Social capital practices for the accomplishment of natural-growth: theoretical insights from low-income mothers’ support of remote-learning during COVID

Abstract

Based on interviews with low-income, Israeli mothers about their experience supporting children’s remote-learning during COVID, this study offers theoretical insights about the accomplishment of natural-growth. The accomplishment of natural-growth is a theoretical concept coined by Lareau to describe the logics of low-income childrearing. Though concerted cultivation, which describes the logics of middle-class childrearing has garnered theoretical elaboration, little research has elaborated on practices for accomplishment of natural-growth. This study elaborates on these practices as they were revealed in mothers’ narratives of adjustment to difficulties placed by remote-learning. The women described practices by which they sought to bind themselves and their children into a social network and to bridge out and utilize resources within and beyond this network. The analysis reveals that these practices work through social as opposed to cultural capital, revealing a childrearing logic based in a different type of capital than that of concerted cultivation.

Keywords:

• Natural-growth
• mothering
• class
• low-income
• social capital

The accomplishment of natural-growth is one of a pair of theoretical concepts that describe the disparate logics of childrearing characteristic of American working- and middle-class parents and their role in the reproduction of class (dis)advantage (Lareau 2003). Though researchers keen to understand how the middle class reproduces advantage, have applied the concept of concerted cultivation across contexts and pointed to specific interpretations and practices and means for cultivating cultural capital (see Golden et al. 2021), comparatively little is known about practices for the accomplishment of natural-growth. This empirical bias naturalizes low-income parenting practices, neglecting efforts of their ‘accomplishment,’ and creates a weakness in the theoretical conceptualization of parenting and class. While the idea of ‘accomplishment’ was meant to signify the labor and agency of low-income parenting, the empirical bias towards studies of concerted cultivation has left the concept of natural-growth under-developed. The present article utilizes data from interviews with low-income mothers from a class comparative study of mothers’ experiences with children’s remote-learning during COVID; the article presents in-depth analysis of low-income mothers’ experiences in an attempt to help remedy the aforementioned analytical bias. What practices for the accomplishment of natural-growth can we identify within the narratives of difficulties placed by remote-learning? How are these practices involved in the reproduction of class (dis)advantage?

The crisis situation brought about by the pandemic has been considered a ‘breaching experiment’ within which we can explore how (dis)advantage is reproduced and negotiated within the constellation of state institutions, family practices, personal responsibility, and material and structural inequalities (Twamley, Iqbal, and Faircloth 2023). Remote-learning altered the nature of schooling, necessitating all parents revisit practices for support of children’s learning, yet existing inequalities shaped the direction parental practices took (Calarco, Coleman, and Halpern-Manners 2021). The low-income mothers’ in this study recounted being cut off from social networks, organizational resources, and other sources of support for educating, raising, and providing for their children, during COVID. We analyze these accounts of coping with disruptions for what they reveal of everyday parenting practices in use and maintained prior to the pandemic. The article describes practices by which the women sought to bind themselves and their children into a social network on the one hand, and to bridge out and utilize resources within and beyond this social network. The analysis reveals that these practices work through social as opposed to cultural capital, revealing a childrearing logic based in a different type of capital than that of concerted cultivation.

Literature review

What we (barely) know about the accomplishment of natural-growth

Low-income parents have not been entirely ignored in existing research from within the theoretical framework of classed logics of childrearing, even if the concept of the accomplishment of natural-growth has been neglected. Studies that question the class divide in parenting practices have found that concerted cultivation is indeed a practice highly correlated with higher socio-economic status and race, yet parents from other ethnic and class backgrounds do adopt and implement concerted cultivation practice, though not necessarily reaping the same benefits of educational or social advantage (Cheadle and Amato 2011; Crosnoe et al. 2016; Dumais, Kessinger, and Ghosh 2012; Roksa and Potter 2011). Other studies have pointed to the importance of understanding how structural constraints shape the cultural logics of low-income childrearing, though still from the assumption of the advantage of the logic of concerted cultivation. Such studies show how enrichments are reframed as a means for keeping children protected and safe and for increasing academic opportunities, relying upon and limited by the resources that are available in the community and the school (Bennett, Lutz, and Jayaram 2012; Chin and Phillips 2004). Further studies which query implications for children when parents do espouse the logic of the accomplishment of natural-growth, describe distrust and withdraw from school-readiness activities and tracking decisions, blaming parents for collaborating with schooling processes that lead to class reproduction (Barg 2019; Podesta 2014; Wilson and Worsley 2021). In these studies, parents who withdraw from school activities in favor of community services are described as alienated from school processes. Yet these practices for seeking out social resources and utilizing them to improve advantage despite the cultural logic of schooling, suggest a need to explore other types of capital employed in the accomplishment of natural-growth. This article elaborates on the idea of situated constraints to consider situated opportunities for tapping into the social capital of social networks and embedded resources in practices for the accomplishment of natural-growth.

Social capital: an analytical lens

Both Lareau’s original work on concerted cultivation and accomplishment of natural-growth and subsequent studies on parenting and schooling have adopted a Bourdiean lens to elaborate how the middle class negotiates advantage in school through the deployment of cultural capital (e.g. Calarco 2018; Golden, Erdreich, and Roberman 2018; Rollock et al. 2014). This focus on cultural capital however, neglects consideration of other types of capital, such as social capital, which Bourdieu (1986) theorized as ensconced in habitus and crucial in the negotiation of social fields, such as education. In contrast to this oversight in studies of education, community work studies of low-income and disadvantaged communities often utilize the lens of social capital to understand both how power of dominant classes is perpetuated at the expense of low-income groups and how these same groups use social capital as a source of productive agency (Galindo, Sanders, and Abel 2017; Hunter 2016; Warren, Thompson, and Saegert 2001). I suggest that bringing social capital back into the analysis of parenting, education, and the negotiation of class (dis)advantage offers a range of analytical tools for understanding how natural-growth is accomplished.

Social capital refers to the social support grounded in social networks and the material or knowledge resources belonging to other members of that network (embedded resources) that an individual can access and employ in daily life (Forrest and Kearns 2001; Horvat, Weininger, and Lareau 2003; Hunter 2016). Belonging to a social network is not only a matter of acquaintance, but of compliance to social consensus around norms and sanctions of behavior specific to a particular network. Social networks are bound internally through reciprocity - the ability to be in mutually beneficial relationships with others based on trust and obligation. Within these networks, resources flow through information ­channels – venues for exchange of knowledge that are the basis for action (Coleman 1988; Hunter 2016).

Social capital is also closely tied to class, because social networks are deeply ensconced in structural inequalities. The distinction between bonding and bridging capital is especially pertinent to understanding how low-income populations negotiate social life, since the two types of capital are distributed unequally across social classes. Bonding capital is the strength of relations and trust between people in a social network that is the condition for action; bridging capital are the cross-over ties between people in different social networks that facilitate access to information or resources and possibly collective action (Larsen et al. 2004; Putnam 1995). Low-income populations often depend on resource-brokers- organizations with ties to other institutions and resources, for access to bridging capital (Small 2006). The lens of social capital requires us to discern the types of resources available as well as the labor involved in maintaining bonding ties, accessing resources, and deploying embedded resources (Offer 2012; Offer, Sambol, and Benjamin 2010; Woodward 2014). Using the lens of social capital, this article will attempt to identify the resources and labor that low-income mothers employ in practices for accomplishing natural-growth and will consider how low-income logics of parenting incorporate agentic practices for negotiating advantage in education.

Low-income mothers in Israel

Returning to the cultural capital lens, a rich feminist literature has described the motherwork of low-income income women as fundamentally different from the middle-class model. Edin and Kefalas (2011) coined the term ‘being there’ to describe a moral philosophy of good mothering that includes keeping children safe, fed and housed, and engaged in education. Opposing such mothering to the middle-class model of intensive mothering, Randles (2021) termed the distinct carework of low-income mothers ‘inventive mothering’ that is ‘innovatively resourceful, harm-reducing, and stigma-deflecting’ (36), requiring extensive physical, cognitive, and emotional labor. These descriptions reflect the logic of the accomplishment of natural-growth, but focus only marginally on practices regarding children’s education. The existing research on low-income mothers’ efforts in supporting their children’s schooling highlights the misfit between their practices and the expectations of school, creating a situation in which classed ways of caring do not serve as capital in the field of school (Gillies 2006; O’Brien 2008). In the worst case, this disparity becomes the source of blame for irresponsible or unfit mothering (Blum 2015; Vincent, Ball, and Braun 2010).

Israeli low-income mothers’ efforts to support their children’s education are similar, yet also provide insights about how mothers’ practices for supporting their children’s education can be viewed as pragmatic agency. Israeli low-income mothers actively shape practices of child-rearing and particularly their support of schooling in negotiation with models of market citizenship – both of being a good worker and of demanding social services support needed to be both a mother and a participant in the labor market (Lavee 2021; Lavee and Offer 2012). Women welfare recipients perceive entitlement to public support as ‘hybrid entitlement’ – disciplined both by ideas of market citizenship alongside ideas of universal social welfare rights that are the legacy of Israel’s social-democratic past (Lavee 2021). Thus even in the face of structural constraints, low-income families adopt an affective stance of ‘agentic hopelessness’ – a social awareness of structural constraints, negative emotions, and a drive for action (Kaplan et al. 2022). Furthermore, low-income parents tap into a therapeutic or psychological discourse as a pragmatic tool for making sense of everyday life and preserving a sense of dignity in the face of real structural inequalities, particularly in the educational marketplace, in which cognitive (dys)functions become a sort of currency for navigating educational trajectories (Mizrahi 2012). The current study focuses on low-income Jewish mothers in Israel and aims to provide insights, that while grounded in a specific context, can guide further research and understanding across contexts.

Methodology

The current article sprang out of a larger comparative study on parental involvement in remote-learning across social classes, which utilized the COVID pandemic as a natural laboratory. The study focused on understanding parents’ experiences of the move to remote-learning and their view of their changing parental role. This article utilizes data from interviews with low-income mothers (see table) in order to bring their practices to the fore.

During the pandemic, the Israeli educational system closed and moved to remote-learning three times nation-wide. Schools reopened in a hybrid model that combined remote-learning with limited hours of attendance in pods. Though efforts were made to compensate for households lacking internet infrastructure and hardware, participation gaps were evident across socio-economic groups (Ilan 2020).

Data was gathered in a qualitative phenomenological, interview-based study (Creswell 2013). Twenty-five parents (fourteen middle-class and eleven low-income) were recruited from a suburban civil municipality and a major city. Low-income mothers were recruited through municipal Welfare Departments. All parents had at least one child in full-time remote-learning during the pandemic (fourth grade or higher). Parents completed a demographic survey and a statement of consent. Interviews last one-and-half to two hours, covering but not limited to: reaction and response to school demands during remote-learning, difficulties and success in involvement in remote-learning, parents’ digital skills and competencies, parents’ role in children’s digital activity, coordination of children’s educational needs, and balance of employment obligations and remote-learning.

Interviews were subject to a context-attentive ‘engaged listening’ (Forsey 2010), as well as a rigorous and multi-level analysis based on the conventional constant comparative method (Creswell 2013). Ten interviews were read by the PI and research assistant to identify initial categories. Categories were then used for comparative analysis across interviews. Comparative analysis revealed unique parenting practices of the low-income mothers. They told stories of reaching out for help, providing help to others, and unabashedly searching for and taking advantage of extensive educational and social services. Remote-learning created a crises in which low-income mothers re-negotiated the educational field, illuminating the underlying logic of their engagement with their children’s education.

Table

Name	Education	Marital status	Number of children
Olga	MA	Married	2
Diana	BA	Single	1
Dalia	High school	Married	6
Sofi	High school	Single	2
Anya	BA	Single	3
Sasha	High school	Single	1
Ilana	High school	Divorcee	4
Sharona	High school	Divorcee	3
Tsofit	High school	Married	3
Angela	BA	Single	1
Tzuria	High school	Married	6

Findings

These low-income mothers’ narratives about remote-learning reveal a logic of childrearing based in practices for building and maintaining social networks and for utilizing embedded resources. The accomplishment of natural-growth relies on social practices for strengthening and sustaining social capital – both of the bonding and bridging type. The mothers take pains to cultivate sociability, oftentimes espousing for themselves a position of care in the community that firmly embeds them and their children in a social network. From within this network, they glean the support and services that they see as crucial to attending to their children’s scholastic and mental needs.

Binding a social network

Encouraging sociability

These mothers actively worked to nurture their children’s participation in social ties online, around the neighborhood, and at school. They viewed each arena as differently vital to the creation and maintenance of social connection. Their labor is a basic practice in the accomplishment of natural-growth - setting and maintaining extensive social connection. This section will show how this practice works from the logic of social capital, valuing social connection as fundamental to creating social capital of the bonding type (Putnam 1995), which the mothers see a crucial foundation of their children’s lives.

Ilana spoke about remote-learning as having divergent repercussions for her children. Remote-learning allowed her daughter to focus on studies, yet cut her off from her friends. Her son, a twelfth-grader with autism, took no part in remote-learning and immersed himself in online gaming, making social connections.

she made a bubble for herself of studies and family…so on the one hand she really made progress in an area she had felt frustration and she blossomed, and on the other hand, on the interpersonal plane she made herself, and I do mean made herself, invisible. Because I always say that relationships take two and if your friends cut you off it’s not because they don’t care, but that she created some sort of opposition.

I can say that my son plays online games all day, so much all day that he has two friendships with kids from the US, but he’s been contact with them since 10th grade…Yeah, it’s very much a friendship connection.

Throughout the interview Ilana speaks often of her concern and efforts to keep her children in school and on track, though she declares that she does not ‘push’ them. Yet during remote-learning, she experiences disruption of her children’s sociability. She laments this disruption both for her daughter’s welfare (‘she’s made herself invisible’) and for its undoing of Ilana’s own continuing efforts (‘I always say…’) to encourage social connection. For her son, who she feels cannot participate in Zoom because of his autism, she laments that he is cut off from his special education school where he was socially integrated. Rather than being upset about his constant gaming instead of learning, she appreciates it as a space in which he connects socially. For Ilana, social interactions and the connections formed are the basis of a social network, which she views as an individual resource for her children and not necessarily as a source of collective action as social capital is often seen in the literature on disadvantaged populations (Larsen et al. 2004).

While some of the other mothers were less enamored of online gaming, they all appreciated it as a venue for connection and allowed their children’s participation. Anya for instance, criticized online gaming as not true friendship, while valuing it as a space for developing skills for making connection. Mothers however, were careful to maintain balance, so that their children would reap benefits of all kinds of sociability. Sofi too who recognized that ‘the whole world is in front of screens, including me’, bemoaned how remote-learning had shifted the careful balance she had set up prior to its appearance in her family’s life:

Sometimes I have to drag them away because they don’t want to go outside …we used to go out a lot, wander around like three, four times a week…I wish they would really find a friend in reality and not through a screen. I think that’s really important that you have a friend you can lean on, share with…don’t know how you can live without that.

She clearly differentiates between the types of connections made on- and offline and embraces online connections as crucial for being part of the world today. Yet she also makes efforts to ensure her children will have the opportunity to develop the unique type of sociability that comes from face-to-face connection, a social capital rooted in trust and norms of support (Coleman 1988).

In the larger study, both low-income and middle-class mothers were concerned with social aspects of their children’s lives, but for the latter these concerns were associated with personal mental health and weighed against scholastic concerns. For instance, though middle-class children had participated in youth movement activities prior to remote-learning and the mothers themselves valued the importance of these activities, none of them encouraged their children to participate in these activities remotely, favoring putting efforts into remote-learning. Several of the lower-income mothers not only encouraged remote participation in youth movements, but valued them over remote-learning as creating ‘fun’. As Angela describes:

So they also did a lot of activities on Zoom, like cooking, making a cake, all sorts of stuff…They did it really, really well; it was professional…Because I think it released the kids from stress, because suddenly there was something fun to do. Okay it was over Zoom but they saw all their friends and talked, ‘how did you do that’ and talked and all sorts of stuff. So it was like a kind of class but fun. So it wasn’t studies, but like them going to the Scouts and having fun, and it was that.

Group fun is an experience that creates conditions for the creation and maintenance of social ties (Fine and Corte 2017). In other words, allowing for, appreciating, and prioritizing fun is a practical means for creating social networks and bonding capital. The logic behind encouraging and working on creating sociability aims to cultivate as sense of not-aloneness as opposed to the logic of concerted cultivation which aims to cultivate a sense of entitlement (Calarco 2018). Natural-growth then is predicated on fun, and as we will see below, these mothers work to infuse fun into the whole social networks of their children’s daily lives.

A position of care

Within these social connections amongst children that the mothers were careful to create and maintain, the mothers also positioned themselves as carers of the community and their children as ensconced in relationships of care.

Anya, who is herself a recipient of municipal services, is a community liaison in the municipal Welfare Department. During the pandemic, she was tasked with outreach and assistance to other needy families. She spoke outright about this dual position, ‘On the one hand I was afraid and needed support, but on the other hand I supported and helped others. And that gave me the ability to get over the fear, it’s doing something. That helped’. Tsofit who struggled to support her daughter emotionally during remote-learning, recalled also how she used her own experience to support others:

Like after my own conversation with the teacher I felt like she had come and helped me. And when my sister felt really stressed with her kids - so she didn’t know what to do and she said, ‘the house is like a powder keg.’ So I told her to go to turn to teacher for guidance, because it’s a really difficult time – difficult for the kids and for her. So she did, she turned to the teacher.

Tsofit and Anya take care of others in their social networks, and their care-taking becomes the source of their own security. Tsofit relates how she creates an information channel (Coleman 1988), that allows for action for children and solidifies social bonds with kin. Though often low-income women tap into professional social support that does not require reciprocity due to fear of acquiring social debt (Offer 2012), in this case, perhaps because children are at stake, they turn the skills for negotiation of bridging capital into a bonding capital with other low-income women.

Two other women, Sofi and Angela, experienced structural constraints on their caring positions due to remote-learning. Both of were active class mothers, volunteering for this role that other parents disdained in order to take care that the class be a fun social space. ‘Fun for the kids - that is really important’, Sofi said. As herself the child of immigrants, she criticized her own parents for not having understood the importance of making school fun for their child. She complained that children in her daughter’s class did not speak Hebrew, implying that as children of immigrants and foreign workers, their parents too did not understand the importance of parental participation in classroom bonding (Erdreich and Golden 2017). Angela, a non-Jewish migrant without civil status, jauntily describes her position as class mom as:

Not Mom but friend for everyone, even the annoying boys [laughs]…I get along with all the kids and I don’t act like a mom. I go along with them, ‘cause I don’t believe in being strict and saying no, don’t do that. That’s not me. I go with the flow…The class is really special so I have fun with them.

‘Fun’ and playfulness effuse the way Angela describes her position. She and Sofi infuse fun into their children’s social network and situate themselves as the purveyors of communal bonds. Taking up caring positions is a way of creating a social network with strong ties (Forrest and Kearns 2001), which serves as the environment in which natural growth can be accomplished. In other words, natural growth does not simply occur in the context of living in close proximity to kin (Lareau 2003). Furthermore, it is here shaped on the periphery of an educational institution, where mothers take on more affective and collective roles as opposed to scholastic and individualistic roles. Perhaps we should see these mothers not as failing to reap benefits of concerted cultivation in their involvement with school (Cheadle and Amato 2011; Crosnoe et al. 2016; Dumais, Kessinger, and Ghosh 2012), but of working from a different logic and accomplishing something else.

In these stories, the mothers described the structures of their lives and their practices for creating and maintaining social networks, which sometimes were disrupted by remote-learning. As such, the stories reveal that the creation of a social network rich in the potential for social capital of the bonding type is a prerequisite for accomplishing natural-growth. Practices of this logic include encouraging connections across on- and offline spaces, taking up caring positions, and doing fun. These practices foster bonding capital which is both a source of individual security for themselves and their children and as we will see, oftentimes a prerequisite for tapping into bridging capital.

Utilizing embedded resources

Woven throughout these women’s narratives were a ready acceptance of support and services and a constant search for further social and educational resources for their children. Their active pursuit and acquisition of these embedded resources (Hunter 2016) is a major practice for accomplishing natural-growth. This practice is also situated in the Israeli context, tapping into a universal social welfare logic that is a historical legacy of Israel’s social-democratic past. At the same time, it adopts the individualistic logic of parental responsibility for children’s mental health and educational success.

Bridging through a civil discourse of economic justice

The resources these mothers use to raise their children are situated into organizational networks; their parenting practices include learning to access and deploy these resources and support each other in doing so. Sasha’s narrative is based in agentic hopelessness (Kaplan et al. 2022), where her agency is proficiency in tapping into embedded resources. Her narrative is colored by casual references to incredible hardship alongside assistance from the social insurance institute, the municipality, NGOs, schools, and her landlord and neighbors. Throughout, she describes her proficiency at acquiring these services – filling out forms, participating in screening committees, translating her socio-economic situation and her son’s disabilities into resources that can ease their lives. She recalls that these proficiencies were not always easy to embrace, that she had to learn how to perform them (Offer, Sambol, and Benjamin 2010) and to overcome shame, ‘It took me a long time to get disability for my son. Like when he was three, I could have taken him for [psychological] diagnosis, gotten disability. I put it off til he was five…my friend Yulia said, “Go do it”’. She explained further that she was convinced that it was the way, ‘to get help…sorry, spend money out of your pocket for medication, why? It’s help. That’s why he gets disability – help with medication, help with afterschool activities’. Proudly she reports how she has passed on knowledge about pimping the system (Woodward 2014) to other mothers in similar situations.

Sasha works from an awareness of her situation and a sense of entitlement to public aid. As a single- low-income mother of a son with learning disabilities, she is eligible for the Big Brother program and firmly pressures the social worker from the Welfare Department to set it up. During remote-learning, she insists that the Big Brother, who receives a stipend for participation stay with her son a full shift, justifying, ‘It cost the State a lot of money to send a Big Brother into our home…I don’t pay, the State does. But a year I had to chase after [the social worker to get a Big Brother], how come?’ Sasha expresses a feeling of responsible consumerism, but also an assumption that these services are coming to her, they are part of a state contract to support her, her son, and the student. She works from a perspective on economic justice that she feels the State has undertaken and to which she holds it responsible.

The State though is not the only body involved in this economic justice. Sasha also relates with no qualms how she approached a neighbor involved with an NGO that provides financial assistance with bills and dried edibles. Now she receives a monthly package of dried goods and COVID tests, the latter of which she says, ‘I test myself sometimes…you wake up with a sore throat, automatically you say, I’m going to Granny [the elderly woman she cares for]. She’s an old woman, unvaccinated, on the edge. I don’t want to take responsibility [for her getting sick]’. She does take responsibility and expresses concern and care for this elderly woman. Since Granny is now in need of 24-h care, Sasha is out of a job and waiting to be assigned a new client. However, she is not willing to work small shifts amongst multiple clients and is waiting for a single client nearby her home so she can return after school to care for her son.

Sasha positions herself as worker, carer for the elderly, carer of other women, and mother. Her mothering efforts are tied into these roles even as she seeks out resources to support herself in them. The connection she draws implies a sort of inexplicit economic justice, whereby she cares for others and the economic support from the state allows her to support her family and provide this support for others. Sasha’s narrative intertwines work life, childrearing, and caring for the community, and is formulated from within an Israeli civil discourse which demands the provision of her social welfare to allow her to fulfill all these roles (Lavee 2021).

This discourse, predicated in the Zionist roots of social democracy in Israel, resonates in Angela’s narrative, even as she cannot partake in it because of her lack of civil status. Angela is a South Asian immigrant who grew up in Europe, where she met the Israeli father of her daughter. She is estranged from him and raises her daughter without his support. She is extremely proud of how she manages to supersede the material and symbolic difficulties of being low-income, migrant, and non-status. ‘I try to give her the most normal life, but our situation is far from normal, really far. But if you came to my house and saw her life you wouldn’t know that at all’. To do so, she utilizes assistance from a variety of organizations: an organization of wealthy immigrants from her European country of origin that gives her a subsidy and assistance as needed including a computer for remote-learning, another organization that provides food, a clinic run by a university professor that supports legal rights, a religious organization that provides toys and treats for her daughter, everything except state services of which she says, ‘Politics is horrible for me because I’m not a Jew, but the people have embraced me’. Angela clearly works hard to create a semblance of normalcy for her daughter that pushes her civic problems backstage. She is not naïve and realizes that the predication of Jewishness limits the embedded resources she can access through the civil discourse of economic justice, but also that it pervades other arenas into which she bridges to acquire resources.

The accomplishment of natural growth requires these women to create practices for accessing embedded resources. Their practices take into account the structure of the field – both the structural inequalities they face and the discourses available to them to bridge into other social networks. They expand out to find resources available to them from both government and third sector institutions. So rather than only being limited by the resources available in their communities (Bennett, Lutz, and Jayaram 2012; Chin and Phillips 2004), we can understand their utilization of these resources as an agentic practice for gaining greater advantage for their children.

Pragmatic individualism – fostering mental health and school success

In the face of economic hardship, women took pains to ensure their children’s mental health and school success. Whereas the middle-class mothers took on such responsibilities themselves - helping children participate in remote-learning and complete homework and watching over children’s mental health, the lower-income mothers found ways to share these responsibilities with professionals. While from a cultural capital perspective, it would seem low-income mothers did not hold the knowledge and skills to perform the roles expected of them by schooling (Barg 2019; Podesta 2014; Wilson and Worsley 2021), from a social capital perspective, these women recognize the contribution that professionals can provide as brokers of resources (Small 2006), and so create bridges into the fields of schooling and welfare for their children. They espoused a pragmatic approach; they worked from an understanding of the importance of personal mental health and individual achievement and utilized a variety of means to this end.

In Sasha’s story above, she speaks openly about having her son categorized as disabled in order to attain services. Angela too was forthcoming about receiving psychological therapy for herself from an aid organization, and Anya appreciatively described how parenting counselling was beneficial for both her and her son. Though these mothers could have been experienced mother-blame (Blum 2015), they did not. For them, the therapeutic/psychological discourse is a tool, allowing them participate as individuals in a pragmatic and immediate way that betters their situation providing them with a sense of dignity (Mizrahi 2012).

Diana and Anya sought out similar therapeutic resources specifically for their children, particularly through the Big Sibling program and were concerned when the pandemic disrupted participation. Both had experience with the program prior to the pandemic and held high stock in student participants’ abilities to provide their children with much-needed socio-emotional support. When Anya’s daughter refused to participate remotely, Anya blamed the student for giving up,

the student just went to her coordinator and said it’s not working out, she’s not cooperating …she said, ‘I’m not a babysitter…I have a program of therapy, I need to do a therapeutic plan, an educational plan that we are not doing.’ That was new for me. Maybe with Zoom things are different. I don’t know.

Anya does not explicitly recognize the mental health role that these student volunteers are meant to serve. She is surprised to hear that the student came with a therapeutic or educational plan and is not even certain of which one. Even if she does not see these volunteers as professional mental health workers, she is certain that the time spent with these student-volunteers can be beneficial for her children’s mental health. Though she and other mothers do not speak about mental health per se, they do adopt what Illouz (2007) calls a logic of the psychologization of life, in which individual mental health is key to happiness and success. Though Silva (2013) describes how low-income young adults work from this neo-liberal logic and create practices for the self-management of emotions, these women break the logic and create practices of shared responsibility for their children’s mental health. From within their logic, tapping into embedded resources is a pragmatic way of increasing chances for mental health, the responsibility for which lies not solely with themselves as mothers.

Ilana, who was in financial debt and in the process of divorcing a violent, manipulative husband, framed her entire narrative around her efforts to take care of her children’s mental health and educational success despite interference from her husband and the effects of divorce. Ilana saw her son falling behind at school and blamed his difficulties on the hardships at home. She turned to the school seeking assistance to get him back on track academically and ‘to save the boy’ from going astray.

His father ruined my son in every way emotionally. So with all that extra load, I realized something’s not going to turn out okay. My senses were sharp enough, so I turned to the school counselor and told her, look, he doesn’t know I’m turning to you and this has to be discrete, but we have to save the boy because he is getting lost.

She recruits the school counsellor, whom she appreciatingly calls a ‘blessing’. The counsellor has a teacher ‘coach’ him in completing assignments and speaks to all his teachers. Assistance from these different functionaries continues as her son experiences ups-and-downs. Ilana is constantly in contact with the school, making sure that professional services are provided to help her son rise above the compounded difficulties at home and of remote-learning. Though it may seem trivial that mothers like Ilana work with school professionals to meet their children’s needs, what is unique is their reliance on this assistance. Ilana’s practice as a mother is not to provide this support herself, especially as she is dealing with debt and divorce, but to seek out the resources that provide it.

Mothers consumed these services actively and intentionally, innovatively using resources to reduce harm (Randles 2021) and foster success. Dalia’s story expresses the experience of frustration when the resources of school that she feels her children have a right to become unavailable. Dalia is a veteran resident of a neighborhood undergoing gentrification. The local school her children attend was taken over by an anthroposophical movement popular with the middle class. During remote-learning, teachers in anthroposophical schools around the country refrained from teaching over Zoom for educational ideological reasons. Dalia relates this from her perspective, expressing anger at the teacher, ‘[My youngest two] didn’t learn anything because their teacher refused outright to open Zoom and that angered me because you [the teacher] get normal pay, nothing changed for you’. Though she relates that the teacher did not ‘believe’ in zoom, she does not attribute this to educational ideology, nor is she concerned to. Of the other parents she says, ‘It’s an anthroposophical school so not everyone believes in Zoom and there are parents who were fine with it. I’m fine with it when people take an interest in my children’. Indeed, several of the middle-class mothers interviewed had chosen anthroposophical or other alternative schools and related how in the absence of school, they replicated the educational approach at home – encouraging crafts, interaction with siblings around games, self-exploration of hobbies and interests. This emphasis on self-expression is at the heart of middle-class habitus (Stefansen and Aarseth 2011). Dalia though has different concerns; she is concerned that her children get their due course of learning support which includes not just instruction but a caring interest in her children’s well-being. When the teacher is remiss, Dalia fears a loss for her children’s school success. Her role in fostering success is not to provide school support, but to acquire it according to her due.

These women’s stories were rife with descriptions of practices for utilizing embedded resources. Even in the face of structural economic difficulties, they used bridging capital (Hunter 2016) to unabashedly take advantage of services and resources that could support their children’s good mental health and school success. Bridging through a civil discourse of economic justice and espousing pragmatic individualism are practices for the accomplishment of natural-growth, which seek to use social capital to create security and growth from within the material difficulties and psycho-social repercussions of economic hardship.

Conclusion

The concepts of accomplishment of natural-growth and concerted cultivation were conceptualized to highlight how parenting practices are involved in the reproduction of class (dis)advantage in education (Lareau 2003). The lens of cultural capital has been useful in explaining how middle-class parenting practices fit the logic of school. Studies have also shown how other groups attempt to work through the logic of cultural capital, yet with different results (Cheadle and Amato 2011; Crosnoe et al. 2016; Dumais, Kessinger, and Ghosh 2012; Roksa and Potter 2011). The lens of cultural capital has been less successful in capturing how low-income parents actively struggle for advantage by playing into the logic of school in a different way. This article has aimed to help ameliorate the empirical bias towards cultural capital in two ways – by identifying actual practices for the accomplishment of natural-growth and by utilizing a social capital lens (Galindo, Sanders, and Abel 2017; Hunter 2016; Warren, Thompson, and Saegert 2001) to suggest theoretical insights into low-income negotiation of advantaged.

For the low-income mothers in this study, practices for the accomplishment of natural-growth include making sure one’s child is embedded in a community, enjoys services, gets to school, and benefits from available support. Mothers take an active role in identifying what they can provide directly themselves and what they choose to have others provide, whether to allow them to work or to sustain mental health and scholastic support. Their childrearing aims to create a safe and caring environment through practices based in social capital –bonding capital to create and maintain social connection and bridging capital to access resources that can ameliorate structural constraints of economic hardship (Larsen et al. 2004; Putnam 1995). The practices of low-income mothers for supporting their children’s education are both in line with the cultural logic of schools regarding the nurturing of individuation of children but off kilter regarding individual parental responsibility.

This discrepancy between the logic of school and the logic of home is usually cited as the source of distrust and disengagement and thus the root of the reproduction of disadvantage (Calarco 2018; Lareau 2003), yet the practices of low-income mothers described here beg an alternative explanation. They work both in and against the cultural logic of schooling, reflecting both an understanding of the workings of school and of the resources not available at home that are needed to afford their children the best possible advantage at school. So while concerted cultivation certainly works by parents employing cultural capital to create home support for schooling, the accomplishment of natural-growth works by parents agentically employing social capital to secure partnerships and resources as the basis for children’s education and well-being. Perhaps the bias towards a middle-class culture of individualism has made its way into our analytical inquiry, coloring interpretation of reliance on professionals and the support of kin and community as non-agentic (Barg 2019; Podesta 2014; Wilson and Worsley 2021). We need the lens of social capital to understand such reliance as active labor – as practices that navigate within and across social networks and work through attempts to create, maintain, and utilize bonding and bridging capital. In this view, mothers’ practices for binding a social network and utilizing embedded resources are means for the accomplishment of natural-growth.

Certainly the Israeli case affords a purview into classed practices in a specific context. The practices for the accomplishment of natural-growth rely on a civil discourse of economic justice (Lavee 2021), a pragmatic view of mental health (Mizrahi 2012), and a consumerist relationship with schools. They reflect a legacy of social democracy interwoven with global middle-class ideals of liberal individualism. These women tapped into a discourse of universal social welfare that legitimizes utilization of social services as a right for working citizens and for mothers. Thus, the Israeli practices for accomplishing natural-growth reflect less of a neo-liberal culture of emotional self-management typical of the American context (Silva 2013). In both cases however, accomplishment of natural-growth includes an element of preservation of mental health and dignity rooted in an individualist, therapeutic discourse. The variation in practices of low-income mothers in other cultural contexts should be considered, with an eye for how global and local discourses shape practices for accessing social capital as a means for ensuring individual needs and dignity.

The question remains what are the implications of such a classed logic of childrearing in the reproduction of class (dis)advantage? While this question certainly invites further research, we can point to two theoretical insights. First, by fleshing out the active practices of the accomplishment of natural-growth, we see how low-income parents can find means and ways of preparing their children for social mobility. By utilizing social capital, they provide benefits which may equip their children with the social, mental, and scholastic fortitude to play the educational field. We could then reinterpret studies that point to the reframement of enrichments by low-income parents (Bennett, Lutz, and Jayaram 2012; Chin and Phillips 2004) not as opposed to the logic of cultural capital, but as an alternative or complementary means to securing advantage. Still, these practices do not challenge the logic of the educational field; they do not challenge the nature of the cultural capital that reflects the logics of deportment and behavior for getting ahead in school and the workplace (Lareau 2003). They may be an alternative venue for successfully cultivating individuation, but they do not challenge social class structure. In other words, as Bourdieu (1986) originally intended in the theory of social praxis, social capital should be considered for how it can be used to negotiate social fields. Yet we need to consider how different types of capital are linked to and implicated in social structure. This leads to the second theoretical point. The difference in type of capital at the base of each logic itself reproduces the venues of advantage. Social capital is rooted in close personal knowledge, local, nontransferable in permanent form, and dependent on one’s continued embedment in a network for continued access. Cultural capital spans both locales and fields. So even as practices of social capital may procure advantage, mobility across new educational fields and locales requires embodied practices of cultural capital. Identifying practices for the accomplishment of natural-growth is certainly important for working with and through them, yet is not enough to truly combat the reproduction of social advantage.

Acknowledgements

Much appreciation to Michal Millerman and Lior Sharir for research assistance in this study.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).

Funding

This work was supported by the MOFET Institute, Tel Aviv, Israel. Research was conducted while I held a position at Beit Berl College.