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This weekend, my younger daughter, who had the good idea to be born a 1 er January, celebrated her 5 years at home. She wanted to invite six children (yes, that’s too much). It was not very difficult for my companion and I to contact the majority of parents. We have become friends with several of them over the years. We often see each other, around a snack or an exhibition. As for the others, we had their numbers, because we exchanged around extra -curricular activity, or because I know, by intermediary journalists, one of the mothers. In short, a more or less close self.
remained a little girl from the class whose parents we did not know. We gave him an invitation remained unanswered and, finally, the mistress confirmed her arrival, before an SMS of the mother. Why do I tell you all this? Because I think it’s no coincidence that we don’t know this family. Of the six invited children, she is the only one at, it seems to me, belonging to a social environment different from ours; The only one, too, not to be white of skin.
friends who “look like”
Everything went very well during this birthday party. The children all played together. But, by closing the door, in the evening, I couldn’t help but ask myself a host of questions. How is it that at 5 years old, my daughter already has a large majority of friends who “look like”, when she is in a very mixed neighborhood school? What role do we have, parents, in its choices of sociability? Is it really a choice, by the way? Our place of life, our leisure, our way of speaking, our money, our relationship to school already excluded certain possible friendships for our children?
I tend to think so – but it seems that I am of pessimistic nature. By documenting myself, I found a recent work on the subject which, to be exciting, is not frankly reassuring. These are window Class childhoods. Inequality among children, under the direction of Bernard Lahire (Seuil, 2019) , professor of sociology at the École Normale Supérieure de Lyon.
For four years, from 2014 to 2018, 17 sociologists followed 35 children aged 5 to 6, in large kindergarten section, everywhere in France. The result is a series of in -depth, very human portraits, classified in three categories: popular, medium and upper classes. What do these children share, apart from their age? What is there in common between Libertad, a Roma little girl who has known homes of fortune, and Lucie, whose father is a writer and the mother professor of philosophy? On the one hand, a little girl who cannot build an intelligible sentence from simple images, which has only one book at home, while the other develops a structured story from the same images, and lives surrounded by works. Can we imagine them playing together, becoming a lasting friend? Beyond these two extreme cases, the question arises on reading each portrait.
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