The informal mentoring gap is substantial in elementary school and steadily increases as children age through middle school and into high school, and as things stand now, formal mentoring barely begins to close the gap. In fact, the modest compensation from formal mentoring is concentrated in primary and middle school and disappears as kids age.26 In high school, there is no difference at all in the incidence of formal mentoring (8 percent) between rich kids and poor kids. Thus, the total class gap in mentoring (informal plus formal) begins in elementary school and balloons just as the kids most need help outside their families.
In sum, nearly two thirds of affluent kids (64 percent) have some mentoring beyond their extended family, while nearly two thirds of poor kids (62 percent) do not.27 And this stunning gap exists not because the poor kids don’t want mentoring; in fact, they are nearly twice as likely as rich kids (38 percent to 22 percent) to say that at some point in their lives they wanted a mentor, but didn’t have one. So mentoring contributes significantly to the opportunity gap.
One consequence of the mentoring gap is to exacerbate the savvy gap that we first noticed in the previous chapter. As we talked with scores of rich kids and poor kids across the country, one of the most striking differences was the stark contrast in their capacity to understand the institutions that stand astride the paths to opportunity and to make those institutions work for them.
Kids from more privileged backgrounds are savvier about how to climb the ladder of opportunity. The stories we heard from David in Port Clinton, Kayla in Bend, Michelle and Lauren in Atlanta, Lola and Sofia in Santa Ana, Lisa and Amy in Kensington, and the dozens of other disadvantaged 18- and 19-year-olds we met across the country are, however, replete with confusion and mystification. These kids are baffled about school practices, two- and four-year colleges, financial affairs, occupational opportunities, and even programs (both public and private) specifically designed to assist kids like them, such as educational loans. Their less educated parents’ limited skills and experience explain part of this, but equally important is the fact that these kids lack the dense networks of informal mentors that surround their upper-class counterparts. One poignant example from our fieldwork arose when a working-class dad asked if he could bring along a younger daughter to our interview with his son, just so she could meet an actual college graduate. Any serious program to address the growing opportunity gap must address the savvy gap and therefore the mentoring gap.
As we observed in Chapter 1, class segregation across America has been growing for decades, so fewer affluent kids live in poor neighborhoods, and fewer poor kids live in rich neighborhoods. Lower Merion and Kensington perfectly illustrate that pattern. That simple fact poses a central question for this chapter: Does the character of the neighborhood where kids grow up have an effect on their future prospects, apart from their individual characteristics? Growing up in a poor family and going to school with poor kids both constrain opportunity, as we have seen in the previous three chapters. Here the question is whether growing up in a poor neighborhood imposes any additional handicaps. The answer is yes.
America’s leading expert on neighborhoods, Robert Sampson, has shown that neighborhoods in America are deeply unequal and that that inequality has powerful effects on their residents. Pervasive neighborhood inequality, he writes, has consequences “across a wide range of how Americans experience life . . . crime, poverty, child health, public protest, the density of elite networks, civic engagement, teen births, altruism, perceived disorder, collective efficacy, [and] immigration.” He concludes, “What is truly American is not so much the individual but neighborhood inequality.”28
These neighborhood effects seem to be most powerful during infancy and then again in late adolescence.29 The longer kids live in a bad neighborhood, the worse the effects. These consequences are often compounded by multigenerational disadvantages: kids whose parents grew up in poor neighborhoods and are themselves still living in poor neighborhoods are doubly disadvantaged, because the parents bear scars from the neighborhood of their childhood.30 This double disadvantage is illustrated in the lives of Molly and her daughters.
Neighborhood affluence and poverty have been shown repeatedly to influence many aspects of child and youth development, even after taking into account the characteristics of kids and their immediate families. Race also matters a lot in neighborhood effects, quite apart from social class, because of the nation’s bitter history of racism, racial discrimination, and racial segregation, as illustrated in Kensington, but our primary focus here is on the powerful effects of class that affect kids of all races.
Affluent neighborhoods boost academic outcomes, largely because of the school effects discussed in the previous chapter, but also because other youth-serving institutions, like quality child care, libraries, parks, athletic leagues, and youth organizations, are more common there than in poor neighborhoods like Kensington. Well-developed social networks in a community provide an important resource for school leaders.31 Conversely, many careful studies have documented that poor neighborhoods foster behavioral problems, poor mental and physical health, delinquency, crime, violence, and risky sexual behavior.32 Most neighborhood studies have focused on cities, but recent research has shown depressingly similar effects in rural areas.33
Neighborhood poverty is bad for kids for many reasons, but probably the most important is that social cohesion and informal social control, based on cooperation among neighbors—what sociologists, following Sampson, term “collective efficacy”—are lower in poor neighborhoods like Kensington or Santa Ana or the Atlanta ghetto. In Sampson’s words, “Collective efficacy among citizens is primarily about informally activated social control and shared expectations rooted in trust.”34
The communal parenting that Diane and Molly recall from their youth was a vivid illustration of collective efficacy, while the failure of residents in Kensington nowadays to intervene to halt spray-painting of neighbors’ homes is a stark illustration of its absence. Collective efficacy, reflected in trust in neighbors, is higher in richer, more educated neighborhoods, and that collective efficacy in turn helps all the young people in the neighborhood, regardless of their family resources. The evidence linking neighborhood collective efficacy and adolescent outcomes is pervasive and robust.
The close association of neighborhood trust and neighborhood poverty is illustrated in Figure 5.4.35 Regardless of your own characteristics, if you live in an affluent neighborhood, you are much more likely to know and trust your neighbors. Both janitors and jurists are more likely to know and trust their neighbors if they live in more affluent neighborhoods. As we have seen, more poor kids are living in poor neighborhoods, while more rich kids are living in rich neighborhoods, so the benefits of collective efficacy and trust are increasingly concentrated on rich kids. In short, it does indeed take a village to raise a child, but poor kids in America are increasingly concentrated in derelict villages.