Saturday, August 08, 2009

Why don't I have Entitlement?

In Outliers, Malcolm Gladwell describes a concept (originally from Annette Lareau's research) called Entitlement. (Both Gladwell and Lareau lowercase it, but I'm capitalizing it to differentiate from the generic.)

Entitlement, in this context, is a sense that you're totally allowed to ask people in authority stuff. If you have a question, you can totally ask. If you need some accommodation, you can totally ask for it. If an authority figure is miss informed, you're totally allowed to set them straight. This concept is brought up in the context of child-rearing. According to Lareau's research, middle-class families tend to raise their children to have Entitlement, whereas working-class families tend not to and the parents themselves are more likely to quietly defer to authority. (I'm normally not comfortable talking about "class" like it's a Great Big Thing, but it's an essential part of this concept and relevant to my personal observations about my own experience.)

I've been thinking very hard about this, because I had a solidly middle-class upbringing (my own room, an allowance, chores and responsibilities on principle rather than out of necessity, family vacations, music lessons, extracurriculars, going to university was a given), but I don't have Entitlement. I don't feel like I'm allowed to ask, I feel like I'm imposing and breaking from What's Done when I ask. I feel like the people in authority know exactly what they're doing and are doing it for a very good reason (and, as I've blogged about several times before, it both scares me and pisses me off when they don't know exactly what they're doing and don't have a very good reason).

So I'm trying to figure out why this is.

My first thought is that my parents didn't raise their children to have Entitlement because they themselves weren't raised that way. Their upbringing was most definitely working class, and I can't imagine my grandparents had any time to do concerted cultivation. But here's where it gets bizarre: I think my sister (just under three years younger than me) has Entitlement. I wanted to be a musician, I signed up for music class in high school and only joined the more advanced school bands when specifically asked to do so by a teacher. My sister wanted to be a musician, she joined a band and later helped start another couple of bands, playing actual gigs and even making a CD. Could it be because I'm Gen Xish and my sister is pure Gen Y? Could it be that my parents had become familiar with more middle-class parenting techniques by the time my sister came along? Or could it simply be a difference in personalities?

My second thought was that my Entitlement had been bullied out of me, but upon further reflection I realized that I had less Entitlement than I was expected to long before the bullying started. My first pertinent memory is from when I was 3 or 4 years old, in Montessori school, in what would now be described as junior kindergarten. I wanted to play with these beads, and I was told that I wasn't allowed to play with them because you have to be able to count to 10. (The counting was relevant to how one played with the toy, but I forget how exactly.) This confused and frightened and baffled me, because I could totally count to 100 at the time. But it never occurred to me to tell the teacher that I knew how to count to 100, I just assumed they had some big grownup reason I didn't understand and slunk off to metaphorically (and perhaps literally) curl up and cry. Years later, while going through some papers at my parents' house, I came upon my old Montessori school report card. One of the comments was something to the effect that I didn't show the teachers what I could do and what I had learned, worded in a way that made it clear they expected me to take the initiative. Reading this, I was flabbergasted. I had had literally no idea whatsoever that the teachers might have wanted me to show them what I could do. The thought never occurred to me. I would never - not even with the benefit of adult retrospect - have come up with the idea myself that the teacher wanted me to take the initiative of showing her that I could count to 10. I always assumed that if grownups wanted something from me, they'd ask. So it seems I never had Entitlement in the first place.

I'm not sure if my parents tried to instill Entitlement or not. (They did specifically try to prevent any sense of small-e entitlement.) If they did try to instill capital-E Entitlement, it wasn't nearly to the same extent as the parents described by Lareau. In the example cited by Gladwell, parents taking their nine-year-old son to the doctor told him "You should be thinking of questions you might want to ask the doctor." Not just that he can ask, that he's allowed to ask, but that he should. As though it's something he has to do to Be Good. My parents might have told me that I was allowed to ask questions, or they might have assumed that I knew I was allowed because no one told me I wasn't, but they never would have made a point of telling me that I should think of questions to ask. On the other hand, when I did find myself in a situation where an adult or authority figure unexpectedly tried to get me to express my thoughts or opinion or preferences, I'd become frightened. The first time I ever got a hamburger at Harvey's and they asked me what I wanted on it, I thought it was a trick. Throughout childhood and adolescence and even early adulthood, whenever authority figures unexpectedly asked me for an opinion or feedback or what I wanted, I'd panic (figuratively) and not be able to come up with a satisfactory answer. Part of this is introvert brain - I don't always instantly have words for things that I'm not expecting to have to articulate or that I've never given a moment's thought to - but there was also an underlying fear that even though they were asking what I thought, they didn't genuinely mean it. I thought asking for what I really wanted was Not Allowed, and they actually wanted me to just quietly and passively go along with what they intended (as Lareau describes the working-class children and parents as doing.) The panic would be because I wasn't able to guess at what the authority figure intended, and I thought I'd get in trouble for giving a wrong answer.

Of course, there's also the possibility this whole thing is so generational it doesn't apply to me at all. I've noticed that in general pure Gen Y people are better at Entitlement than I am. I've talked to a few other people who are X/Y cusp and they don't think they were parented into Entitlement either (although there wasn't a large enough sample size to rule out the possibility of working-class influence). But Lareau's book was published in 2003, so the research was done probably shortly before then. The kids she studied are 15-20 years younger than me, so maybe the parenting techniques used on them are completely inapplicable to me. But the fact remains that I do see Entitlement in people of all ages around me - and in my own sister - and I don't have it. There must be something somewhere in there.

I'm not completely lacking in the ability to do Entitlement. I've been able to do it when it's really truly important. For example, when I applied for translation school, I wasn't informed of the date of the entrance exam and didn't find out I'd missed it until two weeks after the fact. I took the initiative of contacting them and asking if there was anything that could be done, and was granted permission to write the exam independently. I got it done because it had to be done and I had to be the one to do it. But if it can get away without being done, I can't work up the nerve. I clearly remember being terrified to ask my high school music teacher if I might possibly swap the size XL band shirt I had somehow ended up with for a size small and would totally have spent four years passively wearing an unflatteringly large shirt if I hadn't heard that one of the guys really needed a bigger shirt.

I'm only recently starting to see how acting with Entitlement is helpful not only to me but to the people I'm dealing with. I'm learning this mostly from observing my Gen Y colleagues. They walk in with Entitlement and look competent and professional, where I looked like a shy, nervous child. There have been a few cases where I was given more responsibility than usual and had to act with Entitlement or other people's work or the product delivered the client would have suffered, and my Entitlement ended up having a positive effect for everyone. When I do act with Entitlement, it always ends up getting mentioned positively on my performance reviews. And when I was recently responsible for training one of our summer students (Why, hello Impostor Syndrome! I haven't seen you in a while!) I couldn't have done it properly without her Entitlement. So it does seem to be something I need to be a proper grown-up. But it doesn't come naturally, and I'm not sure exactly why.

6 comments:

laura k said...

I finally got around to reaidng this post. (Had skipped it a few times.)

I also grew up in a middle class family, raised by parents who themselves grew up working class. I have a strong sense of Entitlement in the sense you're using it from Gladwell. My sister, five years older than me and a baby boomer, had none. She definitely suffered for that and has worked hard to cultivate Entitlement sense as an adult.

I don't think it's generational at all. It could be innate personality. It could also have something to do with bullying - and a combination of the two.

You recall the lack of Entitlement sense in pre-K, so I think that points to innate. Then later, your bullies sense that lack of Entitlement sense in you - not consciously, just in the sense that bullies test their marks, find what they're looking for and continue on. Then being bullied exacerbates your lack of Entitlement - or diminishes whatever glimmer of it that might ever have existed - and it snowballs.

My sister's experience vs mine is a similar example. She was horribly bullied by our father. He was a bully, and he bullied me too - but much less so - because I stood up to him and fought back. My sister never did, and became more bullied, and more cowed.

What do you think?

impudent strumpet said...

I don't know how much of an impact the bullies had, because the bullies were peers and the question of Entitlement is more with authority figures. I felt the lack of Entitlement most strongly in contexts where the bullies weren't present at all. I felt more Entitlement in school and in immediate family and less with, like, doctors and piano teachers and great-grandparents. I can't say it had no impact (it has been known to affect word choices in my translations FFS) but during the time when the bullies were present the question of Entitlement was strictly with authority figures and the bullies were strictly peers, and by the time the lines started to blur (e.g. shopping at stores staffed by cool kids) the bullies had been gone for several years.

However, your comment about your sister makes me wonder if birth order has an impact.

laura k said...

I don't know how much of an impact the bullies had, because the bullies were peers and the question of Entitlement is more with authority figures. I felt the lack of Entitlement most strongly in contexts where the bullies weren't present at all.

Hmm. I was thinking more that having been bullied could decrease a person's self-esteem and assertiveness to the point where it affected all kinds of interactions. If you feel really small and unworthy, your sense of Entitlement is going to shrink or disappear. I think.

However, your comment about your sister makes me wonder if birth order has an impact.

My sister is the middle child of three. I don't know if my brother, the eldest, has Entitlement. I think he does. But his experience as a male is going to be so different anyway.

impudent strumpet said...

Now that I think about it, I don't think it's self-esteem so much as perception of what the (unwritten) rules of Being Good are. I had assumptions about what was expected of me, and if I'd given it a moment's thought I would have assumed the same was expected of my peers.

This isn't as good an analogy as I'd like, but it's like jaywalking. If you jaywalk, it's not that you think you're more important than any cars that might come zooming down the street or than the pedestrians obediently waiting at the crosswalk, it's that you think people in general should be able to use their own judgment in crossing the street.

laura k said...

That's a good analogy, especially for me, since I jaywalk, and have heard that that is because I either (a) think rules don't apply to me or (b) am in a mad rush. Neither is true.

You also point to a big problem with raising kids with Entitlement in the first place. Adults teach kids to be compliant and obedient, and some adults also teach kids to question authority and be assertive. Balancing those two opposing forces can be a painful lesson, and obviously many kids are going to learn it "wrong" (learn a balance that impedes them later in life).

impudent strumpet said...

That's the problem with a lot of aspects of parenting, I think. The focus on raising good kids doesn't always take into consideration the need to raise competent adults.