Cultural & social capital..

[Snoozyschoozy]

Coming up to Christmas the difference between mc children who are provided with social & cultural capital is so obvious.. It has started already on social media & within my circle... The carol services, xmas markets, pantomimes, lunches out, come xmas & half term the ski trips or Caribbean trips will have started... I would love to be able to provide my dc with all these cultural & social advantages (they are advantages) but it's very costly.. I guess my point is that unless all children have access to all I have mentioned all UK society will remain unbalanced.. The kids getting these advantages are learning all the soft skills to fit into mc society comfortably & feel like they belong.. Christmas highlights it for me...

CC doesn’t have to cost. Walk around your local city, watch the lights be switched on, go to the numerous free museums, find an amateur pantomime, library Xmas craft activities, local events… I’ve said this on threads like this before. You simply have to be canny and creative with your thinking. Take a flask of hot choc and go on a winter walk in the woods. Cut out snowflakes from paper/make paper chains. Make your own snowman from cotton wool and paper lampshades stacked on top of one another. Ok, so it’s not a pantomime in the west end but how many people do that really? Make cosy, festive memories and your DC will remember how they felt.

How many MC people do you think follow polo, let alone play it? The ultimate rich person sport. Yes, some "corporate" bodies have jollies occasionally but from what I know, the hospitality areas are the focus and it isn't necessary to know which end of the pony eats and which end doesn't.

Tennis is far from an exclusive sport, there have been public courts in every area I've lived in. Golf can be accessible. It seems more that you want your kids to have a veneer of what you perceive as social capital rather than a genuine interest in culture or sports.

Polo is actually really cheap to watch you take a picnic and pay for the car not per person. Normally around £10

Isn't cultural capital just based on broadening your experiences? As pp have said, so much can be done inexpensively or even for free.
It's hard to compete with the jet setting rich but you can do things to bring wider experiences and knowledge to your children. It can be as simple as reading fiction and non fiction books, watching documentaries (not just Attenborough but a wide variety of subjects) and films that have good contexts for understanding history or social issues, and playing classical music. Many museums and galleries are free.
They don't have to have a deep knowledge of the arts but just being exposed to some and having a little bit of knowledge will help them to feel comfortable around it, or take an interest in it themselves.
Prioritise experiences over things (I do understand that some people don't have the choice to do that, but many do) and look for offers and cheap tickets.

Surely going to Lapland UK or Winter Wonderland is a nice trip out rather than social/cultural capital?

DS is at a private primary, none of his year are going to the Caribbean for Christmas. There’s a trip to the local am-dram panto planned though. Panto is probably a good example and it teaches children about the theatre, having to be quiet during the performance, applauding at the end etc.

To be honest just having the veneer is enough to fit in... My eldest dc has expressed an interest in accountancy (maths whizz, just loves figures!), I think it's fantastic he knows at 12 that this type of career is there for him... However to get to the top in a corporate job fitting in is so important... So even if he has a veneer it would serve him well, fake it til you make it & all that!

"fake it til you make it & all that!"
Don't encourage your DS to do this. He will come a cropper, people who do play polo/sail/ski etc, who have picnicked at Glyndebourne and actually have seen the orang-utans in Borneo will know within minutes that he doesn't know one end of a polo mallet from the other and couldn't ride a beach donkey. I spent many years around these sort of people there is no shame in not knowing.
Encourage your DS to be himself, encourage him to be a decent confident person, ensure he can hold a decent conversation with people, look people in the eye etc, he shouldn't be in awe of those who have shed loads of money, or tongue tied or even worse sycophantic there is nothing more embarrassing, remind him that those with everything are no more special than those who have nothing.
For whats its worth a friends DD is very rapidly climbing the greasy poll in a very well known top "corporate" accountants, she wouldn't know a tennis racket from a golf club and has never sat on a horse let alone played polo. She's doing very well because she's bright (not super bright) hard working and conscientious.

@Convertedtodressage thank you & you are totally right! The toffs can sniff out an imposter in the ranks in seconds 😁

A lot if not most people in that sort of field won't have the kind of "county set" background you're describing. Yes, there is still an old boys network in lots of areas, wouldn't deny it, but I'm pretty certain ability is what really counts in most fields. In my husband's family there was movement from rural postman to fairly senior officer in an elite regiment in one generation. He achieved that not by knowing a bit about polo, etc but by intelligence and being a very good soldier.

As @Convertedtodressage wisely said it is far better to be yourself. Not good to tie yourself in knots trying to fit in with a substrata whose codes you really don't know. There is indeed no shame in not knowing them.

Ski trips and Caribbean Holidays don't build social and cultural capital.

What a very unusual way of looking at things.

I guess my point is that unless all children have access to all I have mentioned all UK society will remain unbalanced.

And how would that be achieved? All households would have to have the same level of income, and who is to say they would spend their money on those things anyway? Money doesn't buy class. What about people from other cultures for whom carol services, Caribbean holidays and going to the panto don't feature in their lives at all?

The kids getting these advantages are learning all the soft skills to fit into mc society comfortably and feel like they belong...

Are you suggesting that if everybody benefited from the same access to these things, there would no longer be a working class?

Oh who cares. What matters is family and Christmas spirit. I couldn’t care less about ‘social capital’, what does it even achieve?

@Dressageconvert

Absolutely.
Completely agree, stable happy secure home with no matter how many parent's really is the key here.

Everything's else is a bonus.

Op we have been extremely short of Money for about 10 year's when I was a sahm. I really did get dd free Xmas presents (wonderful stuff btw , key boards, beautiful mirror set, Disney toy's) from Freecycle, got a posh m and s Turkey for 12 in discount bay and stuff like that.

Luckily in terms of theatre we had smaller theatres with much cheaper stuff going on i'e small independent theatre companies with two or three players for Xmas stuff.

What changed for us was me starting my own budgeting with those tins you can't open. I put £2 a week in and one year didn't spend it but by the next Xmas we had a little more cash!!

We put more money away now and the DC didn't notice our lack of cash at all when younger.
But that habit of putting money away is still with us.
This is probably the last year we put so much Into it but that's ok.
That 2 pound a week was about 100 and nearly 200 by the following Xmas.

@blacksax again very true. A long time when we were really short of cash our neighbours seemed to have lots of disposable income and did the whole toys r us sweep right before Xmas whilst I was sourcing free gifts but I was also finding cheap theatre and stuff to do but they didn't take their DC anywhere like that.
Same with DH family, very welthy but aside from stingy presents they weren't interested in taking the sc to theatre or anything like that.

I think been able to expression yourself and being easy going and fitting in work's better in normal jobs

I agree with you on this.... There is a secret, unspoken code within that set & if you don't know the code you're more or less an outlier...

I don't think the "secret codes" are something your dc will need access to, as that is the upper class rather than the middle class, and they tend to stick to their own.

@LisaJool I think the mc are similar & absolutely not inclusive. They have their own particular markets too!

@Snoozyschoozy yes there will be markers, but they will not be comparable to the UC exclusivity. In the nicest way possible, you sound as if you are very resentful and any suggestion given to you in how to create cultural/social capital is not acknowledged. Your attitude may be the biggest barrier to your son, not his lack of going to Christmas markets or pantomimes.

I do all of of the listed stuff with my 3dcs, I'm just pointing out the inequalities are very obvious ar Christmas

But OP it has been pointed out multiple times that quite a few of the "inequalities" you've listed are free and accessible for everyone. None of the things you mentioned will be responsible for getting a top job in a Big Four. You said several times that your ds "doesn't stand a chance". That attitude will really affect him.

Let's say for instance typical corporate "mingling" might want entail golf, tennis, skiing, polo perhaps! One would not want to turn up a complete beginner as they would look completely incompetent & more importantly feel completely out of their depth!

Corporate mingling won't entail these things. Possibly golf at a push, but it wouldn't look incompetent or out of your depth for a 20 something not to play golf, it would be the norm. I think you've got a mistaken idea about what the corporate world is like. Encourage your dc to work hard, take an interest in the world/the news etc and they will be fine. People will talk about TV shows at work and normal things. I think the worst thing you can do is pass on an attitude that your family is somehow inferior.

This is hilarious 😂 must be a wind up.
If not it shows you have no insight into what corporate mingling might look like.

Btw. Accounting is a meritocracy. The big firms want bright hard working people to mould.

We run a grad scheme at work. These are for grads who will easily end up earning 100k plus. None of them know a single thing about polo, would turn their noses up at playing golf, some might ski I guess but I don't know, and I guess they might have done tennis at school. None of them went to private school, two are immigrants and one is the child of an immigrant, none of them come from family money and they all absolutely fit into the team.

In fact the one on the wider team who doesn't fit in is the one who over attempts to be posh, sneers at anything she considers to be not middle class enough and is very 'keeping up with the joneses', and tells us she doesn't know anything about the books we talk about because she only reads thirteenth century prose, anything later than that isn't worth bother about 🙄

Having an interest in current affairs, an ability to understand other cultures and the ability to hold a conversation (rather than just talk about themselves) are all useful skills and free to teach.

But honestly the people I know with the best soft skills are those who worked retail and in cafes etc as teenagers and students. Because you have to be able to speak with and deal with everyone. money can't actually teach soft skills.

But I do sympathise with seeing everyone around you whizzing off for fancy holidays and expensive events you cannot afford it's crap. But it will only impact your children if you let it.

@Greennetting thank you so much for the lovely response, very reassuring 😊