In her influential 2003 book, Unequal childhood, the sociologist Annette Lareau uses a gardening metaphor and distinguishes two types of parenting styles, “concerted cultivation” and “accomplishment of natural growth”. Concerted cultivation is the typical parenting style of upper and middle class families. It involves a strong involvement by parents to foster their kid’s talents and boost their cognitive and non-cognitive skills. It consists of parents participating in the organization of their child’s afterschool activities, providing a structured life for their child and consciously promoting language abilities that are useful to succeed in school and other social institutions. Following Lareau’s metaphor, kids are like plants in a greenhouse and upper class parents provide the correct light exposition, the proper amount of water and the most adequate soil fertilizers so that the plants can flourish at the top of their possibilities and possibly even more.
Conversely, the natural growth accomplishment is a parenting style that is typically found in working class families. It implies less involvement (not by choice) by parents in the organization of the afterschool children’s activity and, in general, in the structuring of the children’s daily life. The plant-kid is left to grow as it can, with less direct control by parents. It might flourish or not, depending on the combination of natural endowments and on more or less favourable circumstances in the surrounding environment.
Lareau’s distinction is very popular in social stratification studies. Less studied is the fatigue and feeling of meaningless that many upper-class parents might experience in their full-time concerted cultivation of their children. Many highly educated parents who practice concerted cultivation also live the contradiction of having liberal views and being in favour of redistribution but, at the same time, being the first and most powerful agents of the reproduction of intergenerational inequality.
I have recently re-watched a cult Italian movie of the 80s by Nanni Moretti, Bianca, and a sequence reminded me of the gardening metaphor of Annette Lareau and concerted cultivation. The movie has nothing to say on parenting style but the main characters has some plants…
PS In case you have no access to subtitles this is what Nanni Moretti says: “Have you got too much sun or too less sun? What do you want? More water, less water? Why don’t you speak? Answer me…”