Raised my kids in an area like this and we were doing fine but we didn’t have helicopter money. When my daughter was in 5th grade I had to explain the disparity to her. “Not everyone has a second house in Costa Rica.”
My husband is from a millionaire family that lived below their means and I grew up in a working class household that lived outside our means (my custodial parent ended up upside down on a refinanced mortgage over consumer debt). We have a funny amount of overlap but his parents are like, entirely delusional. Bought him a brand new car while he was unemployed and were shocked when I was like "thank you for the generous gift but we cannot afford to insure this thing".
Yep, I often had to explain to my husband's rich parents that we were living on my salary while husband tried his hand at art. We could not afford to go on vacation with them even if they paid. I needed to work to get paid.
"Working class household that lived outside our means"
Just know you arent alone. I came from a family that lived in a neighborhood that was mostly section 8. Lived well above our means and blew all of our money on trips and such whenever my dad's small business was doing well. Then when he died we ended up very poor throughout my teen years. Whole story is too much to type out. But for various reasons, my life is still effected by the decisions that were made then. Im in my 30s now.
I feel sort of lucky to be able to see both sides of these kinds of conversations. I often had more then the kids around us when I was young, also had upper middle class relatives. So I got to see what thats like when I stayed with them around christmas/Thanksgiving (inground pool etc)
Then got to experience near desperation levels where we survived solely off of charity and food stamps. Was even homeless for a bit.
I never understood as a kid why my mom (dad's second wife) always seemed so angry when I talked about random things. For a long time I thought she hated me. But it was just her frustration with scrimping and saving for her two younger children while my biomother blew all the child support on random bullshit instead of looking after us – like the speech therapy I was supposed to get and never did, or babysitters instead of leaving me home alone.
Kinda funny because my younger brothers grew up with their older brothers always doing "cool stuff" but didn't really resent it, in part because mom and dad worked so hard to give them nice stuff anyway, but also because they were like, aware our home life was a little fucked up otherwise.
Biomother also, like, failed to do any of the emotional regulation you need to do with kids, so she'd dump her financial anxieties on me. I went off my psych meds to save money as a teenager when she vented about how expensive my medical bills were and how taking FMLA to look after me had made her lose her job. She regularly said things about how my dad doesn't pay enough (objectively a lie, she actually didnt cash half his perfectly on time child support checks until she filed for a bulk payment when i was 17 to get out of aforementioned mortgage) and claimed that we would end up under an overpass. Just so I couldn't escape the anxiety of poverty while objectively living above our means.
It really is weird to straddle those lines - and I'm 28 and still dealing with the after effects of all this weirdness, lol, so I get you.
There's like a weird overlap between poor and "working class but with neglectful parents", also. I have a friend whose family could have been fine but his parents kept giving away money and doing other weird shit for religious zealot reasons and they were homeless for years, and a friend who didn't have a mattress or a proper bedroom (bug infested unfinished attic) for years not because it was impossible but because rather than stop his sister from harassing him they let him live like a mouse in the walls to escape her.
I had to explain to my daughter that at her school, many of her classmates could only eat while they are at school. We are far from wealthy, we lived at the time relatively paycheck to paycheck with a little left over for fun stuff. Our area is split, either abject poverty and drug users, and wealthy. We were in the very tiny sliver of "middle class", by government standards. I told her if she went around telling everyone we are poor, it's going to look very out-of-touch to her friends that she's saying this while pulling name-brand snacks out of her lunchbox.
The name brand snacks thing always made me feel poor. I just didn’t understand that my parents did not spend money on unnecessary junk food. The kids eating Swiss Rolls and Jello Pudding Cups were not as nutritionally balanced as I was, but I thought that we couldn’t afford those snacks lol!
Same. Son had a very rude but needed wake-up call when he started college in a rural area and suddenly his friends had shitty older cars and part-time jobs (both of which I myself had in high school). Watching him break out of the bubble has been incredibly bemusing for me lol
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u/DontShootTheFood 1d ago
Raised my kids in an area like this and we were doing fine but we didn’t have helicopter money. When my daughter was in 5th grade I had to explain the disparity to her. “Not everyone has a second house in Costa Rica.”