Childhood and class

In My Humble Opinion
41

We were middle class, but I had no clue. When my parents split up, apparently then we were poor. I didn’t realize we were poor until mom told us she couldn’t afford to give us lunch money (at a mere $0.50 a pop for lunch; we’re talking $2.50 a week) so she had us put on the free lunch program. I didn’t even realize that meant we were poor until the first time I went through the lunch line. When you’re middle class, you got to go to the lunch room once a week and go buy a meal ticket for the week–but you had to keep track if it all week by yourself and if you lost it or forgot it, too bad so sad. Each lunch, the lunch lady would punch your ticket. Except if you were on free lunch, you were evidently not to be trusted to keep track of your meal ticket so the lunch lady kept the free lunch kids’ tickets right there in her little lockbox. When you got up to her in the line, she’d nod, pull your ticket out, punch it, and send you on through the line. All the other kids knew that, if you didn’t carry your own ticket, that meant you were poor. And, of course, this was an upper-middle to high-class school so the poor kids were made fun of quite a bit.

So I didn’t know I was poor until the snotty rich kids started making fun of me for it. Which could possibly be why I still have a bit of chip on my shoulder with wealthy people. I assume they were the same douchebags who made fun of me when I was little and they’ve grown up, but that means they’ve just learned to hide their derision better. Probably totally illogical, but I really don’t know that many rich people. Whenever I do though, I always get this sense they are looking down their noses at me.

42

Working class and knew it. I found out when my parents got me a scholarship to a rich Hebrew elementary school in a fancy neighborhood in Long Island. My mailman dad and SAHM had vastly different tastes and values than offspring of hyper-religious doctors and lawyers. They mocked me for my father’s profession, my small apartment in public housing and my clothing that did not say La Coste. I hated every fucking minute of it. There’s nothing worse than santimonious religious fanaticism coupled with over the top affluence.

43

I voted middle class and didn’t know it, although it would be more accurate to say I was totally confused about what we were. We were pretty solidly middle-class, I think, but we lived like lower-middle-class for the most part (we weren’t poor, but my mom did things like buy clothes four sizes too big to save money and so on)… but on the other hand, I went to private school for a couple of years, which only the upper-middle-class/lower-rich-class did. (There wasn’t anyone truly rich in our town; if there had been, they’d have lived elsewhere!) Then again… I knew we weren’t poor, because when I switched into public school I saw what poor was, and I knew we weren’t rich, because we didn’t have all the fancy stuff my private-school friends did, so I guess I would have answered middle class if those were the three options?

44

We were poor (got out first car my senior year in HS and when I graduated I could not see how I was going to college–truly a miracle happened) and we had wealthy relatives, so hell yes I knew.

45

Then how do you differ rich from middle class? I don’t know of many MIDDLE CLASS suburbs that don’t have safe neighborhoods and excellent schools. While the salaries of the people living there may seem good, I wouldn’t call them rich.

46

I would say we ranged from lower-middle class when I was young to solidly middle-class in my teens. A lot of the change had to do with moving away from the Bay Area (expensive) to the foothills east of Sacramento (cheap land!) in the early 80’s. Every things seemed to cost less and my dad was making more money after we moved.

47

Well, I’m in other China, and although in my own home we’re middle class*, it’s an absolute certainty that we’re rich here. That sort of bugs me, because in Michigan no one knows whether you’re poor (unless you’re trashy or in a bad part of town) or whether you’re upper middle class (unless you’re in the rich part of town). Here I have a driver. My slightly-small car is huge. My house rent per month is more than most Chinese make in an entire year (and suprisingly more than I’d ever pay to live in Michigan).

*Top 10% of the country, although there’s still a huge margin to get to the top 1%.

48

We were middle class, and I knew it. White-collar middle class, not, say, laborer middle class.

Nowadays, I’m simply high class, baby. :cool:

49

I’m British so class distinctions were something I imbibed so young I can’t remember when I wasn’t aware. However, being Britain, class and wealth don’t map precisely on each other. I voted middle class and knew it but we were not as well off as as some other middle class people nor indeed as soem working class people. When I was very young my parents were having quite a struggle with money for day to day things but they owned a nice house.

50

We were poor and I knew it, but I had no idea HOW poor we were until I was in my teens.

51

To me, “rich” is being completely self sufficient due to ownership of large amounts of wealth and revenue generating assets. Usually sufficient such that you don’t really interact with non-rich people. One of the distinctions of “class” structures is that there are real separations between the classes. Private schools. Gated communities (or even gated estates away from such bourgeois affectations), private vacation homes.

52

Snipped out some stuff that was different for me. Otherwise, this is me.

I have a terrible time trying to define my family of origin. Both of my parents worked full time, and we took exactly one vacation when I was growing up (when I was 5).

On the other hand, my parents placed a high priority on education, so part of the reason they both worked was so that I and my sisters could go to private school (albeit on partial financial aid).

My mother constantly talked about how tight money was, especially after my parents split up when I was 14. You have no idea how many times I heard we were going to “the poorhouse”. I think until I was 10, I thought there was an actual poorhouse that we would end up in. She bought those horrible generic food products with the olive green and black stripes and block lettering on the label, and that all came from a place called Heartland Food Warehouse. ANy money I made (starting with when I was babysitting at 13 and until I moved out at 17), I had to give over a significant portion of for “room and board”. I was expected to work full time in the summer, even if that meant having multiple jobs.

On the other other hand, each of my parents had a car. Our electricity never got shut off and, in fact, I don’t think my parents had any issues paying bills on time. We had a color TV. Eventually we had cable. We took dance lessons. And, see above—part of what was going to land us in the poorhouse is that she worked her fingers to the bone to send us to private school. :rolleyes:

So…who knows. We were at best middle class, but not as poor as my Mom led us to believe. I went to school with very, very rich people, though, and it was clear that there was an enormous divide.

53

Wow this is a LOT like my childhood, except my mom had a job in retail so there was always something from her store for holidays. I don’t ask how she got the gifts, but there were always gifts. She too was a single parent in the 70s and my father easily got out of paying child support, despite having a good job. He was warned he wouldn’t be able to see us if he didn’t pay something like 30 bucks a month, but he didn’t care. We didn’t see him after that until we were adults and he came skeeving around looking for a handout (lost that good job to boozing at some point). Anyway it was impossible for her to get a loan for a house. We were lucky in that my grandparents helped out so they owned her house in name. It was small and in a bad neighborhood, but at least that kept us in a stable home environment.

Unfortunately my life for the most part has been about the same. I don’t even think about it I guess, not after living that way so long. It’s never bothered me to be poor, although as I get older I’m learning how tough it is to not have an education or money in the bank.

54

I don’t think I really knew what we were, even though we were middle class.

On one hand, we had two cars, a two-story house with 2.5 bathrooms, and luxuries like multiple TVs (one with a VCR!), our own washer/dryer (though sometimes we would go across the street and use the laundromat in case either one was broken), and our dinner plates were always full.

But on the other, we didn’t get an allowance and you basically had to draft up a legal brief to make a case if you wanted something like a pair of new shoes (I remember being unhappy with the Payless generics my mother would buy but always being unable to articulate why. I just knew they weren’t like what the other kids were wearing). My mother was all about us looking “nice”, but we’d go to Kmart or a similar place to find this “niceness” rather than, say, Macy’s or even TJ Max. I never wanted for much, which was good because whenever I did I’d hear how we couldn’t afford it. If we ever had to ask anything from our parents, my sister and I would take turns and be all scared about it.

My dad was bringing in good money as a principal, and the down-scale neighborhood we lived in probably helped him keep prices low, but both of my parents had the mentalities of the working class. They had advanced degrees but didn’t take us to museums or push other cultural enrichment activities on us. All the vegetables we ate were canned and horrible. Our vacations were spent in cultural blackholes like Panama City Beach, Fl or Myrtle Beach, with the obligatory drive up to Indiana to visit relatives. There was one time when I was five when we went to NYC, but we stayed in dorms because the trip was some saving-the-world work-related thing that my mother was doing. My parents drove two cars, but my dad always drove some old thing that was in constant need of repairs. I can’t remember the last car he drove before I went off to college because they never lasted very long for them to make a memorable impression. (My mother, however, was in possession of the two minivans I remember growing up with).

I do not think my parents–or at least my mother–were very wise with money. She had to work at Domino’s Pizza for a stint. As a nine-year-old kid, I thought it was normal that she’d be picking up shifts there, and I viewed it as a boon for us because we often had pizza for dinner! But now that I look back on it, they had to have been going through serious money problems. I can’t imagine a husband working a professional job feeling particularly proud watching his wife wearing a paper uniform every evening. And I don’t think my mother was particularly proud of herself either. But at least she took care of business.

My parents made out well compared to their folks and siblings. But I think I spent most of my childhood in lower middle classdom without really knowing it.

The other day I skype-chatted my dad and we were talking about my niece and her lofty college picks. He asked if the absence of any parental savings for college had influenced my decision to go cheap and local. It was the first time I realized that my parents hadn’t actually saved anything. I did go cheap and local to make things easier for them, but I didn’t know they hadn’t saved anything. So yeah, there was a lot I didn’t know. I’m still learning some stuff.

55

We were rich, middle class, and poor. Depended upon the year.

From 1967-1976, middle class and rising (my Dad became the top executive at JC Penney in the Atlanta market at this time)
1977-1983, lower middle class and struggling (Dad lost his job, tried real estate, didn’t work, tried an executive placement business, didn’t work, started delivering phone books and in '83 got a management job with RR Donnelley in phone book distribution)
1984- : upper middle class to rich: Judge Green ATT decision came down, which cost my father’s job, so he started a company (delivering phone books), which, after struggling for a while, eventually became a success, making his net worth in the low 7-figures when he passed away in 2007.

56

I was aware that we were middle class because I had friends who were in worse off situations than I was, and far better situations. My dad is a doctor, but when I was born he was still in his residency and paying for his own education. We were living off my mom’s speech therapy wages–and to put that in perspective: when I got my first job out of college I was making more than my mom did in that same year. So for the first few years of my life we were just eeking by. Then dad got a full time doctoring job, we got a house, my brother was born and we were doing pretty well, but my parents never really let go of the “just eeking by” mentality. I had no idea that we were “Very Upper Middle Class” until I was filling out financial aid forms for college. I asked Dad if he could get me his tax info and he straight up told me not to bother because there was no way I was getting federal aid. I was kind of flabbergasted.

57

I will say that mentally, no matter the actual income, our attitudes were upper middle class or higher. We always worked in our own businesses (four separate self-made millionaires among my direct relatives) and we were taught about investing at a young age… When I was 10, I would help my grandfather track his investments and write down his rental income in his ledger (not to mention cutting grass at these properties, or working 6 days a week at his campground & mobile home park (long since sold)).

58

I thought I was middle class into middle school. House in the burbs, boat at the lake, drive to go on vacation. Then my parents sent me to private school, and I lowered myself in my perception, going to school with kids who skied in Aspen for the break.

Then we moved to a farm town. We became rich in my perception. We had a nice house with some land, and I had many friends living hand-to-mouth. It was obvious based on the cars in the high school lot, and who went out to lunch vs ate in the cafeteria. I was one of the rich kids, no doubt, at that school.

When I went to college, I got poor again as I rubbed elbows with heirs to some of the larger fortunes in the nation.

By the numbers, we were always in the top 10% of income streams probably (guessing, my parents never really shared that much). I still am at that level, but again my perception of where I sit completely depends on who I interact with on a given day/week/month.

59

Middle class, but had no idea how other people lived or where we were on the scale (all our neighbors were about the same).

My parents both had multiple degrees, and both worked. They were sort of “toy” nuts, and spent money on things like boats/campers rather than furniture/jewelry. We had an old used ski boat my dad bought and repaired, and ditto an old camper. He went in with several other guys to buy a small airplane so he and I could learn to fly. He was very much a “Caractacus Potts” sort of parent with the engineering degrees to match (always building something).

When I went to college people actually thought I was rich (“He has a boat and an airplane!”). They soon found otherwise when they visited our rather average house.

60

When I was really little we were either on the extreme high end of poor or the extreme low end of middle. As I got older and my mother went back to work, we moved squarely into the middle. At the time I was wholly unaware of any of this.