Living for God

This chapter introduces readers to the childrearing logic of “religious restraint” and distinguishes it from Annette Lareau’s classic class-based childrearing strategies of “concerted cultivation” and “natural growth.” Deeply religious families do not fall into either of Lareau’s categories. Parents who raise their children with religious restraint exist across different social class groups. Children raised with religiously restraint (“abiders”) come to believe in God so deeply that it alters their sense of self—their idea of who they are. Teens believe that they are constantly being evaluated by God, which prompts them to change how they perceive themselves, how they carry themselves, and how they imagine their future selves. Living to please God shapes how teens see themselves and how they behave, which the chapter describes as developing a “God-centered self-concept.” Teens raised with religious restraint who develop a God-centered self-concept come from different genders, social class backgrounds, racial backgrounds, and religious traditions.

A Sociological Examination of Parenting Practices and Gifted Education

This literature review uses a socio-cultural lens to explore how income, race, culture, and parenting practices interact to cause, complicate, and further exacerbate the gap in gifted student identification. The article reframes the aforementioned factors using Annette Lareau’s work on concerted cultivation and natural growth models as a theoretical explanation. The authors recommend the following to address gifted education enrollment inequity: enhanced preparation and training of gifted student identification for educators, education about culturally relevant teaching practices, and improvements to the curricula in schools serving minority and low-income students.

Gendered parenting and returns from children in contemporary India: A study of IIT students and their parents

This article seeks to understand the modern-day value of children to middle class Indian parents. It examines parental strategies aimed at raising successful children by providing them with the best education possible. These strategies, involving ‘concerted cultivation’ and gendered ‘educational labour’, are analysed in relation to schooling and preparation for a highly competitive national entrance exam, for admission to an elite engineering college in the country. Describing and analysing the classed and gendered nature of these strategies, the article explores the shifting nature of returns that middle class parents expect from their grown children. As the article shows, gendered burdens and class location of parents are crucial in shaping the value of children. Mothers across class contribute disproportionately to children’s educational training and highly educated mothers are withdrawn from the labour market to immerse themselves in educational labour. Ironically, educated mothers’ own educational inputs remain invisible even to themselves, resulting from an acceptance of culturally constructed norms around the gendered division of labour. Family strategies are oriented towards aspirations of upward social mobility, a return that parents seek to derive from educationally and professionally successful children.

Chinese migrant parents' educational involvement: Shadow education for left-behind children

As rural people keep migrating to cities in China over the past few decades, tens of millions of children have been left behind by their parents. In this study, I investigated how Chinese migrant parents involve in their left-behind children's education through the theoretical lens of concerted cultivation and the accomplishment of natural growth. I drew on qualitative data from left-behind children, migrant parents and teachers collected at a rural primary school in Sichuan Province. Most migrant parents involved in this study migrated to a less developed area in Tibet. Their voices are a valuable addition to the literature that has so far focused on those going to developed cities. It was found that shadow education is a major channel through which the parents involved in their left-behind children's education. The parents could 1) exercise concerted cultivation and variously use shadow education, 2) hope to meaningfully involve but were constrained by multiple barriers, or 3) exercise natural growth and leave their children to themselves. I interpreted these patterns with a view to China's evolving culture, ideology and social structures. I conclude by discussing sociological implications of these patterns, and theoretical contribution to the literature.

Concerted Cultivation and Adolescent Psychopathology over Time-Mediation of Parent-Child Conflict

Background: Concerted cultivation is a parenting strategy that parents nurture their children intensively by involving heavily in their children’s academic sphere as well as offering them different structured “enrichment” activities so that their children can succeed in the future competitive “rug rat race”. While this parenting strategy has been regarded as an effective strategy to promote child and adolescent development, it is deemed to create stress and anxiety for their children. The present study examined the relationship between concerted cultivation and adolescent psychopathology (indexed by depression and anxiety) via parent–child conflict among Chinese adolescents in Hong Kong over time. Method: A sample of 1570 young adolescents (48.5% girls, mean age at time 1 = 12.6, SD = 0.76) were recruited from 19 secondary schools in Hong Kong. Adolescents were invited to fill out a questionnaire that contained measures of concerted cultivation, parent–child conflict, anxiety and depression in two consecutive years. Results: Results from structural equation modeling showed that higher levels of paternal concerted cultivation were associated with higher levels of adolescent psychopathology via increased father–child conflict over time. However, maternal concerted cultivation was linked to greater mother–child conflict but reduced father-child conflict, which was associated with adolescent psychopathology. Discussion: Rather than regarding concerted cultivation as an effective parenting strategy that promotes adolescent development, the findings indicated that concerted cultivation increased adolescent psychopathology via increased parent–child conflict. The study sheds new light for family practitioners and educators in their awareness of the adverse effects of concerted cultivation and designing appropriate parent education programs for parents.

Shifting the Weight of Inaccessibility: Access Intimacy as a Critical Phenomenological Ethos

This paper offers a critical phenomenological view of the concept of access intimacy, a term coined by disability justice advocate Mia Mingus. Access intimacy refers to a mode of relation between disabled people or between disabled and non-disabled people that can be born of concerted cultivation or instantly intimated and centrally concerns the feeling of someone genuinely understanding and anticipating another’s access needs. Putting in conversation this notion of intimacy with Kym Maclaren’s critical phenomenological account of intimacy, I show how accessibility is not about what one person or institution can do for another but involves an ongoing, interpersonal process of relating and taking responsibility for our inevitable encroachment on one another in ways that enhance one another’s freedom.