Concerted Cultivation Arrogance

Here’s something I’ve wanted to discuss for quite some time, but just never got around to it.  Thinking back to reading Annette Lareau’s book “Unequal Childhoods” I couldn’t help but be convicted of an unknown area of arrogance that I have been holding onto.  It has to do with Lareau’s distinction between Concerted Cultivation (the active, typically suburban involvement by parents in their children’s lives and activities, occasionally bordering on micromanagement) and the Accomplishment of Natural Growth (the typically working- and middle- class philosophy on child rearing that gives greater autonomy  to children).  Now, in my way of thinking, even as I began reading Lareau’s work, Concerted Cultivation was much more difficult and draining for parents, but it gave their children the best preparation for engaging with their world and authority structures later in life.  This is all true, but what struck me is that when I reflected on it, I realized that I had been considering alternate child rearing strategies as inferior and irrelevant.  I had failed to remember the rule that they taught us in Computer Science: there are pros and cons to EVERYTHING!  So I was kind of blown away when I realized that children raised in a natural growth framework tended to be more imaginative, better able to occupy themselves, and better able to socialize with their peers than did those raised under the concerted cultivation framework.  Well, I hereby stand corrected, natural growth is certainly an acceptable method of raising children.  That being said, I still fully plan on utilizing more of a concerted cultivation framework in raising my own children, but what can I say?  At the end of the day, it always seems to be that we do what we’re comfortable with, which tends to be the way that we were raised.  C’est la vie.