" Makes some good points, but the author's tripping all over herself trying to avoid siding with the middle class was hard to take. She says several times that physical punishment used to be the norm--as though this makes it okay? I mean she shows plenty of concern that one of the children can barely read even though illiteracy "would have been virtually universal in certain time periods" (as she says of the practice of hitting children). I mean I appreciate her point that most books of this type are going to be written by middle class people so we have to try to avoid normalizing that culture, but her attempts are clumsy. Another example is that middle class children's "sense of entitlement" is consistently used to explain why they feel comfortable asking questions of a doctor. Really? We need to stigmatize the ability to properly interact with a doctor? Though she mentions a working-class person's ability, in contrast, to argue with a landlord or cable company, she does not talk about a sense of entitlement to explain the behavior in those cases.
I end up feeling that the book begs the questions. Yes, the middle class is in sync with major cultural institutions and this gives them advantages. But discussions of what stops others from doing the same don't precisely tie into the thesis. Yes, economic constraints keep their children from expensive extracurriculars. Yes, the parents' education and occupational experience limits their understanding of professional jargon (a point that really could have been made more of in the "What is to be done" section). But the author seems to admit that these have to do with socioeconomic status. Why the working-class and poor families can't make cultural adjustments, the way the middle-class did, like not physically punishing their children or asking them questions to improve their verbal skills is an explanation that is started but never really resolves. Maybe the problem is that if I took a test on this book I would have trouble answering the question "How did the researchers determine a subject's class?" If class is based on cultural things, then a working-class person performs what the author wants to call working-class culture _by definition_. Thus the difficulty of discussing class in America. "
— Alexis, 1/19/2014