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This article explores musical parenting in Norwegian schools of music and arts. These schools aim to provide extra-curricular activities in music and other art forms to all children and adolescents regardless of their social and economic background, but the schools reveal traits of social and cultural exclusion, serving mainly the children of the middle classes. Taking this into account, we set out to understand the parents' role in relation to music participation and explored different classed approaches to musical parenting in these schools, borrowing Lareau's (2011) notion of concerted cultivation and based on a Bourdieusian-inspired framework. Drawing on 14 qualitative interviews among parents of music students in schools of music and arts, we found that they invested time, energy, and money in their child(ren)'s musical activities in the schools, and as such, we also found traces of concerted cultivation, and some classed connections to different approaches to musical parenting. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper makes two contributions to knowledge. First, it broadens geographies of education's focal reach by concentrating attention on the consumption of supplementary education. Supplementary education markets are booming as parents seek to ensure their children have the qualifications required to succeed in knowledge economies. The paper elucidates how consumption of such commercially provided tuition—which is delivered outside of school boundaries but designed to improve performance in school—is shaped by place‐specific, classed and racialised parenting cultures. This shines an important light on shadow education market mechanics that have hitherto been hidden from geographical view, and foregrounds the significant role parenting cultures play in shaping children's educational experiences. Future research in geographies of education must attend to these parenting cultures, as interactions between the home and diverse formal, informal, alternative and supplementary education settings play an increasingly crucial role in confronting and reproducing educational inequality. Second, the paper advances the conceptual contribution of geographies of education to interdisciplinary debates about parents and education. It demonstrates that multi‐scalar geographical research makes a unique contribution to interdisciplinary theorisations of home–school links, including those utilising Bourdieu's notion of cultural reproduction, and Lareau's model of concerted cultivation. Specifically, multi‐scalar analysis demonstrates that: (i) place‐sensitive research is vital as it contextualises parenting cultures, reattaching analyses of parental habitus and capital to the field, highlighting how intersecting global, national and local processes shape parents' educational practices; (ii) previously overlooked racial differences in concerted cultivation must be analysed without being naturalised, by exploring how racialised dispositions towards education are shaped in/across place, and reproduced through global/local racialised social capital; and (iii) inter‐class differences that have dominated parenting debates remain important, but attention to inter‐class similarity and intra‐class variation, as it emerges through intersections with race and in place, is equally vital. This paper focuses geographical attention on the booming supplementary education market: it elucidates how consumption of commercially provided tuition—which is delivered outside of school boundaries but designed to improve performance in school—is shaped by place‐specific, classed and racialised parenting cultures. The paper argues that geographical research can make a unique contribution to interdisciplinary debates about parents' impact on education, as it: (i) elucidates how intersecting global, national and local processes shape parents' educational practices; (ii) illuminates how parents' racialised dispositions are shaped in place and reproduced though global/local racialised social capital; and (iii) foregrounds inter‐ and intra‐class specificities in parenting cultures while attending to class's intersection with race and emergence in place. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Research examining middle‐class parents' school choices often overlooks parents in post‐socialist nations, where social reproduction may occur differently than in Western urban contexts. To bridge this gap, our study illuminates the intersection of Czech middle‐class parents' school choices and parenting strategies. Drawing on 26 in‐depth interviews with parents, we depict "cultivation for wellbeing" as a distinct parenting approach prevalent within a subset of the Czech middle class that challenges prevailing Western depictions of middle‐class child‐rearing strategies in relation to school choice. We describe five areas in which the parenting approach contrasts with concerted cultivation and intensive parenting: the promotion of unstructured free time, autonomous socialization with selected peers, a propensity to avoid confronting teachers, gentle support for children's interests, and a focus on emotional and physical wellbeing. We posit that "cultivation for wellbeing" serves as a mechanism for social distinction among a segment of middle‐class parents, enabling them to distinguish themselves from other class segments by selecting and seamlessly accessing exclusive public school settings tailored to their nuanced educational preferences. The study underscores the need to reassess the dominant portrayals of middle‐class parenting strategies, highlighting the complex interplay between child‐rearing, school choice, and social reproduction in diverse cultural contexts. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This qualitative study employs a Bourdieusian framework to explore how urban middle-class parents in Pakistan support their daughters' education while transmitting cultural capital. Parents emphasize talim-o-tarbiyat, referring to education and nurturing. I argue that, owing to the availability of educational resources and the recognition of the cultural capital conferred by Western qualifications, middle-class, educated urban parents choose Western education as talim. Additionally, Tarbiyat motivates their aspirations for their daughter's education with specific cognitive references, notably Ashraaf values. Through boundary work and concerted cultivation, they reproduce cultural capital, influencing career choices and networks. Nevertheless, educated working women, experiencing a transformation of their habitus, foster new cognitive and social structures for themselves and their daughters. The study identifies desirable cultural capital, suggesting future research on exploring the conversion strategies of educated women's capital by considering diverse sociocultural factors that intersect with gender dynamics within both private and public spheres. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Drawing upon Lareau's (2011) work on social class and family life, this study explored social-class differences in children's cognitive outcomes from the United States and Scotland—two nations that share a policy emphasis on parental engagement to reduce the achievement gap. At the same time, the two countries differ in the extent to which such policy orientations are enforced, in the overall levels of socioeconomic inequality, and in the form and extent of welfare support for families and children. We find that parental endeavors are not unequivocally associated with children's outcomes. Findings from our decomposition analyses indicate that some practices of concerted cultivation are positively associated with children's outcomes but that the strength and direction of the relation often depend on children's social background. Moreover, social-class differences in parenting practices are more pronounced and more often statistically significant in the United States than in Scotland.

In a context in which Western children's leisure time has become increasingly adult-managed, Girl Scouts of the United States of America seeks to distinguish itself from other extracurriculars with a "girl-led" program. However, based on participant observation and interviews with Girl Scout volunteers, I find that Girl Scouts is more parent-led than girl-led as concerted cultivation and intensive parenting moves into an organizational setting. Specifically, parents work together to promote the accumulation of cultural and social capital though collective concerted cultivation, which ultimately limits the autonomy of children and reproduces childhood inequality even in an organizational setting. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article examines the strategies of a 'new rich' class in China to transmit advantages to their children through admission into highly ranked overseas universities. In-depth interviews were conducted with parents (n = 16) and students (n = 60) at international high schools that cater to the local population in Shenzhen. The findings demonstrate how 'new rich' parents, who lacked knowledge or experience with international higher education, sought to convert their newly acquired wealth into cultural competencies for their children's overseas university applications. Specifically, the parents were shown to 'outsource' concerted cultivation to international schools and educational consultants as presumed experts. The research implications are discussed regarding (1) the significance of economic resources to 'purchase' concerted cultivation in education markets, (2) how 'outsourcing' concerted cultivation did not spare the parents heightened anxiety about their children's education, and (3) the consequences of 'over-involvement' in students' university application for equity and fairness in international higher education. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article investigates Danish and Norwegian early childhood education and care teachers' expectations of immigrant parents' involvement in kindergarten. The findings are interpreted in terms of the multifaceted interplay between social class relations, culture, migration and hegemonic ideals of intensive parenting and concerted cultivation. By taking the early childhood education and care teachers' standpoint, the article contributes a renewed understanding of previous reports of barriers to immigrant parents' involvement in their children's education. Based on early childhood education and care teachers' accounts, I identify three key tensions: (1) conflicting perceptions of responsibility, (2) conflicting perceptions of children's roles and how to communicate with children and (3) conflicting perceptions of what kindergarten is and what constitutes valuable knowledge. The findings suggest the existence of a distinct Nordic adaptation to intensive parenting, contradicting parts of the dominant understandings of concerted cultivation found in more school-oriented curricular contexts, such as the UK and France, while still maintaining the original key characteristics of concerted cultivation. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This study bridges two literatures by asking how the intensive parenting style called concerted cultivation affects one aspect of parental well-being: parental satisfaction. We employ Profile Analysis via Principal Component Analysis to identify patterns of responses to questions about parenting style among 432 U.S. parents who responded to an online survey. Two profiles are identified, one of which resembles the time use dimension of concerted cultivation. Path models that use weights from the profile analysis show that heavy involvement in child extracurricular activities reduces satisfaction among mothers, but not fathers. Extracurricular activities also increase work-to-family conflict for employed mothers and fathers, which indirectly lowers satisfaction. The findings for a second profile suggest that involvement in children's schools increases mothers' and fathers' satisfaction. This study provides partial confirmation for journalistic and qualitative observations about the costliness of cultivation for advantaged parents. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Class-based parenting logic transcends national culture. This is what we found when applying Laureau's (2011. Unequal childhoods: Class, race, and family life with an update a decade later (2nd ed.). University of California Press) schema of concerted cultivation for middle/higher class families and accomplishment of natural growth for working-class families to young parents in Singapore. Through in-depth interviews with 10 low-SES parents and eight high-SES parents between the ages of 27 and 37, we found Laureau's distinctions evident even in this young Asian country where the middle class has only recently emerged. Interviewing young adults at a stage in life when they were forming their parenting ideals, the intergenerational transmission of logics was apparent. So were constraints of work and earnings in shaping the intergenerational logics. The findings suggest that improving outcomes of low-SES children requires going beyond parenting programmes to tackling structures in society that harden class lines, e.g. education and work systems. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The onset of COVID-19 altered the way parents make decisions on safe activities for their children. Given the impact of this global pandemic, it is important to consider what decisions parents make when faced with the obstacle of keeping a child safe while letting them pursue extracurricular activities, such as sports. To this end, we examine decision-making of parents regarding whether or not they are comfortable allowing their children to participate in sport activities. For this purpose, we conducted two waves of surveys with youth sport parents in spring 2020 and fall 2020. The findings suggest that Black parents and female parents were more comfortable allowing their children to participate and that, in general, parents became more comfortable with local youth sport participation as the pandemic continued. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Social scientists distinguish different cultural approaches to childrearing, related to the social class positions of the families. The middle-class childrearing style is often described as ‘concerted cultivation’, and the ‘accomplishment of natural growth’ defines practices prevalent among working-class and poor families. The repertoire of concerted cultivation that manifests middle-class privilege often involves hectic schedules of adult-organised activities and treats children as projects to be developed. The accomplishment of natural growth is based on a more open-ended schedule of children not strictly controlled by adults. Both concerted cultivation and the accomplishment of natural growth are underresearched in the Lithuanian and Eastern European context, where social stratification of family life experienced substantial changes in the last three decades. Based on 23 biographical interviews with Lithuanian working-class parents, the article analyses their different childrearing styles and parenting values. By examining how they organise and structure their children’s everyday life, I demonstrate that most working-class parents are committed to concerted cultivation based on tight everyday schedules and regimented activities. I argue that Lithuanian parents tend to activate middle-class parenting values by practicing concerted cultivation that functions as their attempt to fit the neoliberal norms of achievement, competitiveness and instrumentalism, and the ideology of intensive or ‘good’ parenting.

This paper primarily seeks to explore how mothering practices in different social classes reflect on the schooling experiences of students. We particularly focus on the desire for mothering towards educational success. We draw on Lareau's (2003) theory on "concerted cultivation" and "natural growth" to understand the possibilities of mothering embodied in various schooling practices. The data for the study were generated via 26 semi-structured, in-depth interviews with mothers from the middle and lower-class. The findings demonstrate that the educational and socio-economic status of mothers significantly modifies their children's schooling practices. However, the results reveal that mothers from lower-class backgrounds develop some principles of academic survival skills that they transmit to their children. Strategies to support their children's schooling that mothers from lower-class backgrounds implemented emerge where they interact with schooling practices conducted by middle-class. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

During the late 1960s, Phil Woosnam and the Atlanta Chiefs developed and implemented a community programming model to enculturate local residents into the cultural practice of soccer. The model was immersed in the racialized urban politics of Atlanta, demographic changes of suburbanization, and emergence of middle-class lifestyles. This study merges local historical evidence on the advent of organized youth soccer with the theories of Robert Putnam and Pierre Bourdieu to investigate the role of bonding social capital in early youth soccer, and examines how the pedagogies of the Atlanta Chiefs were constituted around a particular class-based lifestyle known as cultures of busyness or hyper-parenting. In this process, the Atlanta Chiefs increasingly focused on affluent white communities and institutions and removed prior engagement with predominately black neighborhoods. The removal of programming reflects the urban politics in Atlanta regarding recreational spaces in black neighborhoods. More precisely, organized youth soccer emerged in Atlanta from the embodied history of racial separatism in park and recreational spaces. This had consequences for the history of youth soccer in the United States. Based on the findings, future research could examine urban and suburban youth sport in Atlanta, and closely interrogate local developments of community programming by the NASL. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Concerted cultivation describes how parents reproduce middle‐class status by preparing children for success through the organization of their family's daily lives. Scholarship accounting for the potentially important role that minority religious identity plays in this process is warranted. The current study fills this theoretical and empirical niche by exploring the parenting practices of second‐generation, upper‐middle‐class Muslim Americans. I show how within the context of rising Islamophobia, members of this group defined success for their children using both socioeconomic markers and moral markers, in which Islam and excellent character traits are crucial. With this definition in mind, parents aimed to reproduce both class and religion in the third generation using concerted cultivation strategies. I utilize data from two years of ethnographic fieldwork and 72 in‐depth interviews with second‐generation Arab and South Asian Muslim Americans in suburban Metro‐Detroit. I make contributions to sociology by presenting novel data on a little understood minority group and their institutions and by bringing religion into discussions of second‐generation parenting styles and class reproduction. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Social scientists distinguish different cultural approaches to childrearing, related to the social class positions of the families. The middle-class childrearing style is often described as 'concerted cultivation', and the 'accomplishment of natural growth' defines practices prevalent among working-class and poor families. The repertoire of concerted cultivation that manifests middle-class privilege often involves hectic schedules of adult-organised activities and treats children as projects to be developed. The accomplishment of natural growth is based on a more open-ended schedule of children not strictly controlled by adults. Both concerted cultivation and the accomplishment of natural growth are underresearched in the Lithuanian and Eastern European context, where social stratification of family life experienced substantial changes in the last three decades. Based on 23 biographical interviews with Lithuanian working-class parents, the article analyses their different childrearing styles and parenting values. By examining how they organise and structure their children's everyday life, I demonstrate that most working-class parents are committed to concerted cultivation based on tight everyday schedules and regimented activities. I argue that Lithuanian parents tend to activate middle-class parenting values by practicing concerted cultivation that functions as their attempt to fit the neoliberal norms of achievement, competitiveness and instrumentalism, and the ideology of intensive or 'good' parenting. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article explores how conceptions of responsible parenting are re-negotiated in present-day Singapore. It discusses how policy changes in the pre-school area have affected parental practices and notions of morally worthy parenting. Pre-school reform promoting children's holistic development and less intensive parenting is part of a wider process of education reform, which has been on-going for the last 20 years. Based on ethnographic fieldwork, we examine how parents and pre-school teachers negotiate these changes in the context of making pre-school children ready for formal schooling. Our main finding is that the changes associated with reform have created a situation, in which well-educated middle-class parents are increasingly insecure when it comes to education. Rather, they are caught off-balance and are struggling hard to figure out which modes of parenting will be counted as responsible and will turn out to be rewarding in terms of their children's educational success and wholesome development. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Studies have highlighted the growing phenomenon of 'concerted cultivation' wherein middle-class parents are enrolling their children into multiple paid-for organised leisure activities as a way of cultivating their skills and reproducing class advantage. In unpacking the class disparities in children's organised leisure participation, researchers have largely overlooked the way race and ethnicity inflect middle-class parents' concerted cultivation strategies. Drawing upon a qualitative study with Greater London-based professional middle-class British Indian parents, this article argues that the time-spaces of concerted cultivation also serve as sites for British Indian children's ethnic and racial socialisation (ERS). Two axes are identified along which racial parenting strategies intersect with concerted cultivation practices in these families: 'cultural (re)production through organised leisure' and '(anti)racism and leisure'. By analysing these processes, we draw out the implications of this interplay between class and race for understanding middle-class parenting and educational strategies in minority ethnic contexts. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Low-income parents have long been demonised in both political discourses and mainstream media, portrayed as lacking in parenting skills not just financial resources. Using the Millennium Cohort Study (MCS) this article examines to what extent there are differences in the parenting of low-income mothers by examining parenting behaviours of low-, middle- and high-income mothers. The findings show that where there are negative differences in the parenting of low-income mothers these are often part of a broader income gradient that extends all the way up the distribution, rather than unique to low-income mothers. Furthermore, there are some positive differences in parenting among low-income mothers compared to middle-income mothers. These findings have important implications: low-income parents are not an unusual or deviant group parenting differently to everyone else. The findings suggest more attention ought to be given to parenting differences higher up the income distribution. In focusing on low-income parents only, existing evidence exaggerates differences and wrongly identifies low-income parents as problematic. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

African-American middle-class mothers have historically been structurally, culturally, and economically excluded from the practices related to hegemonic frameworks of mothering and parenting that have been described and critiqued by family and work life scholars. Collectively these frameworks make three theoretical assumptions: 1) mothers are principally responsible for raising children, 2) working outside of the home conflicts with being a mother and 3) middle-class mothers share beliefs about how to best raise children. Based on interviews with sixty African-American middle-class mothers, I highlight how the experience of mothering is influenced by racially situated identities, ideologies and practices. My findings challenge the view of motherhood as an exclusive endeavor and highlight that working is intrinsically linked to what it means to be a mother in the African-American community. These beliefs about mothering are also accompanied by psychological and tangible supports including encouragement from family to work and the availability of childcare from relatives. Finally, African-American middle-class mothers have additional race-based parenting concerns that relate to developing their children’s racial comfort, racial identity, and acumen in interracial and intra-racial social interactions. Overall, these findings suggest that African-American middle-class mothers recognize what I call an “integrated mothering” ideology. This ideology assumes that 1) childcare is a mother-centered, but community-supported activity, 2) working is a duty of motherhood and 3) considerations of race and racism should be consistently present in determining how to best raise children.

Denmark has a tradition of kindergarten pedagogy focused on children's play, sociality and individual interests. Political emphasis on global competition, however, has led to reforms in early childhood education and care (ECEC) since 2004. Based on ethnographic fieldwork at three kindergartens, we analyse how the ECEC-reforms have affected the priorities of parents and pedagogues regarding school readiness. To understand how this is negotiated, we draw upon Lareau's distinction between childrearing as 'concerted cultivation' or as 'the accomplishment of natural growth' (Lareau, A. 2003. Unequal Childhoods. Class, Race and Family Life. London: University of California Press). We show that parents and staff consider the social as the most important thing for kindergarten children to learn and as something that the adults must cultivate – often in a disciplinary manner. Meanwhile, parents and pedagogues state that academic competences are not important to cultivate because an interest in academics will naturally grow. Adults just have to support academic activities through play when the children choose to engage in them. However, academic competences are actively cultivated in practice. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article draws from American research on "concerted cultivation" to compare the parenting logics of 41 upper-middle-class parents in Toronto, Canada. We consider not only how parents structure their children's after-school time (what parents do) but also how the broader ecology of schooling informs their parenting logics (how they rationalize their actions). We find that parenting practices mirror American research. Upper-middle-class families enroll their children in multiple lessons and cultivate their children's skills. However, unlike their American counterparts, Canadian parenting logics are not explicitly stratification oriented, guided by a desire to access elite universities. Canada's relatively flat stratification system of higher education, where prestige differences between universities are minimal, prompts the emergence of a more expressive parenting ethos. Our findings draw attention to the macrofoundations of social behavior by articulating the connection between parenting logics and educational status hierarchies. We conclude by considering the implications of cross-national differences to theories of parenting and social stratification. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The paper explores the relation between involvement of school students in extracurricular activities and their self-concept in mathematics and humanities as well as physical self-concept. The study is based on a survey involving over 5,000 ninth-graders from schools in St. Petersburg, Leningrad Oblast and Pskov. Descriptive statistics and regression analysis methods reveal that involvement in extracurricular activities of any kind is positively related with academic performance, most strongly with educational achievements in foreign languages. We found no gender differences in the relationship between extracurricular activities and academic performance or self-concept; even sports have the same effects on the self-concept of boys and girls. Both structured and unstructured extracurricular activities are positively related with academic achievement, though the relation for unstructured activities is weaker. Engagement in two or three types structured extracurricular activities and in unstructured activities at the same time appears to be the most useful option in terms of academic achievement. Extracurricular activities also boost students’ self-concept in relevant academic domains. The strength of relationship between extracurricular activities and academic performance depends on the size of the city, being more conspicuous in small cities and towns than in megalopolises.

Class-related parenting cultures and ideologies have been of considerable interest to academics over the last two decades. Much of the research thus far has focused on exploring Annette Lareau's conceptualisations of 'natural growth' and 'concerted cultivation' and the implications for outcomes in relation to education. The focus of the present article is organised activities, which are a central but as yet relatively under-researched feature of middle-class parenting. The findings are based upon 73 semi-structured interviews with parents and children from 48 middle-class families living in and around a small city in northern England. The article reveals that initiating and facilitating children's organised activities is considered a central aspect of 'good' parenting in middle-class social networks. It is shown how this is a consequence of several developments within society over the past three decades or so, including the rising levels of maternal employment, the growing competitiveness of the labour market and the increasing concerns related to children's health and safety. It is argued that these developments have heightened middle-class parents' predisposition to not only be involved with and invest in their children's leisure biographies, but to do so in a more deliberate, rigorous and rational manner. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

It has become increasingly apparent, internationally, that childhood is a crucial life-stage in the formation of predispositions towards sports participation and that parents are increasingly investing in the sporting capital of their children via a process of 'concerted cultivation'. It is surprising, therefore, that parents' involvement in the development of their children's sporting interests has received so little attention in Norway, given that sport is a significant pastime for Norwegians and participation has been steadily increasing - among youngsters, in particular - over the past several decades. Through a qualitative case study of a combined primary and secondary school in a small Norwegian city, this study sought to add to recent explorations of the role of parents in children's sporting involvement in Norway. As expected, it was evident that sport becomes taken for granted and internalised very early on in Norwegian children's lives. Less expected was the recognition that children's nascent sporting interests were often generated by sports clubs via early years schooling and, therefore, that parents played only one (albeit very important) part in the formation of their youngsters' early sporting habits. Thus, parents, sports clubs and early years schooling appeared to form something akin to a 'sporting trinity' in youngsters' nascent sporting careers. These findings may have implications for policy-makers looking towards Norway for a 'recipe' for sports participation. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article analyses the association between social class and parent--initiated contact with teachers. Hypotheses are derived from Lareau's theory on 'concerted cultivation' and status maintenance theory on rational educational decision-making. Data from a national survey on French students traversing secondary school are used to study social class differentials in parents' involvement in Grade 9 when students are about to proceed to an important transition from lower to upper secondary school. Linear probability models reveal that the likelihood that parents initiate meetings with teachers decreases as students' performance increases and that concerted cultivation beliefs have positive effects. Through inclusion of interaction terms into the models, clear evidence is provided that middle-class parents are more likely to seek a meeting than working-class parents when their children face difficulties. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Different opportunity structures and different perceptions of risk within the global economy shape the ways parents of similar class and ethnic backgrounds strive to prepare their children for the future [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

• This study analyzes the role social networks have in intergenerational transmission of cultural capital from parents to children. • Parents with ties to higher status occupations have children that are more exposed to legitimate culture, also when other influences are controlled for Elite ties are dominant over working class ties in influencing children's cultural participation. • The study finds evidence of Bourdieu's multiplier effect. When parents have high amounts of social capital, this multiplies the effect of parents cultural capital on children's cultural exposure. • When parents have little cultural capital, but strong social capital, this social capital may compensate for this lacking investment and allow children more cultural exposure than would otherwise be the case. • Network ties can be analyzed hierarchically, but important differences are explained by horizontal differences in social network composition of parents, indicating that social ties are highly relational. The study combines Bourdieusian and Linean approaches to social capital theory. How does families' social networks influence the transmission of cultural capital to their children? Earlier research on this process has mainly focused on within-family mechanisms, and the role of social capital as conceptualized by Pierre Bourdieu has here received little attention. This article explores this question through a study of parents' social ties and parents' and children's cultural, leisurely, and athletic practices, using Geometric Data Analysis and regression analysis of data on children (N = 4754) and their parents in the city of Bergen, Norway. The analysis finds that parents with social ties to higher status occupations have children that are more often exposed to traditional legitimate forms of culture, also when other familial resources are controlled for. When ties composition is heterogeneous, composed of both working class and elite ties, elite ties shape cultural consumption. The study finds evidence of Bourdieu's multiplier hypothesis, that returns from other capitals is multiplied by social capital, also that high volumes of social capital can compensate somewhat for having no cultural capital. Within-family characteristics are key to understanding the intergenerational transmission of cultural capital, but significant support for this process may be found in parents' social networks. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article examines the experiences of mothers with disabilities who engage in concerted cultivation, a parenting style commonly practiced in middle-class communities. The author explores these mothers' experiences in the "fields" of their children's schools and organized extracurricular activities. Findings illuminate how ruptures in these mothers' middle - class habitus occur as they confront accessibility barriers and social exclusion while engaging in concerted cultivation. These mothers are found to simultaneously deploy class-based resources to overcome these barriers. This analysis lays bare the ways in which the concerted cultivation habitus presumes a nondisabled identity.

This article investigates the connection between musical mothering and morality, where involvement in musical practices provides middle-class women opportunities to validate their mothering. Previous studies of intensive mothering and concerted cultivation indicate struggles with competitiveness, perfectionism and anxiety. However, there is a scarcity of research that looks closely at the diversity of women's experiences of mothering, particularly through the lens of music as a social practice. This intergenerational sociological study of Australian women applies Bourdieusian and feminist theory to expand music education research by analysing the intersection of music, motherhood, gender, class and generation. This article explores excerpts from the musical life stories of three mother–daughter relationships and the ways in which they produce musical children and maintain musical selves. The findings highlight the diversity within middle-class motherhood and the differing ways in which the field of mothering, family habitus and music are negotiated to construct musical and mothering subjectivities. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

To gain further insight into the beliefs and perceptions of parents to inform instruction in early childhood (EC) music settings, the purpose of this multiple case study was to determine what goals motivate parents to enrol themselves and their children in EC music classes and what they perceive to be the benefits of that participation. This study was guided by the following questions: what goals, if any, did parents have for themselves or their child while participating in an EC music class?; what do parents perceive as the benefits of EC music participation for themselves or their child? Participants were parents or caregivers of children between the ages of 1 month and 3 years who attended one of two EC music classes at a community music school affiliated with a large, research university in the Midwestern United States. A desire to engage in an activity that aligned with participants' personal music experiences and knowledge, wanting to lay an early musical foundation for children and opportunities for socialization and connection with community were the primary goals discussed by participants that motivated them to enrol in music classes. Participants discussed several benefits of attending music classes including enjoyment, parent and child learning and establishing connections within and between different families in the class. Implications for community music educators and facilitators and researchers are discussed. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

I inquired with parents and primary caregivers about why they supported their children's participation in music activities in an out-of-school space and what they expected from such participation. To interrogate Lareau's concept of concerted cultivation, I was interested in exploring the extent to which there might be differences in parental or primary caregiver expectations by race or socio-economic status. In the Boston Children's Chorus (BCC), I found a community youth music programme where household income, race and ethnicity were reasonably diversified. Structured interviews with 132 parents and primary caregivers suggested that practices and discourse most worth analysis in regard to parenting and community music operate not at the level of race, ethnicity or social class, as Lareau suggests, but instead they operate at a local network level. The ways in which parent or caregiver trust in the community youth music programme developed through these local networks, and the ways in which the community youth music programme may have expanded social networks for families emerged as themes for further examination. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Highlights • Educational resources are most important mediator of association between social origin and parental involvement in school. • Other than claimed in the literature, parents' own school experience has no mediating effects. • Concerted cultivation, status maintenance motives and family situation contribute to social class differentials in parental involvement. • Important insights in processes underlying social inequality in parental involvement in school can be obtained from an inter-disciplinary approach. Abstract This article studies why middle-class parents are more involved in school than working-class parents. From theoretical approaches developed in different disciplines hypotheses on the mediating effects of five mechanisms are derived: cultural capital or educational resources, concerted cultivation, economic and time resources, parents' own school experience and status maintenance motives. Using data from a French national survey on students in 9th grade, I analyse to what extent these mechanisms mediate social class differentials in (1) attendance at parents' evenings, (2) PTA-membership and (3) being parent representative. I find that educational resources mediate the largest parts of the social class differences. Concerted cultivation, status maintenance, parents' working status, number of siblings and single-parenthood have mediating effects, too. In contrast to a claim made in the literature, parents' own school experience has no effects on their involvement. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Abstract Annette Lareau coined the term "concerted cultivation" to describe the cultural logic of a distinctive middle-class parenting pattern. I explore whether concerted cultivation as practiced in Japan exhibits unique patterns in response to distinctive characteristics of the nation's education system (i.e., standardized compulsory education with high-stakes educational selection in secondary education). Using nationally representative longitudinal data on third-to sixth-grade children (N = 30187) through growth curve models, I show that college educated parents shift their focus of parenting practices (measured by four aspects) from providing diverse experiences to narrower academic preparation as the time for lower secondary education approaches. Using multivariate analyses with an additional wave of data in seventh grade, I further demonstrate that "unequal childhoods,"––the accumulated disparities in adult-led structured experiences––lead to unequal success in the transition to junior high school education, a critical period of preparation before the mass educational selection (i.e., high school admissions). [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Research suggests that compared with working-class parents, middle-class parents more commonly enrol their children in organised activities with the aim of increasing their prospects of future success in education and working life. Organised activities are seen as an important contribution to the reproduction of social class. Drawing on a Bourdieusian understanding of social class, this study contributes by exploring class-based reasoning about extracurricular activities among Swedish parents. Sweden provides a markedly different institutional and social context than is usually found in the literature. In the present study, interviews with 37 working-class and middle-class parents are qualitatively analysed. Findings show similarities in parents’ reasoning, indicating that Swedish parenting culture and childrearing ideals partly cross class boundaries. They also suggest, however, that the middle-class parents typically regarded extracurricular activities as more important, and enrolled their children in more activities, than the working-class parents. The contradiction between similarities emanating from dominant national cultural understandings of parenting and childrearing and dissimilarities based on class-culture socialisation is explored in this article. One tentative conclusion is that working-class parents’ lower participation levels are not only explained by cultural and financial resources but also by limited control over working hours. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In this chapter, we use feminist and intersectional frameworks to explore how marginalized mothers discuss maternal support. In-depth interviews with an economically diverse group of 21 mothers of color suggest that most affluent, married Black mothers framed support as child-centric and engaged in concerted cultivation (Lareau, 2011) practices. Lower income, single Black mothers engaged in a strategy we call "nurtured growth" - they used low-cost school, church, and community-based resources to promote their children's development. In contrast to these child-centric strategies of support, three mothers used mother-centric supports and practiced self-care. The families of these three mothers, however, often criticized their parenting efforts as "parenting like a White person." The authors conclude by exploring the implications of our study for feminist outreach efforts on behalf of marginalized mothers. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The family is recognised by academics as a key site for the (re)production of class inequalities in several contexts, with parenting being subject to increasing scrutiny and research. Much of the research hitherto has been primarily deductive in nature - academics have tended to test and explore existing theories and the significance of particular family processes and parenting variables. This article presents a grounded theory of class-specific patterns of parenting in relation to children’s education and leisure, which was produced on the basis of 90 interviews with a case study of families from a small city in the north-west of England. Two main social classes formed the case study - a poor-working-class and a middle-class divided into three fractions. The parents from the poor-working-class and middle-class families had distinct mentalities and practices that marked two patterns of parenting, conceptualised as ‘essential assistance’ and ‘concerted cultivation’ (the latter originally coined by Annette Lareau in 2003) respectively. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Parental involvement has often shared a positive correlation with student academic achievement. To better understand parental involvement dynamics among middle-class Latino families, in-depth parent interviews were conducted among 21 such parents. Results from this study which add to the educational literature include high levels of academic socialization between parents and their children as early as elementary school, and perceived barriers to involvement similar to those often found among poor and working-class Latino families. Other findings which support the literature are the ways in which home-based and school-based involvement practices change over time, and the implementation of childrearing strategies previously linked to middle-class families. Parents in this study were primarily concerned with the emotional well-being of their children, and with affording their children autonomy over extracurricular activities and future career choices. Implications for future research are further presented. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

U.S. discourse on low-income mothers frames them as social problems and this presumption of deficiency is reflected in studies of parenting logics and practices. Scholars often underestimate the sophistication of low-income mothers’ parenting logic and do not recognize that these mothers work as hard as and use (appropriately) different parenting logics than those of middle-class mothers. I investigate parenting logics of African American and White low-income mothers. These women demonstrate a logic that follows many of the same premises of middle-class parenting strategies but additionally seeks to address obstacles that prevent low-income youth from reaching goals: addiction, drug dealing, pregnancy, and “the street.” This logic leads to strategies that may appear to be inexpensive adaptations of middle-class practices, however, analysis of mothers’ narratives reveals they are not derivative but are intended to prepare children to avoid perils of their social context. This study illuminates a previously misunderstood version of intensive mothering. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]