Virtually none of our lower-class families had weak ties like this to help with jobs or college placement or health issues. (A notable exception was the church tie that got Lisa’s husband, John, his job at a security firm.) On the contrary, lower-class parents’ social ties are disproportionately concentrated within their own extended family (and perhaps a high school friend and a neighbor or two), who, because of their own location in the social hierarchy, are unlikely to expand the reach of the parents. Though more educated, affluent parents have a quantitative edge in the size of their personal networks, even more important is their qualitative edge, in terms of what their friends and acquaintances can do for them and their kids.
Upper-class parents enable their kids to form weak ties by exposing them more often to organized activities, professionals, and other adults. Working-class children, on the other hand, are more likely to interact regularly only with kin and neighborhood children, which limits their formation of valuable weak ties.13 (When those working-class neighbors had good jobs and could refer friends to those jobs, those neighborhood ties were more valuable.) When adjusting to college, choosing college majors, and making career plans, kids from more affluent, educated homes engage a wider array of informal advisors—family members, faculty, and outsiders—whereas kids from poor families typically consult one or two members of their immediate family, few if any of whom have any college experience at all.14 In short, the social networks of more affluent, educated families amplify their other assets in helping to assure that their kids have richer opportunities.
Affluent families provide their kids with connections that poor families can’t. But connections are important not merely for getting into top schools and top jobs. At least as important as the pipeline from a prized internship to a corner office job are the ways in which social capital can protect privileged kids from the ordinary risks of adolescence. Studies during the past 40 years have consistently shown that, if anything, drug usage and binge drinking are more common among privileged teenagers than among their less affluent peers.15 What is different, however, are the family and community “air bags” that deploy to minimize the negative consequences of drugs and other misadventures among rich kids. Marnie’s ability to fend off the challenges of drug use for Eleanor was greatly strengthened by Marnie’s ties to other mothers in the community, whereas Molly’s pot-smoking, drug-pushing neighbors were the very source of her daughters’ addictions. To be sure, social capital is not the only advantage that privileged kids have in confronting unexpected risks; it was financial capital, after all, that enabled Marnie to get top-quality professional help and to remodel Eleanor’s study space to help her ameliorate ADHD.
Have class differences in social networks changed in recent years? Fifteen years ago, in Bowling Alone, I compiled evidence that revealed a steady withering of Americans’ community bonds. Ten years later, an independent study (by scholars originally skeptical of my findings) reported that both kin and nonkin networks have shrunk in the past two decades, but that the decrease in nonkin networks was greater. In effect, they found, Americans’ social networks are collapsing inward, and now consist of fewer, denser, more homogeneous, more familial (and less nonkin) ties.16 Americans’ disengagement and their retreat to relative social isolation, an even more recent study in this field concludes, “constitute a trend that, even if common to individuals of all classes, affects members of the lower classes disproportionately, ultimately reinforcing differences between social classes.”17 While hard evidence is still too limited for a final verdict, there is reason to believe that class differences in social ties—especially weak ties that are important for upward mobility—are not only great, but may be growing.
But what about the Internet? Does it help close the networking gap between rich kids and poor kids, does it widen that gap, or does it have no net effect? In principle, it could multiply weak ties—that’s the purpose of LinkedIn, for example. However, since online and offline connections tend to be closely correlated,18 simply multiplying online ties would not necessarily narrow the class gap if those online ties were (like “real life” ties) more readily available to more educated Americans. Is there a “digital divide”?
In the early years of the Internet, simple access was unequally distributed, as less educated Americans, especially nonwhites, were slower to gain access to the Web. More recently, however, this digital access divide has narrowed substantially, and indeed racial differences have virtually disappeared.19 But having equal access to the Internet does not mean that everyone gains equal benefit from that access.
Sociologist Eszter Hargittai and her collaborators, experts on how the Internet is actually used, point out that “growth in basic user statistics does not necessarily mean that everybody is taking advantage of the medium in similar ways.” Compared to their poorer counterparts, young people from upper-class backgrounds (and their parents) are more likely to use the Internet for jobs, education, political and social engagement, health, and news gathering, and less for entertainment or recreation. Affluent Americans use the Internet in ways that are mobility-enhancing, whereas poorer, less educated Americans typically use it in ways that are not.20 (The same was true of books and the postal system; the point is that the Internet is not immune from that inequality in usage.)
After talking with scores of teenagers nationwide about how they use the Internet, the ethnographer Danah Boyd concluded that offline inequalities carry over online. “In a world where information is easily available,” she writes, “strong personal networks and access to helpful people often matter more than access to the information itself. . . . Those whose networks are vetting information and providing context are more privileged in this information landscape than those whose friends and family have little experience doing such information work. . . . Just because teens can get access to a technology that can connect them to anyone anywhere does not mean that they have equal access to knowledge and opportunity.”21
Kids from more educated homes learn more sophisticated digital-literacy skills—knowing how to search for information on the Internet and how to evaluate it—and have more social support in deploying those skills. Such children are using the Internet in ways that will help them reap the rewards of an increasingly digital economy and society. Even though lower-class kids are coming to have virtually equal physical access to the Internet, they lack the digital savvy to exploit that access in ways that enhance their opportunities. At least at this point in its evolution, the Internet seems more likely to widen the opportunity gap than to close it.22
As we have seen repeatedly, adults outside the family often play a critical role in helping a child develop his or her full potential:
• Cheryl, my black classmate in Port Clinton, was crucially supported in her college aspirations by the older white woman whose house she cleaned every week.
• Don, the working-class quarterback in my high school class, made it to college (about which his parents “didn’t have a clue”) with the support of his pastor.
• Andrew in Bend got detailed career guidance from his father’s high school classmate, the fire chief.
• In Orange County, Clara was urged toward graduate school by a supportive college teacher, and a generation later her daughter Isabella entered an unexpected career because of her screenwriting instructor at Troy High School. Meanwhile, Isabella’s classmate Kira survived the trauma of her father’s death with consistent help from her English teacher.
• Madeline’s writing instructor at Penn became a “life-changing” mentor, while Eleanor’s father’s female friend from graduate school became “the most important person in my life” (apart from her parents) during their long conversations on summer hikes.
• Youth pastors played critical roles as supportive mentors to all four of the Philadelphia young women, both in Lower Merion and in Kensington, during periods of family turmoil.
All these examples represent “informal mentoring”—natural relationships that spring up with teachers, pastors, coaches, family friends, and so forth. “Formal mentoring,” by contrast, is the result of organized programs, like Big Brothers Big Sisters and My Brother’s Keeper.
Careful, independent evaluations have shown that formal mentoring can help at-risk kids to develop healthy relations with adults (including parents), and in turn to achieve significant gains in academic and psychosocial outcomes—school attendance, school performance, self-worth, and reduced substance abuse, for example—even with careful controls for potentially confounding variables. These measurable effects are strongest when the mentoring relationship is long-term, and strongest for at-risk kids. (Upper-class kids already have informal mentors in their lives, so adding a formal mentor does not add so much to their achievement.) Measurably, mentoring matters.23
Formal mentoring is much less common and less enduring than informal mentoring. In 2013 a nationwide survey of young people asked about both formal and informal mentoring. Sixty-two percent of kids of all ages reported some sort of informal (or “natural”) mentoring, compared to 15 percent who reported any formal mentoring. Moreover, informal mentoring relationships lasted about 30 months on average, compared to roughly 18 months for formal mentoring.24 So combining frequency and duration, American kids get about eight times as much informal as formal mentoring.
Those national averages, however, obscure substantial class differences in access to mentoring. Informal mentoring—exactly as in the instances I’ve just recalled from our contemporary case studies—is much more common among upper- and upper-middle-class kids than among lower-class kids. (Our case studies in Port Clinton hint that informal mentoring of poor kids was more common in the 1950s, but I know of no quantitative evidence to support that conclusion.) Figure 5.3 summarizes the pattern today, showing that kids from affluent, educated homes benefit from a much wider and deeper pool of informal mentors.
For virtually all the categories of informal mentors outside the family—teachers, family friends, religious and youth leaders, coaches—kids from affluent families are two to three times more likely to have such a mentor. Privileged children and their less privileged peers are equally likely to report mentoring by a member of their extended family, but family members of privileged kids tend to have more valuable expertise, so family mentors tend to have more impact on the educational achievements of the privileged kids.25 All told, the informal mentoring received by privileged kids lasts longer and is more helpful (in the eyes of the kids themselves) than the informal mentoring that poor kids get. In short, affluent kids get substantially more and better informal mentoring.