If you grew up poor and in bad areas, did you feel like you were missing out by not being middle class?

[cocolamer]

I grew up pretty poor and come from a housing scheme once considered one of the worst slums in Europe. My parents did manage to move to another scheme when I was 8 but it was still a poor area and my parents really struggled to make ends meet.

I was clever at school but it was rough and if you were clever you got bullied. I did escape into reading and I think it was though books, films and TV that discovered a different world of middle class people where people had things like holidays abroad, music lessons, ballet lessons, trips to the theatre or the museum, different kinds of food and experiences in life. I would have been about 7 when I realised I'd been born into the "wrong" life! I longed for all the trappings of a middle class lifestyle and loved to read books and watch films that depicted the kind of arty, intellectual middle class family life I wish I had myself.

It was something I really felt right though school and I did seek out by myself schemes that would allow me to get free music and art lessons (never did get to do ballet though sadly) I did go to university and have a home and life more like the one I wanted as a child although I have made peace with my working class background now and appreciate the good bits of it.

Did anyone else who did grow up poor notice and feel like they were missing out on all the benefits of a middle class upbringing like music lessons, the piano, the art gallery trips, the educated parents with lots of books? I certainly met middle class people at university who seemed to wish they had been brought up poor like the boy I dated from south London who had me convinced he was from the "ghetto" but was in fact from a lovely town house in leafy Greenwich and his parents were both academics at good London universities!

You're basically asking poor people if they grew up wishing they weren't poor really.

I grew up under pretty unusual circumstances. My parents lived on a council estate but it was due to them not being able to stay renting their previous house. My mum had a good job and got promoted, she was a fairly high earner (around £50k in the 90's/early 2000's). It wasn't the norm in the area we lived in.

So while I grew up on an estate where loads of the parents didn't work, I was the girl who did horse riding and things like that.

I myself as an adult am that young parent trying to make ends meet in a one income household. My DC do lots of things but not expensive things (though they are all little so that may change).

I think cultural interests can be quite restricted by classism. I did a class test recently and got the "emergent service worker" group - low income, renting, but high cultural interests.

The working class category had similar circumstances to me but little cultural interest. So I guess there are multiple factors at play and I can't identify what leads people to have interests in certain things like your OP is asking.

As an anecdotal example, I was one of four. Two of us have interests akin to the ones you describe ( me and my brother), and two of us have interests and social lives that one would more typically ascribe to poorer people. Think drink and drugs and parties and close friendship groups on estates.

So I think that like with anything, it's subjective. Poor people have plenty of company amongst other poor people so I don't always think there is an innate sense of missing out other than in a general awareness that relatively they are not well off compared to other groups.

Likewise, there are MC people who's lifestyles or interests I would associate with poorer people (again mainly drug habits) but they have the finances to support that lifestyle more comfortably than the WC.

I really do think it comes down to personality and perhaps early life experiences?

I felt I missed out on travel and culture, on having calm decent parents who could hold a conversation rather than rant like the Daily Mail. I missed the security that my friends had. I loved the cheerful light hearted feel of their houses and found going home depressing.

I minded that their parents got involved with the school while mine were busy picking fights and being objectionable. I didn't take anyone home. But at least I learnt how to behave from my friends and their parents.

I left home at the first possible opportunity, and then things got much much better 😊

No not until I went to high school and everyone was going on a skiing trip and we couldn't afford it. Wasn't the only one as it was the 80's, but it felt shit. (On reflection, I am glad I didn't go as the people who went from my year were horrible and skiing wouldn't have been my bag at all but it was the stigma, I suppose of being in the poor gang.) I think it was after I left school, I became more aware of my class when I met people who were middle class and pretended we were "just the same". Yeah so we are .Like your mum has just bought you a fancy car and you went to a private school, we are soooo much alike .

I grew up in the 1970s and I think that the things that you mention - holidays abroad , music and ballet lessons and trips to the theatre were a very upper middle class thing . I would say my upbringing was lower MC and nobody I knew did those sort of things. I remember being a little puzzled that children in books went to boarding schools and had ponies - but that wasn't the life of anyone I knew so considered it wasn't real life .

I grew up on a council estate in a shithole ex-mining town. We didn’t have a phone, never mind a car, and this was in the 1980s not the 50s. Your upbringing certainly sounds stereotypically middle class to me.

I grew up in a 2-bedroomed terraced house, with 3 older brothers (one slept in the attic). I had to sleep in the same room as my parents until we moved house when I was 11. We had no bathroom, the toilet was outside in a yard (no garden). No heating, just 2 coal fires downtairs. No carpets anywhere, only lino. No kitchen, just a scullery where there was an Ascot thing on the wall for hot water, and a cooker. No 'fridge, freezer, washing machine. (launderette or hand washing). Certainly no car or 'phone! It really was poor at that time. I can't say I ever realised when I was a child. I'm in my 60s now and it's made me realise how very lucky kids are today (my own GC included)

Slightly off topic but what do people think is the main reason they weren't taken to museums?

I'm not being goady. My parents didn't and still don't have any interest in museums so I wasn't taken as a child. I assume their parents didn't take them as children.

Just wondering if it will change for future generations as museums are free nowadays.

I grew up middle class but broke, in a poor area, so we did go round all the free art galleries and ferreted out the free music/dance lessons, and went to the library everh few days, but only ate meat once a week and that was often one slice of bacon each.

It was a bit weird 🧐 I escaped into reading also.

And I do think it's worth pointing out as well that even as an adult, I didn't really consider people by their class. It was only really until I had my first and got onto MN that I saw people talking about class quite a lot.

I only saw people who seemed to have more chaotic lives (plenty of that on a large CE) but I never considered people as much richer or poorer. Kind of like how as a child, your mum is your mum regardless if she is 16 or 35 when you are born if that makes sense?

Came from a deprived seaside resort and there was no middle class there so I wasn't that aware of any different lifestyles to ours. I only really encountered them when I left home for university and for the longest time I felt like I was living in a zoo. It mostly made me really curious about people's lives eventually once I stopped boggling. I can't say I feel that comfortable with people who are so different to me but I don't feel out of place in museums and public art galleries any more. They were built for the people. Including me.

@MintJulia speak for yourself. My parent's left school at 14 but they didn't rant like the Daily Mail nor did they read the Mail or The Sun. They died pretty darn poor from the East End of Glasgow but not ignorant. They knew their way around a library, which they took all of us to from an early age. I've heard alot of nonsense coming from people of all classes.

Didn't realise the middle class even existed as a child, with my family's working class and brink of poverty lifestyle and environment being as entrenched and encompassing as it was.
Spent my teens feeling completely dissociated, and not understanding why I felt less than. Spent my 20s with imposter syndrome feeling inadequate/anxious about never quite fitting in, and my 30s resentful of how I've had it harder than most people in my social circle, although working on that now with therapy.

There are good things about having grown up struggling financially and being in the cultural desert. It gave me such a drive to work hard, a real love of achievement and progress, and I relish every fancy/posh bit of food and middle class frippery 😁I've mostly dated middle class men who have nowhere near the same motivation to work as I do, most I've known seem to want to just get on in order to keep up their social cachet rather than for an intrinsic love of learning/working/earning money, and they bemoan how much harder they have to motivate themselves because they know they can fall back on family if they fail.

Oh and we went to the Kelvin Art Gallery and The People's Palaces in Glasgow . It was free and I took my own children there when they were small, as a single parent. Filled a plastic bag with pieces (sandwiches) juice and crisps. A day oot.

I grew up poor. Big family, working class. Highlight of the year was receiving bags of clothes from other families so we could have "new" clothes.
My parents tried their very best. We were encouraged to read, all had library cards, went to free events, lots of time outside.
Felt like you, I longed for singing lessons, dance classes and to eat out. I found local drama groups and dance classes at school.

Did well in school and after. Now my kids have the life I wanted. Private school, eating out, trips to theatres and holidays abroad. However, they know they are lucky. Their cousins have a different life, they see how hard we work and they are by no means rich by their private school friends.
We still do things that are free, museums, galleries and walks in the woods.

I did when I was younger, but not now.

When I was at uni I suddenly met all these people whose parents had taken an interest in their cultural and academic education, or were educated themselves. I was SO jealous that I'd missed out that I was really angry with the world (and my parents) for a while.

But as I've gotten older I've appreciated more how relaxed my upbringing was. My parents literally never had ANY expectations of me or what I did with my life, whereas my middle class friends have usually dealt with a lot of emotional pressure from their families to succeed, especially if they "had been given all the opportunities".

I bet a lot of people go through this exact thought process over time.

They were free when I was a child in my city, but it would no more have occurred to my parents (both from deprived, dysfunctional backgrounds) to take us to one than it would have occurred to them to try to sprout wings and fly. I’m not sure they would have known they free.

Either way, if they gave them any thought, it was ‘not for the likes of us’, just as they thought libraries were ‘for rich people’ and books were for those lazy souls who had leisure to waste on that type of thing. Just as they assured me students were ‘rich people’ and tried to persuade me to leave school at 15, and that ‘ordinary people aren’t allowed in the university grounds’.

Ironically, I grew up in a city with a wealth of free cultural stuff they just didn’t see. It has even more now, and they still don’t see it, even when I draw their attention to things they would probably enjoy.

Do it do it do it OP! There are adult beginner ballet classes - I took one and it was fab!
I have very posh parents but we were very hard up, went to a terrible school, lived in a falling down house, on a dangerous street, often cold, hungry. BUT mum and dad found us books, a piano, guitars, took us to art galleries, camping, free activities. AND I had friends in same situation, we got together and encouraged each other to get out of there.
I still have nightmares. But poverty is different to working class.

I didn’t feel like that no, more I couldn’t understand how people had big or nice houses. I found it really confusing.i thought being poor was the norm.

So when I went to a school friends house and the house was nice, I was just really confused by it. It was so far from my norm. Or if they had a fridge full of food, drinks. I just couldn’t understand how that happened. I would just stand and stare and be so confused, that they had lots of food, or juice. And were allowed it. Our fridge was always empty, some nights dinner was a sandwich made with two bits of cheap white bread. There was no juice, no snacks.

i am an example of social mobility being successful, i have the high paying job and the big house, wear good clothes, drive the big expensive car, privately educated kid, and people comment a lot on the house , delivery guys, tradespeople etc . In a nice way. The wow this is lovely,stuff. And I oddly try to downplay, like oh we got it cheap and we did it up, or it’s such a lot of work, or oh it’s smaller than it looks. None of which are true.

i never longed for more growing up , i just couldn’t grasp how anyone actually had more. It was utterly alien to me as my whole child hood was having nothing.

My parents both left school at 14 as their wages were needed in their respective families. I don't think anyone I knew had parents who both attended university.

I didn't feel like I missed out by being working class and I still think the same. I know my parents did the best they could for me.

I'd I'd been born 20+ years later, with all the opportunities that have opened up since the early 90s, maybe I'd have noticed the difference more, but I'll never know that.

@Thehonestybox You do make a good point my parents are very loving and always accepted me and said as long as you do your best. There was no pressure and love never felt conditional while I've had some friends from more middle class background who felt like they were being hot housed and pressured to do well or into things they didn't want to do.

I know this post sounds really scathing of WC people and I know for a fact not everyone is like that, but I do know what you mean.

My mum lives on a nice retirement state now that is still adjacent to the council estate we grow up on. Recently I began walking her dog around there when visiting for nostalgia's sake, and the world of some WC does seem very small. I've seen people who's parents had council houses on the estate get pregnant at a young age and move into a council estate down the street.

But who I am to say there's anything negative about that in fairness. For most of human life, life would have been similar to that, surely?

I do remember too at a really early age becoming aware of some peoples' unpleasant attitudes or views. I was a little Lisa Simpson character looking back, progressive but quite pompous in my own way!

Sorry, a bit rambling but it's been interesting reflecting back on my childhood.

@MaidOfSteel I think I feel like I missed out because I did specifically want to do things like learn to play the violin and piano, take ballet lessons and so on. Arty, cultural things that were not part at all of the working class culture I grew up in. I wanted to study Classics and Russian at high school but those subjects were not available, when I looked into it only the private schools taught those subjects.

Well, we were solidly middle class until the recession in the early 90s, lost everything including our house, moved into rental, I remember my mum telling us to duck down and hide when bailiffs were at the door. I was in a private school and got taken out midway through what is now y7. They sold their cars and bought a couple of run arounds, my mum had to carry 10l of water to top up the water whenever it overheated.

My dad was an architect and his practice folded. There was no income.

I think my point is you can be low / middle / upper / whatever class but it can all fall to shit or you can achieve great things.

I don't judge by class / money / accent / anything else.

I think coming from nothing has its positives. My dc get everything and don’t know they’re born! But I’m really pleased they don’t know what it’s like to be skint. I can’t say I wanted to be mc growing up, but I do want some of it for my dc.

The house I lived in till I was 9 had no hot running water, only an outside toilet, no phone, fridge or central heating, with just a sink and draining board in the kitchen. Baths once a week in front of the fire. The house was in a slum clearance area and we had to move to a new council house - we thought it was a palace!

The only middle class people I saw were in sitcoms on TV. I once asked my dad why he didn't have his boss over for a drink like they did in Terry and June - he still laughs about that now, 50 years later.