On Jan 13, 2010, at 7:41 AM, Alan Rudy wrote:
> Professional-managerial families, since the
> 1980s, increasingly have embraced "concerted cultivation" - the
> overscheduled/overstressed/never-self-motivated child, when scholars
> are
> critical - believing not only that a (crazy) diversity of (exhausting)
> experiences is good for kids but also that dealing with adults,
> learning the
> rules of the game and representing your needs, desires and demands
> to those
> in power, and learning to outcompete others will assure that these
> kids
> aren't downwardly mobile in the increasingly insecure world of upper
> middle
> income living.
...
> My sense is that the produced scarcity is a product of class-specific
> cultural practices not "natural" birth rates... which, I'll admit,
> have
> fallen for PMC types.
Much of the thread dealt with the issue of protecting children (security), and I think that the aspect of scarcity/value that I was attempting to address was related to family size across class lines. More kids, lower value/kid. IOW kids have become precious. A result of this is that parents are much more reactive to the catalyst of fear, and the result is over protective behavior. (Your point about 'concerted cultivation' seems to me to be class-specific.) The scarcity is in part the result of two income households/careerism single parenthood combined with an environment that has contributed to a perception of widespread infertility.
martin
your comments about the Passaic river brought to mind the river in Bridgeport (Pequonnock?) that drew us as kids in the early 50s. My father told stories about bringing home fish he had caught there and his mother throwing the fish in the garbage - he had fished from the pipe that discharged raw sewage into the river. By the time that I played at the river, we were able to throw bricks from the same sewer pipe and have the bricks splash mud and then float on that mud. No water for fish - just muck. But by the time my kids came along, the river had been cleaned and there were once again fish - though I doubt that anyone would consider eating them. I remember reading about fish returning to the hudson river some time back - and I think that both of those 'fish' stories brought some optimism to my outlook.