What role do children play in education and stratification? Are they merely passive recipients of unequal opportunities that schools and parents create for them? Or do they actively shape their own opportunities? Through a longitudinal, ethnographic study of one socioeconomically diverse, public elementary school, I show that children’s social-class backgrounds affect when and how they seek help in the classroom. Compared to their working-class peers, middle-class children request more help from teachers and do so using different strategies. Rather than wait for assistance, they call out or approach teachers directly, even interrupting to make requests. In doing so, middle-class children receive more help from teachers, spend less time waiting, and are better able to complete assignments. By demonstrating these skills and strategies, middle-class children create their own advantages and contribute to inequalities in the classroom. These findings have implications for theories of cultural capital, stratification, and social reproduction.

The COVID-19 pandemic closed schools and childcare centers across the U.S., forcing many parents to care for children at home. While parents generally enjoy time with children and want more “family time,” evidence also suggests that substantial, unanticipated increases in parenting time may negatively impact at least some mothers’ well-being. We investigate this possibility using surveys (N=139) and in-depth interviews (N=65) with mothers of young children in Southern Indiana conducted during the COVID-19 pandemic (April-May 2020). We find that mothers who have greatly increased the time they spend caring for their children also disproportionately report increased stress, anxiety, and frustrations with their children. Our qualitative data reveal that disruptions in childcare arrangements, particularly when coupled with intensive work pressures and/or intensive parenting norms, exacerbate the negative impact of increased parenting time on mothers’ well-being. Meanwhile, other mothers are not experiencing increased parenting time as a substantial source of stress, and some are even experiencing increased parenting time as a source of joy in otherwise difficult times. We discuss the implications of these findings for research on parenting and its impact on women’s health and labor force participation, as well as for policies to support families during and after the COVID-19 pandemic.

How do physical digital inequalities persist as technology becomes commonplace? We consider this question using surveys and focus groups with U.S. college students, a group that has better than average connectivity. Findings from a 748-person nonrepresentative survey revealed that ownership and use of cellphones and laptops were nearly universal. However, roughly 20% of respondents had difficulty maintaining access to technology (e.g., broken hardware, data limits, connectivity problems, etc.). Students of lower socioeconomic status and students of color disproportionately experienced hardships, and reliance on poorly functioning laptops was associated with lower grade point averages. Focus group and open-ended data elaborate these findings. Findings quantitatively validate the technology maintenance construct, which proposes that as access to information and communication technology peaks, the digital divide is increasingly characterized by the (in)ability to maintain access. Data highlight overlooked nuances in digital access that may inform social disparities and the policies that may mitigate them.

Mothers did a disproportionate share of the child care during the COVID-19 pandemic—an arrangement that negatively impacted their careers, relationships, and well-being. How did mothers account for these unequal roles? Through interviews and surveys with 55 mothers (and 14 fathers) in different-sex, prepandemic dual-earner couples, we found that mothers (and fathers) justified unequal parenting arrangements based on gendered structural and cultural conditions that made mothers’ disproportionate labor seem “practical” and “natural.” These justifications allowed couples to rely on mothers by default rather than through active negotiation. As a result, many mothers did not feel entitled to seek support with child care from fathers or nonparental caregivers and experienced guilt if they did so. These findings help explain why many mothers have not reentered the workforce, why fathers’ involvement at home waned as the pandemic progressed, and why the pandemic led to growing preferences for inegalitarian divisions of domestic and paid labor.

Scholars typically view class socialization as an implicit process. This study instead shows how parents actively transmit class-based cultures to children and how these lessons reproduce inequalities. Through observations and interviews with children, parents, and teachers, I found that middle- and working-class parents expressed contrasting beliefs about appropriate classroom behavior, beliefs that shaped parents’ cultural coaching efforts. These efforts led children to activate class-based problem-solving strategies, which generated stratified profits at school. By showing how these processes vary along social class lines, this study reveals a key source of children’s class-based behaviors and highlights the efforts by which parents and children together reproduce inequalities.

As privilege-dependent organizations, U.S. public schools have an interest in catering to higher-SES White families. But, what happens when privileged families’ interests conflict with schools’ stated goals? Focusing on the case of homework, and drawing insights from organizational theory, cultural capital theory, and research on parent involvement in schools, I examine how schools’ dependence on higher-SES White families influences their enforcement of rules. Using a longitudinal, ethnographic study of one socioeconomically diverse public elementary school, I find that teachers wanted to enforce homework rules, but they worried doing so would lead to conflict with the higher-SES White “helicopter” parents, on whom they relied most for support. Thus, teachers selectively enforced rules, using evidence of “helicopter” parenting to determine which students “deserved” leeway and lenience. Those decisions, in turn, contributed to inequalities in teachers’ punishment and evaluation of students. Broadly, these findings suggest privilege-dependence leads schools to appease privileged families, even when those actions contradict the school’s stated goals. These findings also challenge standard policy assumptions about parent involvement and homework, and they suggest policies aimed at reducing the power of privilege are necessary for lessening inequalities in school.

Objective: We examine how disruptions related to the COVID-19 pandemic are creating conflicts for couples with young children. Background: National polls suggest that COVID-19 has led to increased conflict for couples in the U.S. Although scholars have not examined the source of these new conflicts, pre-pandemic research suggests that pandemic-related disruptions may create conflicts around paid work and parenting, economic security, politics, and health decision-making. Method: This study uses the Pandemic Parenting Study, a mixed-methods study of Southern Indiana mothers, conducted April-May 2020, and involving surveys (N=139), diary entries (N=104), and in-depth interviews (N=65). We examine mothers’ reports of pandemic-related changes in their frustrations with their partners and how those changes vary with the disruptions couples have experienced during the pandemic. We then use qualitative data to understand how pandemic-related disruptions are generating conflicts for couples and what consequences those conflicts have.Results: A substantial minority of mothers (39%) report pandemic-related increases in their frustrations with their partners. These frustrations are particularly common among mothers whose partners are (reportedly) providing insufficient support with pandemic parenting or dismissing mothers’ concerns about COVID-19. Mothers blame themselves for these conflicts and feel responsible for reducing them, including by leaving the workforce, beginning use of antidepressants, or ignoring their own concerns about COVID-19.Conclusion: The pandemic has exacerbated longstanding sources of conflict (related to partners’ insufficient support with parenting) and created new sources of conflict (related to partners’ dismissals of mothers’ concerns about COVID-19), with serious implications for mothers, families, and public health.

Socialization is a key mechanism of social reproduction. Yet, like the functionalists who introduced the concept, socialization has fallen out of favor, critiqued for ignoring power and agency, for its teleology and incoherence, and for a misguided link to “culture of poverty” arguments. In this review, we argue for a renewed, postfunctionalist use of socialization. We review the concept's history, its high point under Parsons, the reasons for its demise, its continued use in some subfields (e.g., gender, race and ethnicity, education), and alternative concepts used to explain social reproduction. We then suggest that something is lost when socialization is avoided or isolated in particular subfields. Without socialization, conceptions of social reproduction face problems of history, power, and transferability. We close by outlining a postfunctionalist agenda for socialization research, providing a framework for a new theory of socialization, one that builds off of cognitive science, pragmatism, the study of language, the reinterrogation of values, and the development of ideology in political socialization. Expected final online publication date for the Annual Review of Sociology, Volume 47 is July 2021. Please see http://www.annualreviews.org/page/journal/pubdates for revised estimates.