Tallinger Family's Child Rearing Strategy

The benefits to the Tallinger family's child rearing strategy as it pertains to their oldest son, Garrett is that for a child like Garrett, who is not talkative by nature, extracurricular activities force him to interact with individuals and step outside his comfort zone and the extra curricular activities gives Garrett topics to interact with his family about. For example, Garrett challenges Spencer by stating, “Do you know what Van Gogh did?” (45) and when his mother and him discussed songs from the spring concert in which Garrett had performed. Lareau states, “children like Garrett, who meet and learn to work effectively with a new set of adults for every activity they enroll in, are acquiring a basic job skill” (62). Garett is learning
The parents are so used to their children's practices and games that it forced them to leave out of boredom. The activities put a strain on the parent and child relationship since “the impact of children's activities takes its toll on parents patience as well as their time” (48). This form of childrearing is ineffective since the communication between the parents with the child is weak. Lareau states, “More common are conversations like the one with Mr. Tallinger, described above, and the one with Ms. Tallinger, described below” (46).The Tallinger children are unable to interact with children outside of an activity simply to have child-initiated play. For example, Sam at the age of four is already aware of his older brothers commitments and understands that he will have to sacrifice the invitation. As a result, this demonstrated that “Garrett nor spencer typically [have] long stretches of time to organize or define himself” (44). Moreover, normal events that children his age get excited about do not seem to appear to matter to Garrett. Garrett is unable to interact as an individual without the use of sports with other children his age. Lastly, the children's exhaustion result in moodiness. This effect is not seen “in the working-class and poor children” since they are not worn down every second of the day. As Lareau recalls, a pattern of “falling apart” occurs a few times each month with each child since they're unhappiness