{"id":72317,"date":"2018-03-27T11:19:41","date_gmt":"2018-03-27T16:19:41","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/thesocietypages.org\/socimages\/?p=72317"},"modified":"2018-03-27T11:19:41","modified_gmt":"2018-03-27T16:19:41","slug":"concerted-cultivation-and-the-march-for-our-lives","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/thesocietypages.org\/socimages\/2018\/03\/27\/concerted-cultivation-and-the-march-for-our-lives\/","title":{"rendered":"\u201cConcerted Cultivation\u201d and the March For Our Lives"},"content":{"rendered":"

Originally Posted at\u00a0Montclair SocioBlog<\/a><\/em><\/p>\n

A question that few people seem to be asking about Enough Is Enough and the March for Our Lives is: Why now? Or to paraphrase a question that some people soon will be asking: How is the shooting at Marjory Stoneman Douglas High School different from other school shootings?<\/p>\n

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Photo Credit: mathiaswasik, Flickr CC<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n

There\u2019s #MeToo and #Time\u2019sUp, of course. These may have inspired advocates of other liberal causes like gun control. But just three weeks earlier, a 15-year old in Benton, Kentucky brought a handgun to school and started shooting \u2013 2 dead, 18 injured. The incident evoked only the usual responses, nothing more.<\/p>\n

Here\u2019s my hunch: when I first saw the kids in Parkland speaking out, organizing, demanding that adults do something, I immediately thought of a sociology book that had nothing to do with guns \u2013Unequal Childhoods<\/a>\u00a0<\/i>by Annette Lareau published in 2003.<\/p>\n

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These high-schoolers, I thought, are the children of \u201cconcerted cultivation.\u201d That was the term Lareau used for the middle-class approach to raising kids. It\u2019s not just that middle-class parents cultivate the child\u2019s talents, providing them with private coaches and organized activities. There is less separation of the child’s world and the adult world. Parents pay attention to children and take them seriously, and the children learn how to deal with adults and with institutions run by adults.<\/p>\n

One consequence is the notorious sense of \u201centitlement\u201d that older people find so distressing in millennials. Here is how Lareau put it:<\/p>\n

This kind of training developed in Alexander and other middle-class children a sense of entitlement. They felt they had a right to weigh in with an opinion, to make special requests, to pass judgment on others, and to offer advice to adults. They expected to receive attention and to be taken very seriously.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

It is this sense of entitlement \u2013 the teenager\u2019s sense that she is entitled to have some effect on the forces that affect her life \u2013 that made possible the initial protests by the students at Marjory Stoneman Douglas High School. And once word of that protest spread, it was this same sense of entitlement, these same assumptions about their place in the world, that made so many other high school students join the movement.<\/p>\n

Conservatives just could not believe that kids could\u00a0or should\u00a0<\/i>be so adept at mounting an effective movement or that they could\u00a0or should<\/i>\u00a0speak intelligently about political issues. So right-wing commentary insisted that the students were paid \u201ccrisis actors\u201d or pawns of various forces of evil \u2013 adult anti-gun activists, the media, or the “deep state.” They also claimed that the students were \u201crude\u201d and that they did not have standing to raise the issue of gun control.<\/p>\n

[the students] say that they shouldn’t be able to own guns even though they can go to war, but they think that they should be able to make laws. None of this makes any sense at all. (See the excerpts in the transcript\u00a0here<\/a>.)<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

In a way, Fox and their friends are hauling out the old notion that children should know their place. But the motivation isn\u2019t some newfound independence, it’s middle-class values. As Lareau says, concerted cultivation makes children far more dependent on parents than does the \u201cnatural growth\u201d parenting more common in working-class families. Besides, foreign visitors since the early days of the republic have remarked on the independence of American children. What\u2019s new, and what is so upsetting to exponents of older ideas, is how parents themselves have taught teenagers to demand that they have a say in the decisions that shape their lives.<\/p>\n

Jay Livingston is the chair of the Sociology Department at\u00a0Montclair State University<\/a>. You can follow him at\u00a0Montclair SocioBlog<\/a>\u00a0or on\u00a0Twitter<\/a>.<\/em><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Originally Posted at\u00a0Montclair SocioBlog A question that few people seem to be asking about Enough Is Enough and the March for Our Lives is: Why now? Or to paraphrase a question that some people soon will be asking: How is the shooting at Marjory Stoneman Douglas High School different from other school shootings? There\u2019s #MeToo […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":258,"featured_media":72323,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[1],"tags":[12508,223,29,34,85],"class_list":["post-72317","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-uncategorized","tag-activismsocial-movements","tag-childrenyouth","tag-class","tag-education","tag-politics"],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"https:\/\/thesocietypages.org\/socimages\/files\/2018\/03\/39183396500_d5b102b55f_b-e1522167457408.jpg","_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/thesocietypages.org\/socimages\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/72317","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/thesocietypages.org\/socimages\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/thesocietypages.org\/socimages\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/thesocietypages.org\/socimages\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/258"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/thesocietypages.org\/socimages\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=72317"}],"version-history":[{"count":3,"href":"https:\/\/thesocietypages.org\/socimages\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/72317\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":72321,"href":"https:\/\/thesocietypages.org\/socimages\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/72317\/revisions\/72321"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/thesocietypages.org\/socimages\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/72323"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/thesocietypages.org\/socimages\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=72317"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/thesocietypages.org\/socimages\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=72317"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/thesocietypages.org\/socimages\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=72317"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}