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This weekend, my youngest daughter, who had the good idea to be born a 1er January, celebrated his 5th birthday at home. She had 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 the parents. We have become friends with several of them over the years. We see each other often, around a snack or an exhibition. As for the others, we had their numbers, because we talked about an extracurricular activity, or because I know, through journalist friends, one of the mothers. In short, a more or less close inter-self.
There remained a little girl in the class whose parents we did not know. We gave her an invitation that remained unanswered and, finally, the mistress confirmed her arrival, before an SMS from the mother. Why am I telling you all this? Because I think it’s no coincidence that we don’t know this family. Of the six children invited, she is the only one to, it seems to me, belong to a social background different from ours; the only one, too, not to be white-skinned.
Friends who “look like” him
Everything went very well during this birthday party. The children all played together. But, 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 her”, when she is in a very mixed neighborhood school? What role do we, parents, have in his choices of sociability? Is it really about choice, anyway? Our place of life, our hobbies, our way of speaking, our money, our relationship to school have they already excluded certain possible friendships for our children?
I tend to think so – but it seems I’m a pessimist by nature. By documenting myself, I found a recent work on the subject which, to be exciting, is not frankly reassuring. This is’Class childhoods. Inequality among childrenunder the direction of Bernard Lahire (Seuil, 2019)professor of sociology at the Ecole Normale Supérieure in Lyon.
For four years, from 2014 to 2018, 17 sociologists followed 35 children aged 5 to 6, in large kindergarten, all over France. The result is a series of in-depth, very human portraits, classified according to three categories: popular, middle and upper classes. What do these children share, apart from their age? What is there in common between Libertad, a young Roma girl who has known makeshift homes, and Lucie, whose father is a writer and whose mother is a philosophy teacher? On the one hand, a little girl who cannot manage to construct an intelligible sentence from simple images, who only has a 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 lasting friends? Beyond these two extreme cases, the question arises on reading each portrait.
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