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Annette Lareau
Professor
Ph.D. Sociology,
University of California, Berkeley, 1984
Office:
4141 Art-Sociology Building
Phone: 301 405-9369
Email: alareau@socy.umd.edu
Departmental Specialty Areas:
Stratification; Gender, Work and Family
Additional
Research Areas:
Sociology of the Family, Sociology of Education,
Social Stratification, Qualitative Research Methods,
Sociology of Culture
 Annette
Lareau
studies inequality in American society. She has
used ethnographic methods to examine differences
in the day-to-day lives of families of African-American
and white children. Based on observations inside
in a total of 12 white and black families with
10 year old children,
Unequal
Childhoods
argues that there is a cultural logic of child
rearing where white and black middle-class families
engage in a pattern of “concerted cultivation”
where they actively develop children’s talents
and skills. By contrast, in working-class and
poor families there is a pattern called “the
accomplishment of natural growth” where
parents care for children but presume that they
will spontaneously grow and thrive. Since the
middle-class strategy is more in sync with the
standards of dominant institutions, middle-class
children gain important advantages from their
child rearing even as it takes a toll on the rituals
of family life.
 In
her current research, Annette Lareau is completing
follow-up interviews with the young people, now
20 and 21 years of age. The interviews suggest
the continuing influence of social class as the
young people navigate the transition to adulthood
as well as the growing power of race, especially
for young black men. In collaboration with Elliot
Weininger, SUNY Brockport, and other faculty,
Annette Lareau has undertaken an analysis of a
nationally representative sample of children in
the Child Development Supplement of the Panel
Study of Income Dynamics, to determine if the
results of the case study can be generalized to
a larger population. A second edition of Unequal
Childhoods, with a new 50-page section, will be
published in the future.
 Unequal
Childhoods: Class, Race, and Family Life,
won the best book award for the Sociology of Family
Section, the Section on Childhood and Youth, and
the Sociology of Culture Section (co-winner) of
the American Sociological Association. Annette
Lareau’s first book, Home Advantage:
Social Class and Parental Involvement in Elementary
Education won the Willard Waller Award for
the Sociology of Education Section of the American
Sociological Association. With Jeff Shultz, she
is the editor of Journeys Through Ethnography:
Realistic Accounts of Fieldwork. Between 1990
and 2005 Annette Lareau taught in the Department
of Sociology at Temple University, In July 2005,
she officially joined the faculty at University
of Maryland. During the 2005-2006 year, however,
she will be in residence at the Center for the
Advanced Study of the Behavioral Sciences in Palo
Alto, California. She will teach a graduate-level
qualitative methods course in the fall of 2006
in the Department of Sociology at UMD. She has
held various offices in the American Sociological
Association including being Secretary-Treasurer
for the Section on Childhood and Youth in 2003-04
and being the Chair of the Sociology of Education
Section in 1998-99. Between 1999 and 2003 she
was the Deputy Editor of the journal Sociology
of Education 1999-2003. Annette Lareau is
currently the Vice-President Elect for the Eastern
Sociological Society.
Course
Syllabi:
Sociology 100: Introduction
to Sociology
Sociology 699G: Advanced
Qualitative Methods: In-depth Interviewing
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