ABSTRACT
This chapter examines value differences and parents' strategies for dealing with them. Caregivers walk a fine line; if they suppress their own values too completely they can partially lose their creativity and judgment, qualities that make adults good guides for children. Some parents undertake the ambitious task of trying to instruct caregivers in the more subtle aspects of their child-rearing styles, where rules are not relevant. Most parents try to foster their children's social lives, a task sometimes complicated by class-subordinate caregivers' exclusion from the child's social class. Increasingly, parents enroll even young children in structured activities. When parents enrolled their children in preschools, they initiated a major shift in socialization strategy. Immigrant caregivers—usually raised in harsher worlds than the children in their charge, where disciplined effort to help their families counted for more than academic success—may disagree with their employers' child-rearing methods as a matter of principle.
