Abstract
Drawing on interviews with upper-middle-class parents in a large North-eastern city, we examine how “predictable stability” informs their assessment of downward mobility risks for their children. In contrast to anxiety and a ‘fear of falling,’ multigenerational achievement allows these parents to assume that their children will realize education and career success and a comfortable standard of living. This analysis extends contemporary theories of parenting and social stratification by illustrating variation among upper-middle-class dispositions and the micro-foundations that underlie quantitative research on the “stickiness” of intergenerational status mobility and the “glass floor” that protects upper-middle-class children from experiencing downward mobility.
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Notes
Stevens (2007) refers to how normative behavior among middle class kids, such as participation sports, music, and a host of other extra-curricular activities, informs the formal evaluations made by elite college admission offices.
‘Little’ or ‘Baby’ Ivies are a collection of small, liberal arts colleges in the Northeast of the United States. They are known for their selective admission practices, healthy endowments, and high status.
This trend is evidenced by time use research, which has found substantial increases in the time spent by parents on cognitive activities with young children (Schaub 2010), as well as research noting changing expectations of parental involvement in education (e.g., Jezierski and Wall 2017).
“Stickiness” at the lower end of the socio-economic ladder is a function of the absence of familial cultural capital and financial resources (Calarco 2018; Hamilton, Roksa, and Nielsen 2018) as well as the presence of hazards present within lower-SES environments (e.g., neighborhood crime) (Burdick-Will 2018). Overall, stickiness thus refers to the stability of social reproduction at the extreme ends of the income distribution as a result of diverse social mechanisms.
Names and identifiable information have been changed. To protect the anonymity of the research participants, only generic website links are listed.
Asking participants retrospective and prospective type of questions are standard in qualitative interview studies. Few studies are ‘just in time’ and do require participants to reflect on past actions and ways of thinking or how they anticipate something will unfold in the future.
We invite readers interested in a more detailed quantitative and narrative overview of this activity within our sample to visit Table 1. We exclude this discussion from our findings section as it repeats findings observed by other scholars.
Terrance also discussed his children’s “above average IQ and strong intellectual capabilities” in reference to his children’s mothers’ (his current wife and former wife) decision to send his children to private school. As he explained, “I think both mothers and I felt that the opportunity was greater in a private school with better instruction and lower student-teacher ratios, smaller classes, more variety, and blah, blah,blah. All the usual reasons.”.
The authors have changed the name of two of the schools (Elite Law School and Ivy League Law School) to protect the identity of the participant.
When asked about whether they expected their children to attend an Ivy League or similarly prestigious school, several interviewees noted that there were other good school beside Harvard and MIT, and saw schools such as Berkeley as potential options. These responses were often rooted in their own educational pathways and “first hand” experiences. Julia, for example, recalls being “horrified” to go to the University of Wisconsin, a top 50 school, because it was “not as prestigious” as her top choices. Over time, with the “benefit of firsthand experience,” she came to realize that it was a “blessing” that she did not get in to the schools she originally aspired to attend.
While eschewing this behaviour, a few participants pointed to other parents who are engaged in competitive parenting. Stephanie, for example claimed that her “generation lives in fear of their children’s failure” and that it “motivates them to push their kids in ways that are potentially stressful and harmful.”.
Like their children, some of our interviewees also noted being able to rely on financial or other types of support from their parents. When Jennifer gave birth to twins, for example, she was faced with the prospect of looking after three children under the age of three. Her parents (a doctor and a teacher) paid for babysitter to look after the children every night (9 pm to 9am) and were paying for a full-time nanny at the time of the interview (8am to 6 pm). She noted that the cost was $26 per hour (or $260–312 per day). She described how this luxury not only reduces her stress and allows her to “be a happier mom,” but gives her the time to “make good healthy meals.”.
One useful direction for future research would entail the execution of a representative cross-national survey of parents that could allow us to measure proxies of parental anxiety about the downward social mobility. This approach would be useful in helping to isolate the correlates of this form of anxiety, while also allowing us to pinpoint breaking points within the middle class where these anxieties either intensify or diminish. The cross-national element would also be useful in helping us to understand how national structures shape these sentiments (e.g., Aurini, Missaghian, and Pizarro Milian, 2020).
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Acknowledgements
The first author would like to thank her postdoctoral supervisor, Dr. Michèle Lamont, Harvard University. The authors are indebted to the families who participated in this study.
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This research was generously supported by a Social Science and Humanities Research Council postdoctoral fellowship and a Standard Research Grant.
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This project was given ethics clearances by the Institutional Research Board at Harvard University (IRB # 109) and the Office of Research Ethics at the University of Waterloo (ORE # 13977). All research subjects were provided a letter of information prior to being contacted by telephone and reviewed and signed a consent form immediately before participating in the study. Names and other identifiable information have been removed or changed to protect the confidentiality of the participants.
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Aurini, J., Milian, R.P. & Missaghian, R. The Micro-Foundations of Predictable Stability: How Multigenerational Achievement Informs Upper-Middle-Class Parenting. Qual Sociol 46, 109–128 (2023). https://doi.org/10.1007/s11133-023-09529-7
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s11133-023-09529-7