Son finds it difficult having posh and not posh sides to the family?

[arrian]

Hello, hope you are all having a good christmas. Just had an interesting conversation with 18 yo ds in the car home from relatives.

He was saying he finds it really difficult having two very different sides to the family
. I think it’s exaggerated, or more obvious by the fact that he saw both my family and dh family today.

I was brought up on a council estate, went off to university, got myself a fairly good professional job. I am much better off now than when I was growing up. My sisters didn’t move from the town.
My parents are both very through and through normal caring working class.

My DS adores his grandparents, but complains they’re a bit boring sometimes. They’re your stereotypical northern, ex-miner brexit voter. Even in my view, quite close minded, but still lovely as family.

DH on the other hand has had a very different upbringing. He went to a top boarding school, and comes from a family that has always had a fair amount of money. His family are very educated, professionals and spread all over the world.

My DS is more like my husband, as he was brought up in a stable home in a nice area and we both had decent jobs. He is currently at Cambridge, following the foot steps of many of his paternal family members and so has a good topic to chat about.

In my eyes, I’d deffo say that DH was a posh git.

My son has told me that he finds it difficult moving from one social setting to the next.

He gets funny looks from my side if he uses a long word, drinks wine, or offers an opinion on something in the news etc. They’ll make half joking comments about him being posh. My dh plays it down completely, and imitates their behavior.
Yet my son said it’s not fair that he should put a false face on.

Don’t get me wrong, he has a great laugh with my family, yet says they’re “boring” and finds conversation to be quite uninteresting; “sandra from the shop is going to Salou, she said it’s lovely”.

It doesn’t help that my parents hate my in laws with a passion, as they think they’re snooty, and will always have more money to spend on gifts, meals out.

Oh FFS. Unshared interests, I meant to say!

And I can talk about the other party's kids, but since I don't know them well or see them often it's a short convo....

Why would the DS favour the side of the family that take the piss out of him and can't hold an interesting conversation?

Ah, I dunno. My family is working class and they'll take the mickey out of anything they can. We were raised to give as good as we got in that regard. I wouldn't say it was rude, it's meant to be funny.

I'm feeling sorry for your DS. It's reasonable to expect him to be polite and try to get on with all his relatives and to appreciate them in their different ways, but it's not OK for them to be rude to him for being 'posh'. If he finds them boring he'll just have to suck it up, but neither he nor they should be making the others feel uncomfortable.

Our family is similiar, I’m the ‘posh’ parent.
Tell your Ds there’s nothing so unclassy as snobbery. (Cambridge is full of elitist snobby entitled young people, tell him not to join them)

Tackle your family when they take the piss. Tell him it’s ok to challenge them, if he’s clever he should be able to think of a response.

Tell him to relax and take people as he finds them.

I come from the same sort of background as you OP and anticipate the same sort of problems for my DCs as they get older. While they're young it doesn't make much difference because niether they nor their cousins really have the understanding of all the different little class signifiers then they get to the stage when they understand them but don't see how all of us are molded in our likes and dislikes by our environments and in many ways it's just a different side of the same coin.

It's particularly hard because it isn't simply a matter of live and let live. Your DS is being looked down on for his choices in a bit of (in my experience) typical reverse snobbery, so he feels Othered by his own family which won't make him feel well disposed towards them. Could his dad have a word with him about fitting in? About it being about fitting-in to this group in the way he is (probably unconsciously) doing with his peers at college, rather than about being false? It sounds like your DH has got a grip on how to move between classes in a way that your DS might find helpful.

Your son needs to develop his social skills and fast. The inference from your post is that he looks down on your family and it almost feels like you do too.
We all have to rub along and be out of our comfort zones here and there.
He is finding his way but at 18 and I do empathise but I would expect a little more social sophistication from him.
Also, as one of my best teachers used to say 'only boring people get bored'!

It was only when my Dad’s ferret escaped and went up my DH’s trouser leg, causing the whippets to get over excited and knock DH’s top hat off and dislodge his monocle that we were all able to laugh at our different social classes together.

Every Mumsnetters worst nightmare.

Bloody whippet.

It’s really tough being privileged.

Yes OP. Reverse snobbery is a thing.

@arriann. Completely understand. Inverted snobbery is f*cking annoying. My ex-in laws were unbelievable.

He should do what I do. When I'm with posh people I put on a northern accent and start talking about chips, lard and fags and when I'm with working class people I start pronouncing all my words properly and talk about university and travelling in Nepal. It works well for someone who just prefers their own company.

OP I think your family are inverted snobs making your DS uncomfortable and I think its very telling that they don't like your DH's family for being "snooty".

Tell your DS welcome to the world. I grew up in a very poor WC home, went to a failing school and ended up at Oxford, did several postgraduate degrees and now work in a professional career. DH did similar. Our families —whom we love dearly, but who live in our home country, so don’t see as often as we’d like —are binmen and and hospital cleaners and roadsweepers, and have absolutely no comprehension of our lives, but DH and I codeswitch cheerfully and we all rub along well, even if we have only our childhoods in common now.

Your DS needs to learn to switch modes and calm down about it all.

Your family need to try too - do they ask him about uni or his interests? What are their shared talking points supposed to be? It doesn’t sound like they have shared history to talk about, it doesn’t sound like you raised him close to them, so what’s the common ground?

'What’s the common ground?'

The weather.

You don't have to start with common ground. If he can debate well, he can start with uncommon ground. Failing that, buy 'Articulate your life' (not the original articulate, whatever you do!) and play that together.

People with real class can fit into any situation, without judging those who might be considered to be of a lower social status than themselves.

If my child behaved or said they found being around people of what they perceive to be of a lower social class than themselves difficult I'd honestly wonder where the fuck I went wrong!

It takes 2 to make a conversation interesting, it sounds like he makes little effort with your family because he thinks of them as unworthy of his effort.

Time for a lesson in how not to be an insufferable snob and how to be GRATEFUL for the LUCK of his circumstances.

BUT I agree there's some inverse snobbery going on from op's family too that also needs addressed.

They’re your stereotypical northern, ex-miner brexit voter. Even in my view, quite close minded, but still lovely as family.

Er, what the actual?

I understand your son's experience. We have similar challenges in our family - and a very similar family background it seems.

Things that are normal for us - theatre, broadsheets, radio 4, filter coffee, good wine - are not normal in my family.

Things that are normal in my family - soaps, Brexit, tabloids, doing the same job for years and years - are not normal for me now.

Neither is wrong but it can make conversation hard. I can't talk about what I've heard on the radio, read in the Guardian etc. They can't talk about who did what in Eastenders. We lack shared things to talk about.

Can you help your son find topics of conversation that he can focus on? I've found following the local newspaper for their area on Twitter to be useful. It's much easier to talk about the local outrage over the opening hours at the recycling centre or the plans for the old police station than it is to talk about me or them.

As a bit of a sidebar, I find the difficulty slightly increased for me compared with DH. He is an academic working in a field linked to weather. He likes the weather and gets very technical very quickly if anyone casually says "Might rain today". Consequently my family has learned to avoid weather chat however, it's interesting that when he DOES go off on one, they all listen good-naturedly and exchange comments about these academics, eh?

I have exactly the same level of education as DH and am similarly likely to go off on one about my topic of study (or similar - I left academia). My reception is noticeably less warm; the women in my family give me face and the men are all "Quick, talk about ANYTHING ELSE". Based on this and similar pub conversations with random people, I'm tempted to say it's even trickier if you're a woman to make conversation with people you have little in common with (sorry, too many withs).

People with real class can fit into any situation, without judging those who might be considered to be of a lower social status than themselves

This.

Sporty the Guardian is a dreadful rag these days. Read something better!

Sounds like the OPs D's has good reason for being uncomfortable in their company. Nothing to do with being snobby. He's being mocked for who is is and is being expected to alter his personality to fit in.

If it had been the other way round and the "posh" side had been mocking him for being "common" then I think there would have been very different views.