Imo forget being "rich", just growing up in a relatively sane environment is an advantage.
It took a long time to get out of that, and material problems were an issue for sure, but I would say the biggest obstacle for me was that I had no rolemodel and was forced to discover everything on my own. In retrospect I had plenty of opportunities to get out of my situation way earlier and I could have done a lot of things better, and it was pretty common sense to most normal/functioning people - but I didn't have a lot of those arround me.
And that wouldn't change if you gave my parents money - after my grandparents died my mother inherited some land and a house, in a year she managed to squander it away with terrible spending decisions and no long term planning (coupled with the sense of entitlement and expectation that things will just work out).
I also never viewed school as something relevant, teachers were hardly authoritative figures (from my perspective their job was to babysit me and they were poorly paid - why would I accept them as authority on anything).
So I don't think it's something you can solve with money alone, having functional parents is always going to set you up to do better in life.
Reading your comment nearly made me cry, because it (strikingly) reminded me of my own story. You are not alone.
Keep your head up (as you seem to always have done), and if you can, make peace with the past and your parents. This took me a LOT of time, but it helped me.
Thank you for sharing your story.
I was harsh on my parents in that post, they were dysfunctional but my mother loved all of us in her own way and spent her whole life arround us, and I can't say a lot of good things about my father - dealing with my mother in those days would break anyone.
I'm on good terms with them now and they are in a better place now that we're grown up and independent.
I grew up in similar circumstances, and it still affects my mindset. It's changing, but slowly.
It helps a lot to read others' stories.
"Scarcity: Why having too little means so much" is a great book on this.
In essence it is not that people in poverty have less innate executive control / cognitive capacity, but that the situation of poverty causes anyone to lose some significant points of executive control / cognitive capacity.
There are some illuminating (but terryfing) experiments in the book, where they show you can literally sabotage a low income persons score on an IQ test by mentioning a hypothetical car repair of 2000 dollars before they take it.
Imagine two rooms, each with a caged bear. The bear is not happy being in a cage. A rich man, and a poor man, are ushered into their respective rooms, and told that the lock on the cage isn't all that reliable.
I'd wager that they'd both suffer roughly equally on a provided IQ test.
If you can't afford it, that car repair is an existential threat.
You don't get that car fixed, you don't get to work, you lose your job, and then everything else that goes with that. Not to mention figuring out what you're going to do while your car is in the shop. Maybe you skimp on the repair, just do what you need to get it running again, and hope it doesn't turn into a bigger problem down the road.
If you can afford it, it's an inconvenience.
You drop your car off with the mechanic, get a rental or just Uber it to work, and pick up your car when it's ready. You'll pay to fix things properly, of course, because you can.
I think it's not scarcity itself, but constantly living under existential fear that causes so many problems.
Modern humans have existed for something like 100,000 years give or take a few tens of thousands, and yet we only started building anything particularly innovative in the last ~10,000 or so. So we spent 90% of our species' history doing very little in the way of cognitively challenging innovation.
I wonder if this might not be the reason. Some have observed that hunter-gatherers often had better nutrition and were healthier than at least early civilized humans, but maybe they also lived under a perpetual cloud of fear about the next famine, raid, or plague. Maybe that basically shut down their capacity for higher cognition. Maybe they didn't have any time to sit down and think and do so free of concern about the future.
So, what to do if you are conservative politician and want more voters? Do you try to make poor people better or worse off given these two data points (whose scientific validity I am not able to judge, but I have to admit, they do seem to make sense)?
[1] https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/abs/pii/S01602...
These days I‘m studying physics and mathematics while having a cushy engineering job and I‘m so genuinely happy that I can sit down and study for hours without having to worry about making ends meet at the end of the month. It’s a blessing.
It is much easier for me to be functional and caring parent when I am happy and content. It gets harder when the period is stressful. I would be failing at that way more if I had one of those real big problems.
Do you think your parents being in poverty (if they were) or a similar situation made it as difficult for them as it was for you? It seems to be an obviously vicious cycle that is difficult to break without education and opportunity for people in these situations.
• 5 Things Nobody Tells You About Being Poor, May 27, 2011: (https://www.cracked.com/blog/5-things-nobody-tells-you-about...)
• The 5 Stupidest Habits You Develop Growing Up Poor, January 19, 2012: (https://www.cracked.com/blog/4-things-politicians-will-never...)
• 4 Things Politicians Will Never Understand About Poor People, February 21, 2013: (https://www.cracked.com/blog/4-things-politicians-will-never...)
The 5 Stupidest Habits You Develop Growing Up Poor:
* (https://www.cracked.com/blog/the-5-stupidest-habits-you-deve...)
Source?
https://stateofopportunity.michiganradio.org/post/poorest-ch... And this https://www.nber.org/digest/jan00/poverty-and-mistreatment-c...
Also, not to make excuses but I think in the mental abuse case people don't always know they are doing it. They do what their parents did or learned from those around them who also didn't know what they were doing.
This is absolutely true!
> This is largely because families in poverty tend to also abuse their kids at higher rates (this includes mental abuse) or at least foster an extremely unhealthy environment due to the stress it causes.
This could be true with some families, but most parents try at least not to go below the financial level they are at. I remember my parent use to get all jittery even at a slight stress on the finances fearing that they will not be able to sustain. They had prioritised education, food, clothing in that order. Unfortunately, after education and food nothing was left! I remember wearing same set of clothes for almost a decade. Even now, even though I can afford to spend, I got into that habbit of wearing same clothes most of the time. I still use clothes that are almost 10 years old! I remember we(I and my friends, they too were from the same financial status) use to wear same worn-out/torn school uniforms by doing something called "rafoo". That made us kids understand value of money and the determination to get out of the situation as soon as possible. The problem we faced was lack of information and support network. We had to build it ourselves from scratch, most of the time stumbling. It also dents the confidence as you don't know how long it is going to take to achieve your goals, if at all it can be acheived!
