Annette Lareau (2003) coined the well-known concepts of ‘concerted cultivation’ and ‘accomplishment of natural growth’ to capture parenting as a classed and classing practice drawing on data from the US. Concerted cultivation refers to middle-class parents’ purposeful and constant investments in learning opportunities. According to Lareau middle-class children develop a natural ‘sense of entitlement’; they feel at home and agentic in school and other formal settings, whereas working-class children, whose parents strive to accomplish natural growth, develop a ‘sense of constraint’- feelings of powerlessness in negotiations with adults in formal roles. Children’s different senses of self and value translate to privilege and disadvantage during youth and early adulthood for middle-class and working-class children respectively (Lareau 2015)

Lareau’s work, and particularly the notion of concerted cultivation, has spurred research and scholarly discussion in the US (Bennett, Lutz and Jayaram 2012; Weininger, Lareau and Conley 2015)0, and beyond, for instance in the UK (Irwin and Elley 2011; Perrier 2013; Vincent and Maxwell 2016), the Nordic countries (Aarseth 2015; Bach 2014; Berg and Peltola 2015; Stefansen and Aarseth 2011) Spain (Collet-Sabé and Tort 2015) and Israel(Golden and Erdreich 2014; Lavee and Benjamin 2015). This further research both suggests that concerted cultivation is an apt description of middle-class parenting across cultural contexts, and also highlights the local ‘translations' of concerted cultivation practices across contexts.  

This symposium will present and discuss research on concerted cultivation from different cultural contexts with the aim of highlighting commonalities and differences in parents’ strategies to produce viable future adults (Quinn 2005). A key aim is to stimulate critical discussion about the concept of concerted cultivation as a tool for analysing links between everyday family practices and class reproduction.

Bach, Dil. 2014. "Parenting among wealthy Danish families: a concerted civilising process." Ethnography and Education 9(2):224-37. Bennett, Pamela R., Amy C. Lutz, and Lakshmi Jayaram. 2012. "Beyond the Schoolyard." Sociology of Education 85(2):131-57. Berg, Päivi, and Marja Peltola. 2015. "Raising Decent Citizens—On Respectability, Parenthood and Drawing Boundaries." NORA - Nordic Journal of Feminist and Gender Research 23(1):36-51. Golden, Deborah, and Lauren Erdreich. 2014. "Mothering and the work of educational care – an integrative approach." British Journal of Sociology of Education 35(2):263-77. Irwin, Sarah, and Sharon Elley. 2011. "Concerted cultivation? Parenting values, education and class diversity." Sociology 45(3):480-95. Lareau, Annette. 2003. "Unequal childhoods: Race, class and family life." Berkeley: University of CaliforniaPress. —. 2015. "Cultural Knowledge and Social Inequality." American Sociological Review 80(1):1-27. Lavee, Einat, and Orly Benjamin. 2015. "Working‐class mothers’ school involvement: a class‐specific maternal ideal?" Sociological Review 63(3):608-25. Perrier, Maud. 2013. "Middle-class Mothers’ Moralities and ‘Concerted Cultivation’: Class Others, Ambivalence and Excess." Sociology 47(4):655-70. Stefansen, K., and H. Aarseth. 2011. "Enriching intimacy: the role of the emotional in the 'resourcing' of middle-class children." British Journal of Sociology of Education 32(3):389-405. Vincent, Carol, and Claire Maxwell. 2016. "Parenting priorities and pressures: furthering understanding of ‘concerted cultivation’." Discourse: Studies in the Cultural Politics of Education 37(2):269-81. Concerted Cultivation in a Cross -Cultural Perspective