SES disparity within families

[ksinger]

Jeez, I really should use italics more. Sorry for so many caps.... And the doubled sentences. (I tend to move things around before I post, and then forget to delete the one I copied). I really should have coffee before I post this stuff.

 

[Sabine]

I did worry in posting this that I would be opening myself to judgment for the factors I chose to include in SES...I know that can be a highly debated thing. I'm enjoying reading others' stories, that's for sure, and I appreciate the different perspectives.

Kenny, I'm of the opinion that while stereotypes can be dangerous, that danger comes mostly from relying on stereotypes to form your opinion of someone, or believing that one person who has some characteristics of a stereotypical group will have ALL characteristics of that group, or also from refusing to change your opinion of someone after getting to know them beyond the stereotype. However, they can be helpful in communicating some generalities in a short amount of time. So I was simply saying that my uncle displays a lot of the characteristics of a stereotypical red-neck and hoping that that communicated my point...not saying red-necks are bad, not saying there's anything wrong with that, just saying that he has different values and interests than myself. I did not intend the red-neck and racist comments to be intended as part of the same thought necessarily, just stating that he is both.

Deco, I don't know if I intentionally meant to include weight as a standard of SES or just a general difference between my family and my cousin's, but I'll explain a bit more about why I included it. My mom's side of the family has a genetic predisposition for obesity. When I was growing up and my mom was close to her family and my parents were really struggling, that did show through in the food we were fed on a regular basis. I know part of it was due to the fact that we ate what we could afford to eat, and sadly in our country, healthy food is more expensive. We frequently ate at fast food restaurants and ate junk throughout the day because it was cheaper and more filling than healthier stuff. My mom's mom, my aunt, my female cousin, my mom and myself all struggled with weight. But as my mom acclimated to the area we moved to, she showed a greater health consciousness, made an effort to change her eating habits and those of our family, and now, while I would still consider my mom and I to be overweight, we are not morbidly obese and we are certainly health conscious. My aunt lives with untreated diabetes because she is not willing to change her eating habits at this point, and my cousin weighed 300 lbs by the time she entered high school. I'm certainly not saying that you can't be overweight and a high SES, and I'm not sure if weight should be considered a factor in SES at all beyond mentioning the cost disparity between healthy food and junk food, but eating and other health habits (like smoking, which I forgot to mention in my previous post), are other things that make it uncomfortable for me to be around those family members.

 

[luckynumber]

Intesting thread

I feel happiness is what you define for yourself. Unfortunately success as defined in other people's eyes is often wealth, great career and perfect little children

 

[Haven]

ksinger--I regret including my friend's story as an example, because I see now that it definitely did not convey the point I hoped to convey. I was simply responding to a couple posts that seemed to connect professional achievements with success, and I disagreed with that. I made the mistake of using this particular friend as an example. Regardless of where my friend gets his money, which is none of my business, he is extremely happy and thus, in my opinion, successful, despite the fact that he has not achieved what some people would call success professionally. I very much disagree with the idea that earning formal degrees and climbing up any professional ladder leads to success. Money, perhaps. Success, not necessarily. And regardless, he has CHOSEN to live this particular lifestyle rather than to pursue some job that would impress strangers and bring home more money. Many people who inherit family money, as you guess he did, don't make that choice. Therein lies the important point, in my opinion.

I could have shared examples of a very good friend of mine who has held a low paying secretarial position in a synagogue for years because it suits her needs and lifestyles just fine. She's very happy with her flexible work schedule and minimum responsibility, and despite the fact that she has a college degree and is one of the more intelligent people I know, she has zero interest in moving up any professional ladder. Or my mom's friends from undergrad who teach tennis lessons and live rent-free in Hawaii because they act as the hosts of a little rental village. These people are all successful to me because they have carved out lives that make them happy, not because they have achieved a level of professional success that would impress other people. (Perhaps I should share that I was raised by tree-loving hippies, so I've been exposed to an unusual amount of people who have chosen to live off the grid one way or another, and are loving it. Of course, in their circle, it would be more embarrassing to be a corporate lawyer than anything else, so talk about perspective.)

You mentioned something about whether my bookstore friend is poor. I do not believe him to be poor, and I definitely didn't mean to insinuate that he was. (The bookstore pays salaries to their FT employees, and they get health benefits and paid vacations. I know this because he tried to recruit me when I quit my HS teaching job, not because I was asking about his financial situation.) As for his travel, it's much more affordable to travel if you live like a native when you reach your destination. I hate that so many people feel they will never get to make their travel dreams come true because they believe it to be too expensive. I got myself out of the country multiple times before I was out of college, but that is all for another thread.

Sabine--I did think that your original post was going to rub people the wrong way, but I think this is an interesting topic, and the truth is that we do use a variety of factors to assess others' SES. I'm interested in hearing more about the lines between the classes. I've had The Teacup Ministry and Other Stories, Subtle Boundaries of Class by Rhoda H. Halperin sitting on my "to read" bookshelf for a while, now. This thread has encouraged me to finally pick it up and start reading.

 

[zoebartlett]

My mom grew up with 3 siblings. I don't want to go into much detal, but my mom, aunts, and uncle had a tough time growing up. When they got older, college wasn't encouraged, especially for the girls. It was common for women to go work, get married, or enter the convent. My mom took one of those routes for a while, and then decided that she was, indeed, going to get a higher education. She worked hard all through school and she's had a very successful career. She has an MBA as well, which she earned when my sister and I were younger. My mom's siblings have all had pretty difficult lives. My mom's blown away that for the most part, she and her siblings all had very similar upbringings, yet, she was the one who "made it."

My dad has 2 brothers. Everyone in my dad's family is/was successful, and they had a very happy childhood, as far as I know. There weren't really any issues that I'm aware of. My dad and his brothers all went to college, and they all have graduate degrees. They entered the military and then continued to work in various fields successfully. There aren't any girls in my dad's immediate family, but I'd love to know how one would have been treated growing up.

It's funny, my parents are from the same state, not too far from one another, but they had very different childhoods.

 

[NewEnglandLady]

This is something I struggle with because my life now is completely different from my life growing up. My parents never received a college education. My grandparents did not go to school after 8th grade. Only a handful of us in my graduating class went to college. I grew up in a farming community where keeping the farm in the family was a priority and I can definitely respect that.

My grandmother started and successfully ran a milk farm well into her 80's and is probably one of the smartest women I know. My father has mechanical ability that I envy and I think shows a great deal of intelligence. I do have family members who arelazy...I'd even refer to them as "rednecks", but it's their lack of motivation that irks me more than anything. I grew up poor, but my parents worked very hard and are really smart people, they had just only been exposed to rural life and had no desire to live any other life. I have no idea how in the heck I ended up where I did--I think it was just a curiousity to get out of my farm community, but now that I'm on the other side, I respect my parents and my small, non-college-educated community more than ever.

 

[zoebartlett]

My parents come from two very different backgrounds.

I imagine that the differences you see between yourself and your cousins have more to do with who you are as people than where you come from.


I agree with this sentence. My cousins and I (on my dad's side) are fairly close in age, probably within 8-10 years of each other. We occasionally keep in touch with one set of cousins through FB. While I can't say we're friends really because of how often we keep in touch, we've been to each others' weddings. We care about each other and we love hanging out when we get together, although it happens rarely.

On the other side of that, we never, ever see our other set of cousins on my dad's side. We haven't seen them in YEARS, and we only get occasional updates on how they're doing when their parents speak to mine. We're closer to that aunt and uncle than we are to their kids. That seems kind of odd but it's true. We don't have anything in common with this set of cousins, so there have been plenty of awkward pauses in conversation the last time we did see themm (which was a very long time ago). We weren't invited to their weddings, they didn't RSVP to my sister's wedding or mine. They're really flakey. Nice but flakey.

 

[zoebartlett]

Uppy--I hear ya. I cannot wait to be back on group health insurance in August. Not that it won't cost us anything, but it will definitely be less than what we're paying for individual coverage.

Living on one's own, without a mortgage or car payments or many of the other expenses people tend to tie themselves down with, is less costly than we tend to imagine. My budget from back in my post-college days was so small it's almost impossible to imagine now that I once lived within it. But I did.

My sister is an actress and a dog trainer (I know, odd combinaton!), and some months she does really well and other months, not so much. It just depends on what job(s) in either position she has lined up. I have no idea what her yearly income is, but it's not nearly as high as somone with a 9-5 (or similar) salaried type of job. She and her husband have one car, they take public transportation as often as possible, and they rent out a few of their bedrooms in their house to friends. So essentially, their roommates pay the majority of their mortgage. That helps immensely, but still...

Somehow, they make it and they're very happy with their career paths and how they live their life. Neither set of parents help them out financially, and they have a very full life. It is possible to survive happily on little income.

 

[partgypsy]

My family is all over the map. What is the definition of SES? The biggest generalization I can make, it seems like the members of my family that didn't have much education often pulled themselves up by their bootstraps and ended up making much more money, while the people who were more highly educated could barely support themselves. And there are also cases like my (uncle, oldest cousin, older brother) who had neither.

My Dad and my uncle were considered to have come from a respectable family from that area (Greece); the great grandfather enterprising making smart decisions buying up other farmers becoming a landowner, but accident led to his death. The grandfather, young, inherited those assets, didn't know what he was doing, squandered it, got sick and died. So both Dad and my uncle were raised by two widows, worked hard from a young age on a small farm. They were lucky to obtain a high school education, as providing for family came before education. After coming to this country both both made alot of money in the restaurant business. My Dad ended up losing his money (low SES to high to low again), with my uncle keeping his and is retired, lives very comfortably.
On my mom's side my grandfather came from a very educated well regarded family, has a masters from a prestigious university but chose to be a self-employed commercial artist, paying the bills and not much else. My grandmother grew up on a farm, not sure if she even had a hs degree. In my mom's family no money was saved for her to go to college, supposed to go to her 2 brothers. My great grandmother was indignant about that and paid for her way; my mom ended up getting a masters and was accepted for the PhD program at a prestigious univerity, but as she was married with 3 small children by then didn't go. Nowadays she makes very little teaching part time as she was a wife during her "career" years. A far as her brothers one has a masters degree but again middles by, other brother who they had high expectations of ended up dropping out of school and joining the merchant marines became an alcoholic (not sure what order).

I have a PhD and a post doc, but make less than half what my specialist nurse cousin makes. In the same vein another cousin is younger than me, went to college at a third rate institution, but has his own restaurants and is probably a millionaire.

Understandably this confuses and upsets my father . One of his pieces of advice when I was growing up was that you can never make a living doing what you love.