American Individualisms:  Child Rearing and Social Class in Three Neighborhoods.  Adrie Kusserow.  Series on Culture, Mind, and Society.  New York:  Palgrave Macmillan.  2004.  xiii + 207pp.

Reviewed by:  Cindy Dell Clark, Associate Professor, Human Development and Family Studies, Pennsylvania State University

The American cultural tapestry is woven not just with ethnic variations, but also with distinctions tracing to social class.  Accordingly, American scholars are advised to illuminate class-related issues if only to avoid projecting their own middle class assumptions on all Americans.   In this spirit Adrie Kusserow, transcending her upper middle class roots, has written American Individualisms:  Child Rearing and Social Class to show how the concept of “individualism” is inconstant across social strata. Kuserow’s interesting and often vivid treatise examines how ideas of individualism are differently morphed or inculcated, within the socialization practices of three New York City neighborhoods, studied through fieldwork (at preschools) and through informant interviews (with parents). 

During her fieldwork Kusserow was employed as a nanny in an upper middle class community on Manhattan’s upper east side --  an area given the pseudonym Parkside.  She had access to four and five year olds at two preschools in Parkside, each observed for about three months.   The other two predominately white communities, where Kusserow observed at two preschools and interviewed parents, were in the borough of Queens and known by the pseudonyms Queenston and Kelley.  Although positioned along the same subway line, Queenston and Kelley were a number of subway stops (and rungs on the working class social ladder) apart.  Queenston residents struggled with significant urban problems, including teen pregnancy, youth unemployment, violent crime, and drug abuse. Kelley was a cramped working class enclave that was relatively higher end than Queenston.  Residents of Kelley shared strong community ties, took pride in their socioeconomic attainments, and actively protected their neighborhood from decline.

From research in these three New York City communities, Kusserow extrapolates three renderings of individualism, each linked to covaried socialization practices prevailing in a neighborhood.  Kusserow argues that the prior literature on individualism has missed the point that individualism is neither monolithic nor fixed, but rather fraught with nuance and multivocality.  Kusserow gives expanded descriptions (with quoted illustrations) of how the adults in Parkside, Queenston and Kelley are characterized by distinctive, and not necessarily mutually compatible, styles of rearing children to be individuals.

In Parkside, parents and teachers adopted the sort of individualism familiar to popular American psychological discourse, which Kusserow labels soft individualism. Soft individualism involves the need to cultivate a youngster’s unique inner self, assumed to be vulnerable to attacks on self esteem.  Parenting to foster soft individualism involves protecting the child from harsh threats (e.g., through avoidance of critical discipline), while seeking to actualize the child’s potentialities and abilities.  Sociologist Annette Lareau (2003) has called this middle class parenting approach “concerted cultivation” (which is consistent with Kusserow’s metaphor that children are like delicate “flowers” under cultivation), a process by which middle class parents spare no time or expense to seek just the right resources for their child’s unique self-development.

In Queenston hard individualism meant to be protective of the child prevailed as an ethnoconception, according to Kusserow.  Queenston parents wanted their children to have tough, resilient selves, and independence in the sense of not getting pulled into negative social dangers.    If a child took karate lessons in Queenston, it was not for purposes of self-actualizing, but for toughening self-defense amid local dangers.  Children’s feelings in Queenston were not spared from such self-affronting practices as routine teasing, shaming, or harsh verbal discipline, since these were acts valued for imparting tough, defended boundaries of self.

Kelley residents also preferred the sort of hard individualism just described, but with less emphasis on the goal of protecting the child from a harsh, treacherous world. By Kusserow’s account, Kelley residents had a greater degree of upward striving and achievement (termed by Kusserow to be projective).  Kelley parents were mindful of children’s achievements and valued aiming for a “good job” later.

There are many parallels between American Individualisms  and Annette Lareau’s Unequal Childhoods, perhaps not surprising since both these studies of socialization were conducted in northeastern cities (New York for Kusserow versus Philadelphia for Lareau).  Both authors are influenced by Bourdieu, and both authors foreground the repertoire of routine practices that instantiate socialization.  Both Kusserow and Lareau insightfully pinpoint a class-related barrier in education, when middle class teachers interact with working class students but fail to realize that modes of action need to be class-relevant.

Quite apart from her thesis that individualism is a class situated construct, Kusserow’s book is valuable for adding to our general awareness of social class as a milieu for socialization. In policy research, education and health care, interventions for children’s welfare are often derived from middle class discourse and practices, without regard to the way concepts and routines are variable by social class.  Kusserow’s book serves as a primer to remind us that when making cross-class contact, a conscious examination of cultural beliefs and practices is essential.

Two reservations are worth mentioning.  First, there is the issue of generalizability, given that Kusserow’s study is based on New York City.   New Yorkers may not share individualisms with rural or small town communities or even cities in other American regions.  Replications of this work in other geographic settings might turn up other patterns.

The second reservation concerns the emphasis on adults, not children, for Kusserow did not interview children in a systematic way. Kusserow may be missing a very important dimension by not concertedly seeking children’s views.  Socialization is not a unidirectional process of adults shaping passive, receptive children, but a two way interactive dynamic in which children and adults are mutually influential.  Children’s agentic interpretations do not always match adults’ notions, as the mounting evidence from child-centered scholarship has clarified (e.g., Briggs 1992;  Clark 1995, 2005;  Holmes 1998).  To do a study of socialization without consulting children’s meanings arguably raises a barrier to full understanding.  The tapestry of American culture contains nuances of ethnicity, social class – as well as age status.

REFERENCES CITED

Briggs, Jean L.

   1992  Mazes of Meaning:  How a Child and a Culture Constitute Each Other.  In Interpretive Approaches to Children’s Socialization.  William Corsaro and Peggy J. Miller, eds. Pp.25-50.  San Francisco:  Jossey-Bass.

Clark, Cindy Dell

   1995   Flights of Fancy, Leaps of Faith:  Children’s Myths in Contemporary America.  Chicago:  University of Chicago Press.

   2005   Tricks of Festival:  Children, Enculturation and American Halloween.  Ethos 33(2):180-205.

Holmes, Robyn

   1998   Fieldwork with Children.  Thousand Oaks CA:  Sage Publications.

Lareau, Annette

    2003  Unequal Childhoods:  Class, Race, and Family Life.  Berkeley:  University of California Press.