After having their first child and cohabiting for 5 years, my parents made the decision to get married. They had their first child, my older sister Alexis DeBord, in 1992 and did not marry until 1995. Both of my parents acknowledged that they knew that they wanted to get married before getting pregnant with their first child, but as my dad described in his interview, they did not “want to get married during the pregnancy and people think [they] only married because of it.” Two years after their marriage and six years after the birth of their first child, their second and last child was born- me.

The birth of their first child in 1992 posed new obstacles for my parents. They had already been together for two years and had lived together for that amount of time, but they had never formally discussed how they wanted to raise children once they had them. So after the birth of my older sister, they were faced with the task of coming together and figuring out how they wanted to raise their kids together. When it was time for me to make my way into the world, my parents had nearly perfected their parenting to be a balance between concerted cultivation and natural growth.

Me at age 13 in dance costume

Me at age 7 in dance costume

My sister at age 11 in cheerleading uniform

My sister and I were both involved in many different activities growing up. The most important for my sister was cheerleading, while the most important for me was dancing. My parents worked hard to manage my hectic schedule of going to school immediately followed by going to the dance studio. Not only did this activity require time management, but it also required monthly payments and dedication to come see the performances. This is the concerted cultivation side of my parents’ parenting styles: my dancing required transportation and money which they did not ever complain about having to provide. It shocks me to reflect on the fact that they were so willing to pay for me to do something that I loved because we are a working-class family and my parents have always lived paycheck to paycheck. My mother’s interview helped me realize why they did not hesitate to pay for my dance classes and clothes that came along with it because she stated that her “kids became [her] number one priority and you have to sacrifice everything for them and you don’t think twice about it.” One thing that differed from the model of concerted cultivation is my strong relationships with my sister and many members of my extended family. I have always had very strong relationships with them and this really just added more people into my support system (see menu titled “Pictures” to see the relationship with my sister and extended family exhibited in photographs). Overall, I think my parent’s sacrifices to allow me to take part in activities that I enjoyed improved my social skills and confidence when performing in front of others.

Even though my parents practiced concerted cultivation by managing my activities, they also practiced natural growth. If I was not in the dance studio or at school I was at home playing outside with the neighborhood kids or sitting in my room reading a book. My parents would only intervene in these activities every hour or so to make sure I was safe or tell me when dinner would be ready. This is where they really blended their childhood experiences together. They gave us freedom, but not to the extent that my mother’s parents gave her. My mother saw the negative impacts that endless freedom had on her and she made sure her children did not experience them. Since I am the first person in my family to attend college I did not have the privilege of going to my parents for homework help, but they always stressed the importance of education and made me work hard in school. My father mentioned this in his interview and discussed how he values education because his own father was “all about school.” Education has always been important to me thanks to my parents and even though I worked hard for myself I mustadmit that I would never allow myself to make a grade below an A because I did not want to disappoint my parents. I am so thankful that they made education my number one priority otherwise I would not be attending Dartmouth. Studies done by Josipa Roksa and Daniel Potter found that a mother’s educational level and social background is related to her children’s academic achievement. These results are not true to every mother and child, and I am an example of this. Neither of my parent’s attended college or even graduated high school and they both come from poor families, yet they prioritized my education and made sure I put in the hard work to end up at a college like Dartmouth. Lareau associates the “concerted cultivation” style of parenting with middle-class parents but my family managed to incorporate this style of parenting into their lives as working-class parents by wanting me to succeed in school and allowing me to grow through dance classes.

My sister and I