Sunday, July 23, 2006
parenting as concerted cultivation
[This is the passage about parenting dynamics from today’s other posting that is more focused on socioeconomic factors.]
Annette Laueau’s ethnographic Unequal Childhoods: class, race, and family life indicates in detail what parents of successful children do. She finds that successful children are far more communicatively engaged by their parents, for the sake of facilitating broad engagement of their children’s lives, than are the parents of unsuccessful children. This might seem unsurprising; but what’s interesting is what the parents of successful children do: They’re enmeshed in a syndrome, so to speak, that educes cognitive development and independence, whereas the parents of unsuccessful children tend to believe that letting their children have “freedom”—that “natural growth” takes care of itself—is good parenting.
a critical point in the fundamental war
Fighting poverty through community-based human development
Had not Hizbollah attacked Israel, the news might be occupied with G8 follow-ups related to WTO resolutions that can complement the UN Millennium Goals’ and World Bank’s war against poverty in developing regions (and the Gates Foundation’s material solidarity with the WHO’s war against disease).
Meanwhile, “developed” nations have their ongoing war against poverty—well, it’s not exactly a war, is it?—in terms of underfunded public health services, social services, and education. (A “great” success of terrorism is to keep public attention distracted from valid struggles.)
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