Pugh 2009 50 upper income parents talked about

goalie,” she said smiling ruefully.” (Pugh 2009: 50)
“Upper-income parents talked about spending $450 on a five year old’s
birthday party, thousands of dollars for a family vacation to Cambodia, and
hun-(Pugh 2009: 84)dreds of dollars on Halloween costumes. And the
expenses went beyond commodities, to the experiences they worked to
ensure their children could have. Schools could command $15,000 for private
tuition, summer camps might be $3000-$4000, and they might spend $1000
a month on extracurricular activities like carpentry, dance, soccer, horseback
riding or piano lessons.” (Pugh 2009: 85)

Compare Kusserow’s Parksiders:
“…many understood their children’s desires were linked to their social
citizenship at school, their ability to participate and belong, and most thus
sought to respond to their children’s desires so that they could stand among
their peers. …sought to understand their children as individuals, including
their desires, as part of diagnosing their individual strengths and weaknesses
—the central task of every upper-income caregiver before commencing on
the path of (Pugh 2009: 111) “concerted cultivation.” Plumbing the depths of
children’s desire was good parenting.” (Pugh 2009: 112)
“Affluent children were nothing if not different. Parents offered long
diagnoses of children’s individual traits—“Dennis just constitutionally is a
very empathic guy. A soft, low-toned buy, and there’s something just…sweet
about him. …Donna, an Arrowhead parent, described her son Gavin as
needing “constant challenges.” “I just didn’t sense that in the public school
system he’d get that,” she said.” (Pugh 2009: 192)
“Affluent parents who chose private school often did so after deciding their
children required a more individualized educational match for their particular
needs and strengths—in other words their differences. …affluent parents
were leery of the power of interactional differences—such as what children
owned of experiences they could talk about—leery enough to respond to
children’s desires, often despite their own ambivalence about spending. Yet
at the same time many affluent parents, particularly mothers, felt
responsible for searching for and recognizing their children’s psychological
and intellectual differences, what we might call “personal differences. In
upper-income families, this celebration of “uniqueness” was tied to spending
through pathway consumption, just as the fear of interactional differences
was linked to spending through commodity consumption.” (Pugh 2009: 193)
Han, Sallie (2009) Imagining babies through belly talk. Anthropology News ,
50(2): 13.
“Talking, reading aloud and singing to the belly are activities that frequently
were described to me, and that I occasionally observed, during 15 months of
ethnographic research with US middle-class women and men.” (Han 2009:
13)
“How belly talk is employed to turn fetuses into people and pregnant women
into mothers…” (Han 2009: 13)
“Both women and men in my study stressed the significance of belly talk in
terms of bonding. Bridget explained: “I read somewhere that by 16 weeks,