The rugrat race

孩子们之间的比赛

词汇

Rugrat/（口语）孩子，小孩

 

Working-class parents are becoming more like middle-class ones

工薪阶层的父母正变得越来越像中产阶级的父母

They have adopted their child-rearing habits

他们已经养成了抚养孩子的习惯

Oct 3rd 2020 | NEW YORK

LIKE MANY children around the age of two, Madison has decided not to do what her mother wants. She will not speak above a whisper. She does not want to read “Big Red Barn”. She will not identify her colours or her shapes, even though she knows them. So, for half an hour, her mother patiently cajoles, persuades, distracts and redirects. “You want me to read to you? What kind of sound does the cow make? Are you going to sing? What’s this?”

和许多两岁左右的孩子们一样，Madison并不想按照母亲希望的那般做。她只小声念叨。她不想读《红色大谷仓》。即使她知道自己的颜色和形状，她也不会说出来。她妈妈花了有半个小时，连哄带骗，说服、分散注意、再次（反复）询问。“你想让我把这部绘本读给你听吗？绘本上这只牛发出什么样的声音？你想唱歌吗？这是什么？

词汇

Big Red Barn/绘本读物https://www.sohu.com/a/169457642_278796 （绘本内容和妈妈给孩子的提问内容有关）

Cajole/以甜言蜜语哄骗；勾引

It would be a familiar scene in a pushy, upper-middle-class home. But this is a working-class black family in a poor district of Long Island, east of New York City. The careful cultivation of Madison reflects a change in her household. Her mother, Joy, says that she did little to prepare her two older children for school, assuming that they would be taught everything they needed to know. She is determined not to make the same mistake again.

对于爱出风头的中上层家庭来说，这将是一个熟悉的场景。但这是一个工薪阶层的黑人家庭，位于纽约市东部长岛的一个贫困地区。 Madison的精心栽培反映了她家庭的变化。她的母亲Joy说，（在之前）她曾以为学校将会教会子女他们所需要学会的一切知识，便没有为他俩更大的孩子的上学前准备些什么。如今，她决心不再犯同样的错误。

词汇

Pushy/ 有进取心的；爱出风头的

district /区域；地方；行政区

Across the rich world, working-class parents have reached the same conclusion. They expect more of their children than in the past, and treat them differently. Gradually, they have adopted child-raising habits normally associated with middle-class parents. That largely unheralded change has probably mitigated the harm done to poorer children by covid-19 and the school closures it prompted. Unfortunately, some damage has been done anyway.

在富裕国家，工薪阶层的父母也得出了同样的结论。他们对孩子的期望比过去更高，对待他们也有所不同。逐渐地，他们养成了通常与中产阶级父母有关的抚养孩子的习惯。这种基本上没有预兆的变化可能减轻了新冠对贫困儿童造成的伤害，也减轻了由此导致的学校关闭。不幸的是，依旧有一些危害一些造成。

词汇

 unheralded /未事先宣布的；没料到的

In 2003 Annette Lareau, a sociologist at the University of Pennsylvania, published an astonishing book about child-raising. “Unequal Childhoods” showed that working-class parents—whether they were white or black, poor and welfare-dependent or with steady jobs—thought and behaved differently from middle-class ones. Most assumed that their children would develop naturally, and that their job was to keep them happy and safe. Middle-class parents, by contrast, engaged in what Ms Lareau called “concerted cultivation”, stimulating, stretching and scheduling their progeny to within an inch of their lives.

2003年，宾夕法尼亚大学的社会学家Annette Lareau出版了一本关于抚养孩子的惊人的书。《不平等的童年》表明，工薪阶层的父母——无论他们是白人还是黑人、贫穷、依赖福利或有稳定的工作——在思想和行为上都与中产阶级父母不同。大多数人认为他们的孩子会自然发育，而他们的工作就是让子女快乐和安全地成正。相比之下，中产阶级的父母则致力于 Lareau女士所称的“协同培养”，促进、延申和规划他们的后代，并在生活上紧密联系。

词汇

Concerted/协调的；协定的；商议定的

 Progeny/子孙；后裔

Middle-class child-raising habits such as endlessly pointing out new things and answering children’s questions with other questions are easily mocked. They are also highly effective. Jill Gilkerson is the chief researcher at LENA, an organisation that measures children’s and adult’s speech using small digital recorders. By controlling for social class, she finds that 14% of the variance in adolescents’ IQ scores can be explained by the frequency of “conversational turns” in their speech at 18-24 months—a measure of their interactions with adults. The effect of toddler talk on adolescents’ verbal comprehension was stronger: it explained 27% of the variance.

中产阶级的育儿习惯，如无休止地指出新事物和用其他问题回答孩子的问题，很容易被嘲笑。但也很有效。Jill Gilkerson是LENA的首席研究员，该组织使用小型数字录音机来测量儿童和成人的语言。通过对社会阶层的管理，她发现青少年智商分数中14%的差异可以用18-24个月时“谈话转换”的频率来解释——这是一种孩童与成人互动的衡量方式。幼儿说话对青少年语言理解的影响更大:这解释了27%的差异。

词汇

Variance/变异；变化；不一致；分歧

 Toddler/学步的小孩；幼童装

Verbal/口头的；言语的

Fortunately, the ideal of concerted cultivation seems to have spread. In 2018 Patrick Ishizuka of Cornell University presented American parents with domestic vignettes and asked what they thought of them. In one vignette, a girl who complains about being bored after school is told to go outside and play with her friends; in another, the bored girl is pushed into music lessons and sport. Mr Ishizuka found that highly educated and thinly educated parents differed hardly at all in their responses to these scenarios. Almost all thought the pushy parent was better.

幸运的是，协同培养的理想似乎已经传播开来。2018年，康奈尔大学(Cornell University)的Patrick Ishizuka向美国父母展示了一些家庭琐事，并询问他们对这些琐事的看法。在一个小插曲中，一个女孩抱怨放学后很无聊，被告知去外面和她的朋友们玩;在另一个场景中，无聊的女孩被迫去上音乐课和运动。Ishizuka发现，受过高等教育的父母和没受过高等教育的父母对这些情景的反应几乎没有差别。几乎所有人都认为有进取心的父母更好。

词汇

Vignette/梗概，简介，花絮

Scenario/方案；情节

 

Poorer parents are putting in more time, too. Sociologists Giulia Maria Dotti Sani and Judith Treas have data for 11 Western countries. In all but one (France) mothers without university educations are spending more time caring for their children than in the past. The Centre for Time Use Research has found a concertina pattern in Britain. In the mid-1970s highly educated and thinly educated mothers alike spent little time interacting with their children. Over the following decade the highly educated changed their behaviour, opening a large lead over everyone else. The less-educated then closed the gap (see chart).

贫穷的父母也投入了更多的时间。社会学家会玛丽亚多蒂便为11个西方国家和朱迪丝胎面数据。除了法国这一个国家，其余国家没有受过大学教育的母亲比过去花更多的时间照顾孩子。时间使用研究中心（Centre for Time Use Research）在英国发现了一种类似于手风琴的模式。在20世纪70年代中期，受过高等教育的母亲和没受过高等教育的母亲几乎都很少花时间和孩子交流。在接下来的十年里，受过高等教育的人改变了他们的行为，大大领先于其他所有人。受教育程度较低的人群随后也缩小了差距(见图表)。

词汇

concertina / 类似风琴的六角形乐器；六角手风琴

 

Tomás Cano, a sociologist at the University of Frankfurt, suggests that child-raising norms are trickling down the social scale, much as liberal attitudes to divorce did in the second half of the 20th century. He has found that working-class Spanish parents are putting in more time on “developmental” child-care activities (such as reading and playing). Fathers in particular began to do more following the financial crisis, which hit Spain especially hard. They may have had more time for playing because so many had lost their jobs.

法兰克福大学的社会学家托马斯•卡诺指出，抚养孩子的规范正在向社会的各个层面渗透，就像20世纪下半叶对离婚的自由态度一样。他发现，西班牙工薪阶层的父母在“发展性”育儿活动(如阅读和玩耍)上投入了更多的时间。尤其是在金融危机之后，其对西班牙的打击尤为严重，尤其在此时父亲们开始投入更多时间。他们可能有更多的时间（陪同孩子）玩耍，因为很多人都失业了。

 

All this attention may be helping children at school. Two scholars, Sean Reardon and Ximena Portilla, have shown that in America the gap between the test scores of the most privileged and least privileged children upon entry to nursery closed slightly between 1998 and 2010. In Britain all children in year one of school—aged five or six—are doing better in phonics tests than they were a decade ago. Those who are entitled to free school meals because of their parents’ poverty have advanced more.

所有这些关注可能对学校里的孩子们有所帮助。两位学者Sean Reardon和Ximena Portilla指出，在1998年至2010年间，美国最富和最穷的孩子进入托儿所时的测试分数差距略有缩小。在英国，所有五到六岁的一年级学生在语音测试中的表现都比十年前要好。那些因父母贫困而有权享受免费学校餐的人进步得更多。

词汇

Phonics/声学；拼读法，声音基础教学法