Reddit reviews Unequal Childhoods: Class, Race, and Family Life, 2nd Edition with an Update a Decade Later

Therapy, mainly. You also need to try to understand the position of your parents a bit, depending on your situation.

My dad was a quiet guy, worked a lot, didn't do much for father-son relationships. Largely absent in my life.

When I grew older, I realized he was beat as a kid all the time. His dad bought him a chick for easter, then made him slaughter it several months later and eat it. He doesn't eat chicken to this day.

His dad was an angry drunk man.

In his eyes, he probably gave me the childhood he always wanted. Not beating your kids and not getting angry and not getting drunk all the time...was probably a childhood dream of his.

To him, my childhood was probably paradise. To me, it was lacking compared to other dads I see out there.

Edit: It should also be noted that I am never having kids. I never had the drive and I realize how much it would take for me to raise a child well and it's just not worth it to me. I'm sure childhood may have something to do with this...maybe not.

I'd also recommend people read "Unequal Childhoods" if you're curious about your upbringing, especially if you were lower middle class (like I was) and end up in solid to upper middle class later in life.

https://www.amazon.com/Unequal-Childhoods-Family-Update-Decade/dp/0520271424

A lot of it focuses on how people with less money view children as children and not as small people with the ability to reason and understand as an adult human, to some degree. It's really interesting.

Check the book Unequal Childhoods. It is a wonderful qualitative research into the upbringing in different families and a must read.

oh, nice of you to say! Just something I've thought about a bit. Partly inspired by my reading of this book some years ago

https://www.amazon.com/Unequal-Childhoods-Family-Update-Decade/dp/0520271424

I posted this last time, but I'll post it again.

There's a working draft in PDF format of relevant academic paper here.

There's so much wrong with the New Yorker article I hardly know where to start.

The scolding and moralizing tone of the New Yorker article isn't really found in the paper, at least not based on my quick read of it. Even accepting everything in the academic paper, it's completely incorrect to put the "blame" on Americans. The paper itself is comparing "a small scale egalitarian society", "a post–colonial socially stratified society", and a "a post–industrial society with a market economy". The US only enters into it because it's the exemplar for the last category.

The New Yorker article basically takes a working paper by two anthropologists that hasn't even made it into a peer-reviewed publication, completely misses many of the major observations of the paper, and basically turns it into a trite anecdata-filled lament about "What's the matter with kids today?" The US certainly has its share of spoiled children, but any nuance that was in the original working paper was totally lost.

The working paper focuses on responsibility as a moral concept, with several quotes from philosophers like Aristotle and Kant. The paper is trying to illustrate the idea that helping with household chores is a moral activity, because it involves anticipating the needs of other people besides yourself, which helps kids be more compassionate. The New Yorker completely misses this moral/philosophical context to the paper.
The New Yorker publishes observations from the paper about the Matsigenka, but fails to note that, in the same paper, when Matsigenka children go to town for schooling, the Matsigenka children and their parents view the kids' Peruvian mestizo classmates as highly spoiled. So it isn't just American kids who can be judged as spoiled by outsiders.

Not that the paper's perfect, mind you. The paper doesn't do a good job of distinguishing between responsibilities placed on US children for household chores and the responsibilities placed upon them by schools and extracurricular activities. In fact, the paper dismisses US kids' homework responsibilities as an explanation, because they say it can't explain why children refuse to do short-term tasks, like taking a dish to the dishwasher. But the paper doesn't mention how an overscheduled US child with lots of homework and extracurriculars might be too tired or too short-tempered from fatigue to help out at home. In fact, the New Yorker article's moralizing about middle class American children being lazy conflicts with some recent ethnographic research about how middle-class American children run frenetically from activity to activity with barely any free time, prompting similar moral panic articles in journals like the New Yorker, but this time about "overscheduled kids."

The New Yorker and the anthropologists also have a bit of a middle-class bias in ignoring the role that corporal punishment can play in how children behave. American children are routinely called spoiled by both non-Americans and Americans alike, but compared to the rest of the industrialized world, the U.S. also has a very high percentage of Biblical literalists who are quite sincere in their belief that sparing the rod spoils the child. Is it possible that American are both the most spoiled and the most likely to be subject to corporal punishment in the industrialized world?

The best explanation offered in the paper is actually the simplest one. The Matsigenka and the Samoans view young children as competent enough to help out around the house, and the children act accordingly. Some US parents, on the other hand, view young children as naturally messy and incompetent about household tasks, and (guess what?) the children act accordingly.

More and more I see mainstream media outlets pouncing on scientific studies and drawing some very reactionary conclusions. An archeological analysis of one German Neolithic site that concluded some men inherited land and probably were privileged because of that, became "THE RICH GUY GETS THE GIRL!" Not what the study said at all.

tl;dr: when the media is all over a "scientific paper," try to read the actual PAPER and see what you come away with.

I have a couple of books to recommend: Crossing the Tracks for Love: What to Do When You and Your Partner Grew Up in Different Worlds, Unequal Childhoods: Class, Race, and Family Life. Also maybe Lillian Rubin's Families on the Fault Line and Worlds Of Pain.

Sociology won't fix your problems, but it definitely helps if you can understand where each of you are coming from. I would recommend you both read those and maybe some other similar books. Not everybody is a huge Ruby Payne fan, but she does a good job at just bluntly discussing why people raised in lower-class environments behave the way they do which is a really helpful thing to understand when you are trying to forge a meaningful relationship with somebody whose family are drunks and your parents were accountants.

Some people like Geoffrey Canada (president of the Harlem Children's Zone) have had some good results, while confirming as well that moving people out of poverty requires early and consistent action, and even then it's more than just having a good school. You can have access to books, but do you have parents with the time and social capital to read them to you? The home stability to have consistent nurturing and instruction?

Poor parents of any race tend to have very different parental styles, ones which aren't directly damaging but which tend to involve unsupervised play and a concentration on the safety of children, rather than the more direct guidance middle-class parents (again, of any race) tend to provide. This gives some children a huge disadvantage later on; I recall reading that a lot of the poorest children in America know something like half of the words middle-class children know by age two. That kind of difference doesn't just go away even if you start trying to change things in elementary school.

Anyway, if the "culture" argument were pitched in these terms, rather than ones which implicitly blame people as the cause of their own problems and which deny the history of poverty in the first place, I could get behind the discussion. As it is threads like this make me wary of talking about it.

There's a book about this very topic and a few closely related topics Unequal Childhoods. It examines in great detail a whole bunch of aspects of lives of about 8-10 year old kids from middle class, working class and poor families. So it's a LOT of text and it's much easier to digest in audiobook format.

I haven't finished it yet and don't want to offer you a summary, but rest assured that all the pros and cons of all kinds of approaches are discussed. It's given me a lot of food for thought on how I want to approach the same situation you are in.