What Money Doesn't Buy: Class Resources and Children's

What Money Doesn’t Buy 479 What Money Doesn’t Buy What Money Doesn’t Buy: Class Resources and Children’s Participation in Organized Extracurricular Activities Elliot B. Weininger, SUNY College at Brockport Annette Lareau, University of Pennsylvania Dalton Conley, New York University ecent research suggests that participation in organized extracurricular activities by children and adolescents can have educational and occupational payoffs. This Rresearch also establishes that participation is strongly associated with social class. However, debate has ensued—primarily among qualitative researchers—over whether the association between class and activities stems exclusively from inequali- ties in objective resources and constraints or whether differing cultural orientations have a role. We address this debate using a nationally representative sample of children’s time diaries, merged with extensive information on their families, to model participation in, and expenditures on, organized activities. While we cannot directly observe cultural orientations, we account for a substantially wider array of resources and constraints than previous studies. We find that, above and beyond these factors, maternal education has a consistently large effect on the outcomes we study. We discuss the plausibility of a cultural interpretation of this result, as well as alternative interpretations. Introduction In the forty years since the publication of Inequality (Jencks 1972), the question of how family social position influences children’s life experiences has occupied a great deal of sociologists’ attention. While scholars have focused for decades on issues such as inequality in family resources and school characteristics, in recent years interest has increased in the ways children spend their out-of-school time, and in particular, their participation in organized extracurricular activities. For example, some researchers have argued that organized activity participation The authors gratefully acknowledge the generous support of the Spencer Foundation as well as the University of Pennsylvania. They appreciate the assistance of Melissa Velez. The authors are grateful to the anonymous reviewers and the editor for their helpful comments. Thanks to Josh Klugman, Maia Cucchiara, and Judith Levine for comments on earlier versions of this paper. All errors, however, are the sole responsibility of the authors. © The Author 2015. Published by Oxford University Press on behalf of the Social Forces 94(2) 479–503, December 2015 University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill. All rights reserved. For permissions, doi: 10.1093/sf/sov071 please e-mail: [email protected]. Advance Access publication on 28 May 2015 480 Social Forces 94(2) serves as an important selection factor in the recruitment of students to prestigious colleges and universities (Kaufman and Gabler 2004; Stevens 2007) and in the hiring of candidates in certain elite professions (Rivera 2011). Additionally, numerous researchers have argued that participation in organized activities pro- vides children and adolescents with diffuse but important cognitive and non- cognitive skills that subsequently yield both educational and occupational payoffs (Bodovski and Farkas 2008; Covay and Carbonaro 2010; Lareau 2011). Others have asserted that participation positively affects psychosocial development ( Linver, Roth, and Brooks-Gunn 2009). Not only is there evidence suggesting that extracurricular activities may be important in producing class outcomes, participation in such activity has been shown to be stratified by SES itself. Numerous studies of nationally representative data have reported that participation rates rise sharply with their families’ social class or SES (Dumais 2006; Lareau and Weininger 2008; Covay and Carbonaro 2010). Meanwhile, qualitative scholars have debated the underlying mechanisms that produce this class gradient in extracurricular activities. On one side, some suggest that, among parents, the relation between social class and particular childrearing practices—including the propensity to enroll children in organized activities—is mediated by distinctive cultural repertoires (Lareau 2011). Others, however, challenge this assertion (Chin and Phillips 2004; Bennett, Lutz, and Jayaram 2012). They argue that family differences in material resources and objective circumstances produce these distinctive childrearing patterns. In this view, cultural orientations are of relatively little significance, and equalization of resources and circumstances would be sufficient to substantially diminish or eliminate differences in participation. Seen in this light, this debate belongs to the long-standing sociological inquiry into the mechanisms through which inequality is sustained in daily life, and to the more specific question of whether and how culture may play a constitutive role in social stratification (Mayer 1998; see also Lamont, Small, and Harding 2010). In this paper, we seek to contribute to this debate over the factors structuring activity participation by analyzing a nationally representative data set containing detailed child-level time diaries and family-level questionnaire information. In addition to examining various measures of participation, we also address the previously unstudied issue of expenditures on organized activities. Taking up arguments made in the ethnographic literature, we model the effects of a much wider array of factors than previous quantitative work in the field, including numerous aspects of parents’ work and labor-market situations. Furthermore, we assess an argument stemming from this literature that asserts that “leveling” institutions—specifically, schools—equalize participation. To preview our results, we do not find support for the contention that class differences in activity participation or expenditures are solely the result of variation in parents’ resources and the constraints they face. Instead, our analyses show that maternal education—which we view as a stand-in for cultural orientation—has large effects on both expenditures on and participation in organized activities, even in the presence of extensive controls for resources and constraints; moreover, the effects on participation are consistent across institutional settings. Of course, just as material circumstances could be proxies for cultural What Money Doesn't Buy 481 frames, maternal education could itself be a stand-in for some other unobserved factor like innate skill; however, if this were the case, our central point would still hold: the observed association is not reducible to material situations. In the con- clusion, we consider the mechanisms that might drive these effects. As we imply above, varying cultural dispositions are a plausible candidate, though not the only one. Class, Constraints, and Culture A significant body of research has developed in recent years regarding the consequences of children’s participation in extracurricular activities. For example, researchers have suggested that—above and beyond academic considerations— undertaking particular organized activities directly influences one’s chances of admission to a prestigious college or university (Kaufman and Gabler 2004; see also Dumais 2009). Another recent study asserts that intensive participation in various activities constitutes an important informal hiring criterion for entry- level positions in elite law firms, investment banks, and management consulting firms (Rivera 2011). In addition to acting as a screening mechanism, activities participation may also provide children with skills and dispositions that will serve as a source of advantages later in life. For example, Lareau asserts that activities such as membership in a choir or on a sports team, music lessons, and scouts instill in young children “the ability to perform in public, in front of adults, including strangers” and to “work smoothly with acquaintances”; consequently, many organized activities reproduce, “in their organizational style … key aspects of the workplace” (2011, 61–63). For this reason, Lareau describes organized activities as a kind of “pre-employment training” (2011, 62), and views them as a source of “cultural capital” (see also Adler and Adler 1994). Other researchers have suggested that activity participation is predictive of educational outcomes such as standardized test performance and grades (Bodovski and Farkas 2008; Cheadle 2008). To be sure, absent randomized controlled interventions or natu- rally occurring experiments, we cannot know for sure whether some unobserved factor—like “grit”—is driving both activity participation and positive school outcomes. Nonetheless, the findings concerning the consequences of activity participation are suggestive enough that vigorous debates have arisen concerning the sociological antecedents of children’s participation. On one side, Lareau (2002, 2011) has argued that the relation between social structure and various childrearing behaviors (including enrollment of children in extracurricular activities) is mediated by a set of class-specific cultural orientations that confer distinct meanings on these behaviors. The relevant orientations correspond to families’ social class locations, but are not directly deducible from the constitutive characteristics of these locations—that is, from the attributes of their jobs or variation in their incomes. What Lareau terms “concerted cultivation”—typical of middle-class parents in her data but rare among working-class

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