My wife and I were now in Washington. We had a warm welcome from my new associates, mainly young sociologists – Manny Rosenberg, Len Pearlin, Erving Goffman, and others soon to arrive.

I knew what I wanted to do: A study of social stratification and family relationships. I was not thrilled at the idea of doing such a study in Washington, DC, because Washington was so atypical a city. But I had little choice in the matter, and Washington was not a bad place to begin such research. Our budget was limited. Basically, I could hire a few young people as my staff, and that was it. It was enough. The young people were wonderful – enthusiastic, quick to learn, and cooperative.

Numerous studies of social stratification and parent–child relationships appeared before ours, mainly by psychologists, all of them focused on particular parental practices – bottle-feeding or breastfeeding, and the frequency of using particular disciplinary practices when their children misbehaved. I had tried my damnedest to make sense of this literature and had given up in despair. My former teacher and close friend, Urie Bronfenbrenner, outdid me, though, and made eminently sensible descriptive sense of the entire body of literature. He arrayed the studies, not in sequence of their dates of publication, but of their dates of fieldwork, and discovered that there had been great changes over time in the practices that parents followed, from restrictive to permissive. Middle-class parents had led the way, always about several years ahead of working-class parents. I questioned Urie regarding his further interpretation, that the reason middle-class parents led the way was because of their greater education. I suggested, instead, that while their greater education led middleclass parents to be more likely to read the experts’ books, as we knew they did, they need not have followed the experts. That they did follow the experts was not, to my thinking, because they blindly followed expert advice, but because the experts gave them useful advice, consistent with their values.

What I did instead was to approach the entire issue from a vastly different perspective, the perspective of sociological theory.