To think people underestimate impact of advantages

[brasty]

I think lots of people underestimate the impact of advantages in their life.
So having parents who value education and encourage you.
Having parents who find the best school for you.
Having loving parents who create a loving environment to grow up in.
Getting help with house deposits.
Having a parent who will help you out when things go wrong.

All or some of these things makes it so much easier to have a good life. Yet so many people underestimate the impact.

So true Jonapot
I hope one day my children can look back and feel that about me.

Success (well, the generally accepted version of it in our society) is a mixture of things.

Your starting conditions
Your temperament
What happens along the way
How you deal with it (which is influenced a lot by 1 and 2.)

It's undeniable that your start in life is a huge factor. I'm from a poor and not terribly functional background. I've done ok because:
I was lucky enough to be born well above average intelligence
My temperament is of the stubborn but flexible type
Nothing too dreadful has happened to me

I'm well aware that if I'd had a more stable upbringing and better educational opportunities I'd have done better. I did go to uni (multiple times) but it was a financial and social struggle. I saw there that those who expected to go saw it very differently than I did
I'm also aware that my upbringing could have been much worse. I could have had a truly terrible time of it, or I could have been born a girl in a grim bit of tribal Pakistan. What would my chances have been then? Or I could have developed a life changing illness. Or become disabled.

Success is a mix of factors. It's rarely all luck unless you're of the dim but billionaire Ilk. It's rarely all circumstance, although there are people who have pulled themselves up from some dire situations. For most of us it's a mix, although that mix varies with where we started.

What can we DO about it is the question.

We can ensure that families that need it have early, quality intervention. Closure of sure start centres is insanity. We can ensure that all children have equality of opportunity in education. It's obscene that abpoor child is expected to put up with what might be a sink school and low expectations while a rich child's parents would have the resources to educate privately. ALL schools should be of high quality with free school meals, and wraparound care and high expectations for children.
Reducing child poverty would help
Moving us from a low wage low skill economy to a more skilled higher wage economy would help.
More help for drug and alcohol problems
Better housing
Better schools
Less inequality.

I also think that people seem to get offended when people say luck (or chance or circumstance) is a factor in success. I do t understand that. It doesn't take away from the fact that they may have worked immensely hard as well.

And hard work alone isn't valued by society. To earn money you need hard work, a skill that's in demand and that skill has to earn someone some serious cash

We don't value hard work or skill that benefits society but doesn't generate money, do we? So carers for example work incredibly hard and do a socially valuable job. But they don't earn money. A footballer on the other hand is skilled no doubt, but they are paid because on the back of their skill someone is make serious money.

Closure of sure start centres is insanity.

On the face of it yes, but the issue with sure start centres is that they failed to reach their target demographic and drive change. They were therefore ineffective in achieving their funding objectives. Unfortunately so many "good on the face if it" initiatives just don't work, and we have to just try different things.

The point about the normalisation is such a good one.

A while ago I was sitting with DH and two of his old school friends, and they were talking about how they won't be sending their kids to private school, it's no longer an affordable option and anyway, they didn't think it had given them any real advantages. I burst out laughing - they are a barrister, a solicitor and a doctor, and the fourth of their old gang is a very successful vet. None of those careers are unattainable on state education but as a random sample of old school friends, I doubt you'd find many who are all in such prestigious careers. Certainly isn't true of my peer group. DH didn't even get very good grades at university, but his absolute self confidence means he always succeeds in interviews. I'm convinced that raising a child to think it's a foregone conclusion that they'll end up in that echelon, rather than "something that of course you can do if you work very very very hard" makes it far more likely that they will.

And also (sorry banging on here) I don't think it's healthy to think that either no luck at all is involved or that only luck is involved. Only vanishingly rarely is that true.

I've read about the concept of internal vs external locus of influence. Interesting stuff. People who think they are predominantly (not totally, predominantly) in control of their actions and fate are more successful on average than those who think it's all down to external circumstances.

Luck/starting point/events along the way are hugely important but so is how you react to them.

That's interesting cantsee

So what's happened then? Are actual evidence based intervention policies being put in place or have they just. been scrapped to save cash with nothing else offered?

The irony is, that although I've never had the wealth or leg-ups that the bad-advice-MNer has and denies , I personally consider myself immensely privileged for the reasons PP describe: to have grown up in the UK with the NHS, good quality free education, a welfare state (now being withdrawn), law and order good enough that being killed in a break-in or car-hijacking is low on my list of things to worry about... (and I realise that last is a privilege not everyone in the UK has).

We are daily grateful for those things in this house.

Sunflowers makes a very good point. So often those strong and resilient characters who overcome adversity to find success take the attitude that "Well I did it so why can't everyone else?"

Often those politicians most lacking in empathy are the "Self made men" (or of course women). In the past some of the old "Patrician classes politicians" actually had a greater sense of responsibility to working people. I think that is fading now though.

I'm sure that all these advantages help but I think it's often a case of how you react to what you've got iyswim.

Some people seem to have loads of advantages but feel unhappy and unloved so go on to a downward spiral.

And hard work alone isn't valued by society. To earn money you need hard work, a skill that's in demand and that skill has to earn someone some serious cash

I would add that it often needs to be a skill that most people can't or won't acquire. So to take your example of highly paid footballers, there are very few people who can play well enough to command the salaries in the Premier League. There are a couple of hundred English men (max) playing in the PL v how many thousands of English men who play football.

anatidae AFAIK there was no strategic review/replacement and that's the issue. My gut feel is that we need to look at more peer based and outreach programmes, and also be more specific about how the project achieves the outcome, which in turn requires a more granular understanding of the barriers to achieving it

e.g. I eat too much junk. Educating me about the dangers of junk won't make me eat less because I already know and it doesn't make me reach for a salad.

I thought sunfloweras post was saying something quite different!

op you are utterly right. I am gobsmacked daily by people who can't understand or see the role privilege has had in their lives.

I went to state school but had supportive parents and also the genetic privilege of a high IQ. The advantage that gives you in education, the job market, navigating everything from legal stuff to healthcare is monstrous. Unsurprisingly IQ is strongly linked to life expectancy.

People wildly underestimate the role of socioeconomic and genetic advantage in their lives, let alone gender, race, country of birth....

I agree surestarts weren't necessarily hitting the demographic in lots of cases. I thought it was a terrible shame when they shut the surestart I took dd to. We weren't the demographic it was aimed at. We had to drive to get there. However, we would have paid to continue going. And some of the people, who went were local and the demographic aimed at. It was the most amazing group and there was no paid club around as good due to the facilities it offered. It was really like a whole children's nursery packed into a humongous sports hall. So it was a crying shame when it went. And we all mixed together. There was no snobbery. I met some really nice mums and it was nice to mix with people from different cultures and backgrounds.

Sunflowers makes a very good point. So often those strong and resilient characters who overcome adversity to find success take the attitude that "Well I did it so why can't everyone else?"

Yes- (1) my dad and (2) my mate who went to an awful school but became a litigation barrier and is now $$$$$$$$$.

My mate is the reason I'm not convinced that greater contact with people not like you = greater empathy because mate's school experiences (which were, admittedly, bad- v bad bullying due to perceived poshness) has left him with what is probably best described as hatred for the town he grew up in and all its inhabitants.

I've known plenty of well of people who went to uni etc and don't have great lives. Stuck in a job they hate, or terrible with money, drug/drink problems etc. Money and good upbringing is no guarantee of a good adult life.

Conversely one of the most successful people I know was raised in brixton by a single mother with addiction problems. Himself fell into a bad crowd in teenage years. He saw where his life was going and worked his ass off to get himself to uni. Now finishing off his PhD, good guy very well adjusted and street smarts!

I work in a school as support staff and every day I see children who have the latest iphone but don't have a pencil or any ambition other than to avoid education that day. I guess their families have different priorities.

Do people really think if we somehow hit a reset button and took everything from everybody and gave them all, say, £10,000, that in 100 years the descendants would all have the same amount of wealth?

Parents who have experiences and achievements in certain fields and professions will give greater employability to their children. Even just by listening to them talk about work somehow feeds into the children so when they are in an interview the right words come out.
They also project a career path, light the way so to speak - so you have an idea where to look for jobs. I wasn't mentored very well after uni, and didn't know what next - in part I didn't really realise what was possible.

Perhaps we have forgotten what should be generally considered 'normal'. I don't consider having parents that loved me and were interested in my education as advantaged, I consider this normal. There are undoubtedly advantages that having money conveys however taking basic care of your children, valuing education, taking advantage of what our education and health system has to offer is not having an advantage.

When I look at the help and support there is now it is a million times better than when I was young yet it still doesn't seem to be enough. I know I am going to get flamed but people these days don't seem to look to themselves first they just blame everyone else.

Do people really think if we somehow hit a reset button and took everything from everybody and gave them all, say, £10,000, that in 100 years the descendants would all have the same amount of wealth?

No, of course not. They wouldn't all have the same wealth by the end of 5 minutes. That's not the point though. It's that your life's outcomes should not be overly influenced by your socio-economic status at birth, and currently there is overwhelming evidence that it is.

No blackberry I don't.

But that's not the point. Equality of opportunity is the point. Not enforcing equality by stripping those who have assets/success etc. That's not true meritocracy, it's communism.

We provide equality of opportunity by reducing child poverty, making sure that all Children have access to high quality education. Give all kids the chance to succeed. Because right now so many just don't have that chance.

1, 3 and 5 on the list in the OPfeel to me like the absolute bare minimum that any parent should be doing. If they're not up to those 3, they shouldn't be procreating. Perhaps that's just my entrenched privilege coming through and I probably do take those things for granted.

I completely agree about acknowledging your privileges; I've been incredibly lucky in many ways, and I try to acknowledge that whenever appropriate. I do sometimes wonder whether this is just hand-wringing that makes me a feel a bit better but makes no actual difference: is acknowledging your advantages meaningful if you don't actually do anything about it? For instance, I'm pretty certain I owe my career in large part - not entirely, I did also work hard, etc., but in large part - to a combination of my privileges and random luck (right place, right time). I do try and acknowledge that, but is that achieving anything? Should I quit? The thing is, the person who would replace me would almost certainly be just as privileged, but is that a crap excuse that I give myself? I do try and do what I can towards equality (I'm an academic) by helping with widening participation schemes, but if I'm honest with myself it's fairly token. I think acknowledging your luck is important, and a step that far too many people refuse to take, but it can't be an end-point, can it?