Class Inequality In Putnam's Our Kids

In the first chapter of Putnam’s Our Kids, he brings forth his main argument and uses his own home town to back up his claims. Putnam argues that while racial inequality has dwindled, class inequality has dramatically increased. He impresses upon his readers that this increase in class inequality has directly influenced a growing gap in equality of opportunity, which threatens the very American Dream that the USA has been founded on. He attempts to prove his point by using the small scale example of his own home town, Port Clinton, Ohio, to represent the proposed nation wide trend. Using personal stories and statistics from the 1950s and present day, Putnam compares his findings to display the growth in class inequality. Personally, I agree …show more content…
Putnam attempts to show the growing class divide that shows in the parenting style of different families from Atlanta, Georgia and Detroit, Michigan. One upper class, family whose parenting style is defined as concerted cultivation (118). Meaning, their parenting style attempts to “foster their children’s cognitive, social, and cultural skills, and, in turn, to further their children’s success in life,” and relies heavily on “monitoring, encouragement, reasoning, and negotiation,” (118). The lower class family, that’s example consists of only a single active parent figure, has the parenting style defined as natural growth (118). This method has overall less parent involvement and leaves the children to be responsible for their own development, and parents rely on rules and punishments for child (118). Adding statistics, Putnam shows how higher class parents are more likely to spend more money, time, and energy on their children and lower class are likely to spend less. The point Putnam makes with these examples is that children are being parented more positively in upper class and more negatively based on being apart of lower