INSTRUCTIONS: It should be double spaced and its length should be between 8 and

INSTRUCTIONS: It should be double spaced and its
length should be between 8 and 10 pages. Do not use footnotes. If you quote from Lareau, simply write
the book’s page number in parentheses after the quotation, e.g. (Lareau, p.10). I expect you to make use of pertinent sociological concepts.
Annette Lareau’s book, Unequal Childhoods: Class, Race, and Family Life, is based on painstakingly
detailed ethnographic research on the comparison between child rearing in middle class families and
that of working class and poor families. Lareau’s focus is on the different ways in which the classes
raise/socialize their children or, put differently, how class impacts on child rearing. Lareau and her
research team did intensive, lengthy observations of twelve families that were part of a larger study of
eighty-eight children. All the children were nine or ten years old, lived in the city or suburb, and
attended two middle schools: one a city school and the other a suburban school.
Based on your reading of Unequal Childhoods, write an essay incorporating the following points:
a) Describe the book, Unequal Childhoods, including Lareau’s most significant research findings, and the
concepts she uses to explain what she found. Use examples from the book.
b) relate Lareau’s book to the focus of this course which is inequality/oppression and the use of
intersectionality to understand and analyze inequality. Explain/describe with examples the extent to
which Lareau’s book brings into focus the issues of class, race, and gender in explaining the rearing of
most? Least? To what extent does she directly or indirectly incorporate the idea of the matrix of
domination? To what extent does she incorporate a social structural analysis vs. a purely individualist