‘Essential assistance’ versus ‘concerted cultivation’: theorising class-based patterns of parenting in Britain

Abstract

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.

Keywords:

• Concerted cultivation
• essential assistance
• grounded theory
• parenting
• social class

Acknowledgements

I would like to thank Professor Ken Roberts for his insightful comments on an earlier draft of this article, as well as the two anonymous reviewers who provided helpful comments on the original submission.

Notes

1. Poor-working-class is used to denote the families at the bottom of the social class spectrum in this study. Others might use precariat, socially excluded, lower-class or even under-class as a label for this group, as they mostly survived on benefits, resided in distinct localities and experienced multiple forms of deprivation. As other academics have observed, they are a section of our society who have struggled to ‘reinvent’ themselves in the labour marking following the disappearance of traditional working-class jobs from the 1970s (Roberts 2001; Walkerdine, Lucey, and Melody 2001).