As children in the Latin culture grow older, expectations of them increase. Elder daughters are expected to assume maternal household duties if their mother gets sick (p. 55). A parallel message of childhood enculturation is that family reputation is not to be put at risk for gossip, which is deplored (and indulged in) throughout the community. It is in this context that siblings are taught to cooperate with and show mutual respect for each other--and are punished when they do not. role of obedience to their father. But within the authoritarian family context, moth ers also function as intercessors, acting as the "bridge to the father" (p. 5). Indeed, Madsen characterizes the Latin woman in traditional, conservative households as "a skilled manipulator of her lord and master" (p. 53) on many issue fronts, including but not limited to child-rearing matters. Given the growing number of single-mother households in the American middle class, childhood experience of the father as role model or parenting figure may be limited. In one sense, this sug gests that the middle class child avoids strong family hierarchy and indeed that the child is encouraged to find strategies of in dependence. Alternatively, it suggests that the middle class child in a single-mother household may not have access to the nur turant potentialities of a father. In such a household, more over, boys may have no father figure to observe and learn their social roles from while also experiencing their mother as both nurturer and authority. Thus the lesson of social roles may be more ambiguous for middle class American children than for their Latin counterparts. In the lower-class segment of the Mexican-American commu nity, many children experience cultural dislocation owing to the fact that they speak little English by the time they start school. The obvious comparison to American middle-class children here is that as a group they enter school as exponents of the mainstream and benefit from that |
