Quote:
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Originally Posted by MSD
Once I was out of the bubble of upper class suburbia, I realized just how much I had and was grateful for it.
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See, now this is something I would like to avoid (the bubble part) when we have kids. I don't know if we'll be living in upper-class suburbia, but given the degrees and potential joint income that ktspktsp and I have/will have in the future, I doubt we're ever going to struggle with money... and thus, neither will our children.
Some background (which I think will be more informative than the survey in this thread). I grew up in an upper-middle-class home (mostly due to circumstance: my biological father died before I was born), on some property at the end of a dirt-road, with a mixed bag of privileges... we had a nice house and several pre-owned cars, but my dad built the house by hand, and he fixed all the cars himself. We never bought anything new. My clothes came from K-Mart for a long time, because my mom was an immigrant and didn't see any social "stigma" about shopping there (neither did I, until I was in jr. high and encasing myself in my own bubble, wanting nicer clothes like the "cooler" kids). So we were by no means rich/upper-class, but we were comfortably FAR from being poor. My mom grew up upper-class in Thailand, and my step-dad grew up working-class/blue-collar in the US. He's still a manual laborer who works his ass off, no less than 10 hours a day, in his mid-50s. Neither of them graduated from college, but our home was full of books--mostly bought for me--and education was an essential value that they instilled in me. We also traveled as often as we could afford.
Anyway, it was my dad who made me aware of poverty, when I was still pretty young... and I think that had a great effect on me. I was never able to construct a decent enough bubble (which I wanted, so I could emulate those "cooler" kids) to make me forget about what he'd shown me. For example, he knew of an elderly woman living in public housing in urban Seattle... we'd go visit her several times a year, bringing gifts and generally just "remembering" her (she had no family). I remember her room stank of urine every time we walked in the door, and her "apartment" was tiny and rather filthy. My mom hated visiting her, and maybe I did, too... but I'll never forget her reality. She died in her room and no one found the body for 3 days. She had no financial capital, and perhaps more importantly, no social capital.
We also took in all kinds of people to our home, much to my mother's dismay, as my dad has always had a soft spot for people who are struggling to just get by. We even had a homeless guy staying in our place for several months, because our church refused to help him out (he struggled too much with alcoholism and wouldn't get help, though, so we had to ask him to leave). It never seemed terribly strange to me, growing up, but I think it shaped a lot of my understanding of class and privilege for the future. He encouraged me to volunteer all the time, with soup kitchens and the disabled, etc. I never liked doing it--but still, it shaped me.
So, thinking about the life ahead for ktspktsp's and my kids, I know that we two are much more privileged than my own parents were... but I want our kids to grow up with as much (if not more) exposure to different classes and levels of privilege than I did, so that they're aware of exactly how lucky they are from a young age. I'm just not sure how to do that. Does anyone have any other ideas/experiences in doing this? Other than lots of volunteering, I'm not sure what else can be done...