Unequal Childhoods: Class, Race, and Family Life by Lareau Annette (a review)

Unequal Childhoods: Class, Race, and Family Life by Lareau Annette. Berkeley: University of California Press. 2003. 343 pp. $21.95.

Since the mid-1960s, the question of how people get and stay ahead has been a central focus of sociological research. While the early status attainment research answered this question by constructing parsimonious models of the relation-ships between occupational position and educational attainment, later research moved one step further by adding to the model a set of social psychological variables aimed at specifying how family background affects educational and occupational attainment. Since the 1980s, influenced by Pierre Boudieu, sociologists have begun to incorporate questions of culture much more thoroughly into their examinations of how people get and stay ahead. Scholars working in this tradition argue that cultural resources play as critical a role as material resources in the reproduction of social inequalities. It is to this tradition that Annette Lareau makes a remarkable contribution with her most recent book, Unequal Childhoods: Class, Race, and Family Life.