Annette Lareau's ethnographic study of how middle and working-class families raise their children provides insights into how social class shapes the development of children and youth. Through this assignment, you will think about (1) how childrearing philosophies are shaped by economic and social resources, (2) how your own life was shaped by social class, and (3) how you, as a professional will work to enhance child and youth development through collaborative efforts across different social class contexts. This paper should be a typed, double-spaced, 4-5 page paper. Please use Times New Roman 12 point font and 1" margins. Writing style (orderliness of presentation, clarity, and smoothness of expression) and grammar will be taken into consideration when evaluating your paper. In addition, accuracy and depth of conceptual understanding will be evaluated. Finally, your paper should be written in both a narrative and an expository voice. In other words, you should show that you understand the concepts and that you can apply them to your own personal experiences and to an imagined professional.

Issues you must address:

• Describe the processes of concerted cultivation and accomplishment of natural growth, providing brief examples from the book to support your descriptions.

• Explain which process best explains your personal experiences growing up, providing brief examples to support your explanation. Share insights that you gained about those who are growing up in contexts that are different from the one in which you developed.

• Elucidate how different logics of childrearing (concerted cultivation and accomplishment of natural growth) result in different approaches to interacting with dominant institutions such as the school system.

• Imagine that you are a teacher or other type of social service provider in a rural California school system in which both working-class and upper-middle class students attend. Given your understanding of how class influences parenting, language development, and, even, philosophies on how to interact with professionals, how would you collaborate with parents of both groups to facilitate child or youth development?