s “permissive parenting” to a new model of “intensive parenting,” in part because of the new insights into brain development that I have just described.
This newer ideal has reached all segments of society, through childrearing manuals, family magazines, and experts on TV. Like previous changes in parenting philosophy, however, it has spread most rapidly and thoroughly among more educated parents. As Earl (our upper class dad from Bend) put it, “Our generation has read every damn book you can read about being parents. Even more with this generation behind me, they’ve done all the homework for it.”
In the contemporary United States, parents seek to stimulate their children’s cognitive and social skills from an early age, and as a result “good parenting” has become time-consuming and expensive. Especially among college-educated parents, “good mothers” are now expected to make immense investments in their children, and “good fathers” face more demanding expectations of involvement in family life and day-to-day child care.48 Parents at all levels of society now aspire to intensive parenting, but, as we shall see, the less educated and less affluent among them have been less able to put those ideals into practice.49
The influential family ethnographer Annette Lareau has discerned two class-based models of parenting in American society today, which she calls concerted cultivation and natural growth.50
Concerted cultivation refers to the childrearing investments that middle-class parents deliberately make to foster their children’s cognitive, social, and cultural skills, and, in turn, to further their children’s success in life, particularly in school. When Simone briefed her kids on Anne Frank, made flash cards, gave Desmond Hooked on Phonics, or arranged playgroups, or when Carl took Desmond to work, discussed the news with him, or asked him what he had learned in Sunday School, they were engaged in concerted cultivation.
Natural growth leaves the child’s development more to his or her own devices, with less scheduling and less engagement with schools. In this model, parents rely more on rules and discipline, less on close parental monitoring, encouragement, reasoning, and negotiation. Joe wanted to be a more engaged parent for Kayla as she drifted toward depression, but given the constraints he faced, as well as his own impoverished childhood, a natural growth strategy was the best he could manage. It’s the parenting model still more characteristic of poorer families today, though it may be fading among them, too.
One broad class difference in parenting norms turns up in virtually all studies: well-educated parents aim to raise autonomous, independent, self-directed children with high self-esteem and the ability to make good choices, whereas less educated parents focus on discipline and obedience and conformity to pre-established rules. Figure 3.1 illustrates this sharp distinction. Parents with less than a high school education endorse obedience over self-reliance, 65 percent to 18 percent, whereas parents with a graduate education make exactly the opposite choice, 70 percent to 19 percent. Upper-class parents have more egalitarian relations with their children and are more likely to use reasoning and guilt for discipline, whereas lower-class parents are more likely to use physical punishment, like whupping.51