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Five stereotypes about poor families and education

 
 
 
ZiprHead

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The Trouble with the ‘Culture of Poverty’ and Other Stereotypes about People in Poverty by Paul C. Gorski - Gifted Article

A long history of psycho-social research details the human tendency to imagine our own social and cultural groups as diverse while we imagine “the other,” people belonging to a social or cultural group with which we are less familiar, as being, for all intents and purposes, all the same (e.g., Meiser & Hewstone, 2004).

Cognitively speaking, our stereotyping has been shown to be a natural and necessary human response in the face of limited context-specific knowledge. A woman’s stereotype about men might prove to be an over-generalization in most instances but her intuition eventually could protect her from sexual assault. However, the content of stereotypes is only partially organic, only partially based upon a measured consideration of the totality of our experiences. Stereotypes grow, as well, from how we’re socialized (Shier, Jones, & Graham, 2010). They are the result of what we are taught to think about poor people, for instance, even if we are poor, through celebrations of “meritocracy” or by watching a parent lock the car doors when driving through certain parts of town. They grow, as well, from a desire to find self-meaning by distinguishing between social and cultural in groups with which we do and do not identify (Homsey, 2008). That’s the heady science of it….
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So, what if I told you that some stereotypes commonly associated with poor people, such as a propensity for alcohol abuse, are truer of wealthy people than they are of poor people (Galea et al, 2007)? It’s true. But how often do we, in the education world, apply this stereotype to wealthy people? How often do we hear, “No wonder so many rich kids don’t do well at college; their parents are all alcoholics…”?
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Judgments…can be self-reinforcing as ambiguous evidence is taken not only to be consistent with preexisting beliefs, but to confirm them. Logically, the latter is the case only when the evidence both fits with the belief and does not fit the competing ones. But people rarely probe the latter possibility as carefully as they should. (p. 651)

So, whereas a more well-to-do parent or guardian might be pardoned for missing structured opportunities for family involvement—she’s traveling for work—a low-income parent or guardian’s lack of this sort of involvement might be interpreted as additional evidence of disinterest in her or his child’s schooling (Pattereson, Hale, & Stessman, 2007).

In our efforts to become equity literate educators, one of our first tasks is to understand our own socializations and the ways in which we have bought into the stereotypes that hinder our abilities to connect with low-income families, or any families, in the most authentic, open way. It’s not easy. It takes an awful lot of humility to say we harbor stereotypes. The fact that many of us have been trained as teachers and administrators with frameworks like the “culture of poverty” that encourage stereotyping does not help. One important step in this process, though, is to nudge ourselves to rethink some of the most common stereotypes that exist about people in poverty and the extent to which we have been duped into believing them.
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A lot more information in tha article.
 
Not one mention of the heredity of behavior and cognition. M'kah.
 
"No wonder so many rich kids don’t do well at college; their parents are all alcoholics…”
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So the kids become rich alcoholics themselves, while they're still in College. No urgency about food shelter or clothing or sports cars breeds complacency and laziness, yet they succeed because they have hereditary membership in the rich people's kids club, and will be named to some phony baloney overpaying job, just like Ivanka, Eric, Don Jr, HUNTER BIDEN!!!! and everyone else born under that umbrella.
Meanwhile the "poor kids" (the ones not so poor as to have suffered severe malnutrition) have all the motivation in the world. At that point, Ollie's distraction becomes TOTALLY irrelevant, and those "poor people" often become exceptional in their fields.

The really bad thing is that even an advanced degree might not land them a job if the COO's nephew applies.
 
Elixir said:
"No wonder so many rich kids don’t do well at college; their parents are all alcoholics…”
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So the kids become rich alcoholics themselves, while they're still in College. No urgency about food shelter or clothing or sports cars breeds complacency and laziness, yet they succeed because they have hereditary membership in the rich people's kids club, and will be named to some phony baloney overpaying job, just like Ivanka, Eric, Don Jr, HUNTER BIDEN!!!! and everyone else born under that umbrella.
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Nobody ever talks about how pampered and coddled such children are, children of upper-middle-class and upper-class parents.

Look at Tucker Carlson, for instance. He was sent to expensive private schools, then to a liberal-arts college where he majored in history. Yet because of his family's wealth, he didn't end up unemployable.
 
Oleg said:
Gospel said:
Oleg said:
lpetrich said:
Yet because of his family's wealth, he didn't end up unemployable.
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Eh? Are you employed? Were your parents wealthy?
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A crudely drawn penis would have been a more mature response.
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But why would he otherwise be unemployable? Doesn’t make sense.
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Wealth = opportunity. I wouldn't say he'd be unemployable. But if he was raised in Owsley county West Virginia with parents suffering from drug and alcohol abuse his ass wouldn't be anywhere near Fox much less have his own show.
 
Something that I found out some years ago: Not Everyone Has the Tools to Become Rich: How Our Childhood Shapes Our Ability to Succeed | HuffPost Impact - "For those Americans who have been materially successful, it may seem like everyone else simply not to follow the same path, but the reality is that most Americans don't know how to find that path."

Noting this research: Social Class Culture Cycles: How Three Gateway Contexts Shape Selves and Fuel Inequality - Annual Review of Psychology, 65(1):611
Some early 1990's research comparing two groups of baby monkeys.
  1. Those whose mothers could easily find food, mothers who could easily spend a lot of time with those babies.
  2. Those whose mothers spent so much time finding food that they had little time to spend on those babies and often neglected them.
The results were tragic. The second group of babies grew up with noticeable despair and anxiety issues. Their brains literally looked different. Their brain cells couldn't regulate emotions like their healthier peers'. Once they became adults, the second group of monkeys was shy, clingy, weak and socially awkward. They had trouble making friends, and they never became leaders. They were forever scarred—and their potential forever stunted—by their distracted mothers.
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Cruel? Maybe. But rhesus monkeys are smaller and faster-growing than we are, making it easier to do precisely-controlled experiments on them.  Harry Harlow was known for similar sorts of experiments, with similar sorts of results, so these results are not unprecedented.

Back to the HuffPost article.
In a way, the same experiment is taking place in American society today. Some mothers have easy access to the basic necessities of life —food, shelter, clothing, transportation, healthcare—but many do not. Millions of mothers live paycheck to paycheck, working multiple jobs and long hours, leaving them too busy and too exhausted to give their children the same attention as their wealthier peers.

The difference is so drastic that children raised in poverty have brain activity that looks like it's been damaged by a stroke. Study after study show that these early scars last long into adulthood, affecting everything from job prospects to marital happiness.
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From that Annual Review of Psychology article, as summarized in the HuffPost article,
First, higher-income parents encourage their children to follow their dreams. They encourage critical thinking and support expression of likes, dislikes, feelings, and thoughts, and then give them opportunities to pursue those interests. Lower-income parents tend to emphasize toughness and pride in the face of adversity. They emphasize rules that must not be broken, and then let the children figure out the rest on their own.
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Schooling follows the same patterns.
From there, the children go to school, where higher-income children are given opportunities to work independently, think creatively and ask questions. Their parents take an active role, challenging practices that they disagree with. Their teachers treat them like adults and reward students who speak up and take initiative.

Lower-income children usually find themselves in a more regimented environment. They walk through metal detectors and aren't trusted with basic classroom equipment. Their parents want to be involved, but they don't assert themselves. Their teachers demand respect and reward students who show deference.
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When they grow up and enter the workforce, people with higher-income parents tend to have learned leadership skills, while people with lower-income parents tend to only do what they are told and try to stay out of trouble.

What's interesting here is that the higher-income approach is like a common stereotype of touchy-feely liberalism, while the lower-income approach is more like the conservative ideal that one must have no initiative outside of obeying authority figures.

The damage of poverty is visible as early as kindergarten - Vox
A big part of the American Dream is being able to climb the ladder and land higher than your parents. But that climb starts when people are just small children, according to new research, and getting off on the wrong foot has lifelong consequences.

In a new article in the spring issue of the Princeton University journal The Future of Children (and highlighted by the Brookings social mobility blog), researchers show that poverty is directly correlated to kindergarten performance. Children who live in poverty have far lower performance than their richer peers across a variety of measures, and those who live in near poverty in turn have dramatically worse performance than middle-class peers. The poorest kids, for example, are less than one-third as likely as middle-class kids to recognize letters.

Research has shown that an early head start creates better and better educational outcomes down the road, as the effects build on each other and make future learning easier.
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Rice University: School Literacy and Culture: The Thirty Million Word Gap
On average, children from families on welfare were provided half as much experience as children from working class families, and less than a third of the experience given to children from high-income families. In other words, children from families on welfare heard about 616 words per hour, while those from working class families heard around 1,251 words per hour, and those from professional families heard roughly 2,153 words per hour. Thus, children from better financial circumstances had far more language exposure to draw from.

In addition to looking at the number of words exchanged, the researchers also looked at what was being said within these conversations. What they found was that higher-income families provided their children with far more words of praise compared to children from low-income families. Children's vocabulary differs greatly across income groups. Conversely, children from low-income families were found to endure far more instances of negative reinforcement compared to their peers from higher-income families. Children from families with professional backgrounds experienced a ratio of six encouragements for every discouragement. For children from working-class families this ratio was two encouragements to one discouragement. Finally, children from families on welfare received on average two discouragements for every encouragement.
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Here again, the higher earners fit the stereotype of touchy-feely-liberal parents who pamper and coddle their children, while the lower earners are closer to the conservative ideal of punitive parenting.
 
The racial parenting divide: What Adrian Peterson reveals about black vs. white child-rearing - Salon.com - "Black parenting is often too authoritative. White parenting is often too permissive. Both need to change."

The author is a US black woman.
In college, I once found myself on the D.C. metro with one of my favorite professors. As we were riding, a young white child began to climb on the seats and hang from the bars of the train. His mother never moved to restrain him. But I began to see the very familiar, strained looks of disdain and dismay on the countenances of the mostly black passengers. They exchanged eye contact with one another, dispositions tight with annoyance at the audacity of this white child, but mostly at the refusal of his mother to act as a disciplinarian. I, too, was appalled. I thought, if that were my child, I would snatch him down and tell him to sit his little behind in a seat immediately. My professor took the opportunity to teach: "Do you see how this child feels the prerogative to roam freely in this train, unhindered by rules or regulations or propriety?"

"Yes," I nodded. "What kinds of messages do you think are being communicated to him right now about how he should move through the world?"

And I began to understand, quite starkly, in that moment, the freedom that white children have to see the world as a place that they can explore, a place in which they can sit, or stand, or climb at will. The world, they are learning, is theirs for the taking.

Then I thought about what it means to parent a black child, any black child, in similar circumstances. I think of the swiftness with which a black mother would have ushered her child into a seat, with firm looks and not a little a scolding, the implied if unspoken threat of either a grounding or a whupping, if her request were not immediately met with compliance. So much is wrapped up in that moment: a desire to demonstrate that ones black child is well-behaved, non-threatening, well-trained. Disciplined. I think of the centuries of imminent fear that have shaped and contoured African-American working-class cultures of discipline, the sternness of our mothers and grandmothers looks, the firmness of the belts and switches applied to our hind parts, the rhythmic, loving, painful scoldings accompanying spankings as if the messages could be imprinted on our bodies with a sure and swift and repetitive show of force.
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The same class divide here also.

She later states:
Many a black person has seen a white child yelling at his or her parents, while the parents calmly respond, gently scold, ignore, attempt to soothe, or failing all else, look embarrassed.

I can never recount one time, ever seeing a black child yell at his or her mother in public. Never. It is almost unfathomable.
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Libby Anne of Love, Joy, Feminism: Positive Parenting - Love, Joy, Feminism
Positive parenting focuses on raising children to be capable, independent, compassionate adults rather than on instilling obedience and compliance. Positive parenting sees children as individuals with needs of their own and focuses on cooperation and mutual respect between the parent and child. Positive parenting rejects corporal punishment and tends to minimize punishment in general, seeking instead to encourage good behavior and foster the child's self-determination and understanding of natural consequences.

I adopted positive parenting when my first child, a daughter, was about a year old, and it completely transformed my relationship with her. No longer a contest of wills, parenting has become a cooperative enterprise filled with mutual respect and surprises along the way. For everything I've written on positive parenting, click here. - positive parenting Archives - Love, Joy, Feminism

I should note that my experiences with and thoughts on positive parenting fall against the backdrop of having been raised on the strict authoritarian discipline methods of Michael and Debi Pearl, as enshrined in their child rearing manual, To Train Up A Child. To read more about my thoughts on the Pearls and their methods, click here. - "To Train Up A Child" - Love, Joy, Feminism
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More from Libby Anne: Obedience, Empathy, and the Laundry Hamper | Libby Anne
Every parent wants their children to learn certain values and exhibit certain behaviors. Its just that just what those values and behaviors are varies. The pew survey found that consistently conservative parents tend to see teaching religious faith and obedience as most important while consistently liberal parents instead value teaching empathy , curiosity , tolerance , and creativity .
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Noting
Teaching the Children: Sharp Ideological Differences, Some Common Ground | Pew Research Center

Which supports my assessment of higher-income parenting as stereotypically liberal and lower-income parenting as stereotypically conservative.
 
lpetrich said:
Here again, the higher earners fit the stereotype of touchy-feely-liberal parents who pamper and coddle their children, while the lower earners are closer to the conservative ideal of punitive parenting.
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Is it parenting style that matters? Or heredity? Adopted children take after their biological parents, after all.
 
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