Studies have highlighted the growing phenomenon of 'concerted cultivation' wherein middle-class parents are enrolling their children into multiple paid-for organised leisure activities as a way of cultivating their skills and reproducing class advantage. In unpacking the class disparities in children's organised leisure participation, researchers…

The purpose of the article is to compare and contrast higher education and research among public relations and journalism students of middle-class and working-class origin. The paper applied Bourdieu's theory of "habitus" to analyze prejudices against the working class, explores whether working-class students express an anti-education…

Many studies have stressed the key role played by competitive sports in the socialization of boys, particularly in middle-class families. This article looks at the minority group of boys from this social class who dislike competition and participate in few, if any, sports. We present case studies of six boys and their families, interviewed on…

Research by Xinyin Chen and others has documented that in past decades, shyness in Chinese children was associated with leadership, peer-acceptance, and academic achievement. In contemporary China, shyness predicts maladaptive youth outcomes. Although social, political, and economic transitions are presumed to be responsible for this shift, little…

Studies conducted in Western countries document the special role of mother--infant face-to-face exchanges for early emotional development including social smiling. A few cross-cultural studies have shown that the Western pattern of face-to-face communication is absent in traditional rural cultures, without identifying other processes that promote…

How did the undergraduate college rapidly position itself as the gateway to middle-class US employment between 1880 and 1920? This article attempts to explain one part of that process. Drawing on Weberian organisational theory, transnational intellectual history and case studies of three institutions, it identifies hierarchy as a defining aspect…

The aim of this study was to determine the effects of age and family socioeconomic status (SES) on the evaluative language performance of Mandarin-Chinese-speaking young children and their mothers. The participants were 65 mother-child dyads recruited in Taiwan. Thirty-four of these dyads were from middle-class families and 31 were from…

Studies of socialization from a stratification perspective stress that while people accept socialization in a broad sense, individual behavior is affected and controlled by special strata relationships and strata culture. This paper sees rural college students as a subculture group and describes their new cultural experiences and the development…

Once societies embarked on programmes of mass education home schooling became essentially a middle-class project and remains so. This paper looks at the educational experiences of some lower middle class women at the turn of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries for whom the resources of the middle-class home were simply not available. It…

Erikson's construct of generative concern for future generations seems a plausible structure for supporting environmental behavior and socialization in the family. The present study of 44 Canadian middle-class families with a focal child aged 14-16 years, examined variations in generative concern among parents and their children and tested how…

Despite increasing rates of university attendance among women, a significant gender gap remains in socialisation and educational processes in Japan. To understand why and how gender-distinctive socialisation processes persist, this study aimed to examine both middle-class and working-class mothers' beliefs about gender, education, and children's…

Parent responses to children's emotions vary within and across cultures. The present study compared mothers' reports of their emotional and behavioral responses in hypothetical situations depicting their children experiencing anger, sadness, or physical pain in two communities in India (traditional old city, "N" = 60; suburban middle…

This article addresses the socialization of emotion expression in infancy. It argues that in order to adequately understand emotion development we need to consider the appraisal of emotion expression through caregivers in mundane, everyday interactions. Drawing on sociocultural and Bakhtinian theorizing, it claims that caregivers' appraisals of…

This study examines mother-child reminiscing conversations with respect to variation in use and function of mothers' elaborations, the nature of children's memory elaborations, and the connections between the two, in three Western middle-class cultures where autonomy is valued over relatedness. Mothers participated with their 4-year-old children…

As their numbers at university grow, we need to gain a better understanding of the different ways in which working-class students negotiate their potential outsider status in what is often considered an essential middle-class institution. Based on data from a four-year longitudinal, qualitative study of working-class students at a Canadian…