Excerpt from the Summary
Children want to organize things for themselves and go their own ways. They are sensitive to their environment and they let people know what they want. The majority are satisfied with how things are with regard to their families, their leisure-time, their friends, and school, and they express a high level of well-being. Their attitude to what life brings is hopeful and therefore positive. Nonetheless, we can clearly see how social differences already exert an influence on children at elementary school age, and how decisively social origins determine their daily situation.
Depending on their social class, children have different scopes for shaping their lives. Poverty and a lack of household resources lead to fewer opportunities to participate: in the family itself, in which children already register material pressures and existential worries very precisely; at school, in which individual support to help compensate for disadvantages is lacking; in the less attractive areas in which they live; and in terms of opportunities to join clubs and associations or to take advantage of courses in the arts. Lower class children are more frequently left to their own devices. They lack support, stimulation, and guided encouragement. As a result, many of their daily lives show a one-sided focus on television or other types of media consumption. And we find that boys are particularly susceptible to this.
Children from higher social classes, in contrast, can take advantage of their better chances right from the start. Comparatively speaking, they are the ones who have greater scopes for shaping their lives, and the educational background of their families provides access to a varied and creative range of leisure-time activities almost as a matter of course. Self-confidence in being able to organize things for themselves develops almost naturally on the basis of everyday experiences. These children can try things out, and they receive much more encouragement in their personal lifeworlds. They can take advantage of a far greater variety of opportunities to build up a stable group of friends, and, at the same time, they much more frequently experience that their own opinion is taken seriously. These children correspondingly have a much greater trust in their own learning competencies. They learn to make their own decisions on how they should tackle their lives and make the best of the opportunities available to them. Like all children of course, they are also confronted with risks, and they also experience the pressure to prove themselves. However, the difference is that more paths are open to them, and this puts them in a far better position to develop the necessary self-confidence to cope with what are, in part, a range of completely different demands in the family, at school, in leisure time, and in the peer group. More
