Why do people from poorer backgrounds have low aspirations

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I may not be explaining myself well here so please bear with me!

I've seen on here a few times where it's been mentioned that people from poorer backgrounds / deprived areas don't have higher aspirations. It seems they can do better but don't.

Just wondering why this is and what would help to change it.

Reason I'm asking is I'm from a por background and I still am. I don't want this for my kids but don't know how or what to do to change it.

DD is extremely musical. Voice for her. We said we would fund the conservatoire/rada route but she had to do teaching or nursing so she could always earn a living.

Reading this makes me so sad.

I grew up very poor, music was the one thing I excelled at. Fortunately music lessons were free where I lived so I always had access to them regardless of my parents’ income.

I had SO many people tell me that I had to study another degree alongside music. Why? Why could you not earn a living working solely as a musician?

This goes for many other careers and degrees such as dance, fine arts, design, drama… and many humanities subjects. Why is it expected that you won’t be able to earn a living through these degrees?

I am so thankful that my parents were the only ones around me to never have this attitude. They couldn’t afford to give me any money for uni, but they encouraged me to do what I loved, so I worked my ass off and practised day and night to get a scholarship. I was the first person in my family to go to uni (second in the large extended family if you count a cousin). I got part time jobs whilst at conservatoire. I struggled massively for a few years until I landed a good orchestral job and I’ve been on an upwards trend ever since and now earning double what my nurses or teacher friends do. And I’m still on temporary contracts, once I get a permanent one I’ll be tripling the average salary and some.

I’m sure this PP’s DD is happy with what she does now, but it’s attitudes like this that prevents kids from even considering they could do something that they love. And that they could be successful at it and earn a living from it. Don’t tell your child they won’t be able to live off XYZ. Tell them if they work hard and become the best in that field, they’ll be just fine. Don’t put them down, encourage them to become he absolute best at what they do.

[quote WonderfulYou]@BrightYellowDaffodil do you know what that programme was called? It sounds really interesting (and sad).[/quote]
Scratch that, I did a bit of Googling and found it! It was called Second Chance, it looks like he was kicked out for alcohol but I do definitely remember his family calling him a name like “coconut” or “Bounty”.

Is your secondary school good? All the secondary's round here are good. All encourage children to do whatever they want. Including Oxbridge applications if that's your 'thang', irrespective of background.

I do. We all do but at the same time we know our chances of getting what we want are so good damn low when the odds are massively stacked against up we stop dreaming and focus on surviving.

@speakout

Clarabella7

Low apsirations are also born from fear. I grew up in a poor mining community, where just a few generations ago "indentured labour" was the norm. This is in the UK.

Wow. Yip, it's as much about deep-rooted attitudes etched into the psyche of people and passed down through generations. It's complex.

I think having an understanding that working is a verb, you dont only work when you get the job you want, you work to get there and not only academically . The difference is a demotivated kid with no aspiration in a mc household has stable housing to fall back on so their needs are met, in a WC household, this can be the start of a slippery trap as there is no one to bridge the gap for them. Get teenagers working- for friends or family, or volunteering or doing D Of E , the more people they know and talk to, more confidence and more networking

@AngelinaFibres

It's a confidence thing as much as anything. I worked with children in deprived areas for years. They don't see getting away from it as something for them. Its almost as if you think you are better than your family and friends if you actively want to do better and that is a difficult mindset to work around. Middle class children are exposed to lots of different experiences as they grow. They go to cafes, to restaurants, to nice social events. They learn how to behave without really thinking about it. They have experience of dressing smartly or casually as the event requires. They feel comfortable in their own skins.I had a TA at my last school who had never been to a 'proper' restaurant. She and her partner were too nervous about being asked about the wine they would like, which cutlery to use, that they just didn't go. Another TA had a son who was gifted in maths. The deputy head suggested he should try for a scholarship to a local private school. Her husband had a carpet cleaning business. She felt people would look down on her and that 'It's not for people like us'. Her son works for his dad now.

That’s so sad. People like that only have themselves to blame. When opportunities are being handed out, to come with this sort of rubbish is poor parenting.

Despite coming from a MC family who value education DS1 failed badly at High school for various reasons i won't go into for brevity.
He left with the kind of exams results typical of a poorly performing school, including no maths qualifications.
He fiddled about in part time retail jobs, was on the dole and at one point joined the armed forces as they take you with no qualufications but couldn't cope being at the other end of the country or the culture and left after basic training.
He finally decided to sort himself out but its been a really long haul involving doing distance courses and access courses at FE college. It's taken years but he's about to start a computer science degree aged 24, he'll have to live at home for at least another year. It's been isolating for him as he feels a bit left out from his peers who are working and can afford holidays and cars etc.
What I'm trying to say is that it is possible to better yourself from a low starting point but it is a real slog and not for the faint hearted and would be so much harder if you had responsibilities and didn't have parents who could afford to let you live at home without contributing and pay for driving lessons (car only way to get to college for his subject really where we live although i believe the college has recently laid on a minibus from the town next door.).
DS1 is the only one brave or foolhardy enough from his access course to transfer to a full degree the rest are doing two year HNDs designed for the job market but realistically this will make it harder for them to progress in their careers beyond a certain level.
I wouldn't blame a young working class person from deciding it was too much to give up 6 years of their twenties like DS1 when they could be earning and enjoying themselves.

Clarabella77

Absolutely, very complex. I was brought up to obey men, keep quiet and smile. The Motherwound. My mother was lucky- she found a benevolent man. Me not so much.
But all that keep quiet and smile stuff was protective. Not so long ago that women would quite literally be slapped down and even the police would walk away calling it a "domestic".
Hard to push forward, raise your head up when you are raised with oppression.

@ComtesseDeSpair

*In primary you need to try and get into the Outstanding primary school. Try to get them into the best secondary you can- dont just think they'll be fine at secondary. If no good school where you live try and move into a good catchment.*

This in itself lacks understanding of how little agency many poorer people have to make these kinds of choices. If you live in social housing because you can’t afford to own your own home, you simply can’t just move into a good school catchment.

I agree. My parents didn't really know they had a choice. They just sent us to the nearest one because that was the norm in our area.

They've since said that they should have looked at it more, especially for me as I struggled immensely. But they had no idea what to look for or how to look for it. They couldn't Google the schools either, as it was the late 80s.

@suggestedlogin

I do encourage my kids and tell them that they can literally do any job within reason and get into any field they wanted tobeith hard work and grit but I'm not sure that enough.

Do schools play a big part?

OP This is a fabulous attitude to have and my heart sang when I read this 🥰 I work as a careers adviser and I wish more of my parents would do this for their children ❤️

I am a dentist. At school I never got less than an A in any exam and looking at options I only really knew the obvious vocations as all my mates parents worked in trades/factories/supermarkets. At my school we had an ex-estate agent working a day a week as our careers advisor so no help was forthcoming there. I was navigating applications totally blind while others from private schools have dedicated med/dent/vet careers advisors. They find it easier to arrange work experience, they know the jargon.

If I had been raised elsewhere I may have been more attracted to more corporate roles but I had no clue you could have a job as an actuary or anything like that.

I grew up in a (then) mining area in the North in the 70s and 80s. Very few of my peers stayed at school to do A levels and nobody expected them to. When I talked about going to medical school quite a lot of people, teachers included, literally laughed in my face. Kids from the area, especially girls just didn't do that kind of thing.
Fortunately for me, my parents felt differently. They both had grammar school educations and my Dad was in a white collar job. We were seen as "posh" though in monetary terms we were poor compared to the local mining familes (whilst the mines were open of course). But we did have what would probably be called cultural capital nowadays. My parents didn't have the opportunities that my siblings and I went on to have but they did know that they were possible and viewed further and higher education as a good thing. We were brought up to be avid readers and were exposed to the arts, museums, places of historical interest etc a lot more than many of my school friends. We talked about philosophy and politics at the dinner table and our house was always full of books. My parents were interested in what I was doing at school and there was always an assumption that I would do "better" in life than they had.
My parents had also moved around the country a fair bit and we didn't have any local extended family so the idea of leaving home didn't seem like a big deal to me. That simply wasn't the case with many of my classmates who had parents, aunts and uncles, grand parents and great grandparents all living within walking distance,and all working or previous employees at the same places - men down the pit or the local heavy engineering factories, women mainly as machinists at a local textiles place. That was what they had been brought up seeing and what they expected to do themselves. They wanted to leave school and start work as soon as possible. Then as the recession hit, industries closed and many people were unemployed then that became their expectation. School didn't really do anything to challenge those expectations either.I am sure there were kids in my class who were perfectly capable of A levels and degrees but the teachers didn't encourage them and they had no role models or encouragement from home either. Peer pressure can be a big factor too. I was "different" in many ways so nevervhad many friends anyway. Wanting to go to University and working hard at school didn't make me any more of an outcast than I already was. But had I bern part of one of the groups of friends who poked fun at the nerdy kids then I imagine it would have bern hard to break away and say that you had different plans for your life.
If you're unsure about your own abilities, haven't had the best education, don't know how to get where you want to be and those around you either can't help you or actively discourage you from breaking away from what they see as the norm, it's bound to be very difficult to change direction. If nobody believes in you its hard to believe in yourself.

It’s hard to be the swot if their peer group are not interested . Key would be friends that want to succeed and the other thing is just setting the expectation of them going to uni and I do t mean in a pushy way I just mean in our house we always talked like the sc would go to uni. Like the most natural thing in the world and this natural path was set well before any exams and while they were young.

It's not always about low aspirations. It's also about opportunities.

If my dc had wanted to go for medicine (they don't). I have various family and friends who are doctors/medics of various descriptions who if they couldn't take them for work experience would know people who could.
It would be incredibly easy to arrange work experience for them. A matter of one email or phone call. I suspect if I wanted to I could get them a week every day of the summer holidays in a different discipline this evening.

If you don't have family and friends who are in that line of business then your child is one of many who may ask for work experience there-and the space may have gone to a relation. You're then trawling round lots of places.
Heaps more effort and a reasonable chance of ending up without anywhere.

I understand why things like medicine they like to look for evidence of work experience, however I think it does make it harder for people to get on the training from backgrounds where they don't have the connections.
It doesn't seem fair to me.

That’s so sad. People like that only have themselves to blame. When opportunities are being handed out, to come with this sort of rubbish is poor parenting.

It's too simple to blame parents.
We live in a world so full of information that it is possible to question, research society, class- so much stuff at a tap that parents didn't have years ago.
My parents were scared to launch themselves, they were not able to launch their children.
I have had to do the growing up of two generations, me and my parents.

@JellybabyGina87

Yes I think it possibly is a learning difficulty I've got. I used to get As and Bs in things like English and other subjects but maths, it's like my brain just switches off. My DH is brilliant at maths but he can't spell.

it still might be worth pursuing if its holding you back?

I grew up in a very WC family. My dad left school at 12 with no qualifications and my mum wasn’t allowed to sit the 11+ as she was Catholic in Northern Ireland (this was in the 50s) their advice was keep your head down and get a job asap, university isn’t for the likes of us.

So I did my a-levels and got a job and realised there was so much more available to me than a dead end office job. I was lucky as I worked for a big CP company in admin and blagged them to support me in doing some professional qualifications, then used that to go into a Big Four, where they supported me to do a MSC.

Whilst I was doing this I got the cultural education mentioned above (I’d never eaten out, been out of the UK, seen a play, been to a museum, used chopsticks - particularly embarrassing memory where I had to ask for a fork at a work lunch), I remember my first work trip abroad, I was so worried about the airport…

So fast forward to my children, we do lots of free museums in all sorts of topics, eat out as much as we can, travel when we can and talk about all the interesting jobs that I hear about. I also mentor girls via social mobility scheme at work, as I want to pass on what I have learned.

In short OP, it is a lot of things - education, aspiration (for your kids, and your kids need to have aspiration too) role models, mentoring and experiences. Finally it’s a willingness to now just fit in, that’s the one thing I am trying to drum into my girls, don’t be like everyone else, dance to your own beat.

The trouble some concepts are so alien to middle classes, Some people from what you would consider to be a poor background actually think they’re doing really fucking well in life.

And I know lots of them that are actually really really happy, there’s one girl who’s got three children with a man who had seven children before he met her, he has gold teeth and he is in prison, she works her absolute ass off to give those children everything and I mean everything they miss out on nothing. Currently they live in a three bedroom house they have a garden they have their cousins close at hand to play with they never go home to an empty house after school they are always safe warm and fed. Whilst there is nobody driving them around to ballet lessons or music they do activities and sports at the weekends like every other child if they’re struggling in any area at school I have absolutely no doubt their mum will do whatever it takes to help them.

But I’ll say it again they are a really happy family when dad gets out of prison thatll be the icing on the cake.

Horrible judgey thread
Grew up in a council estate now a surgeon.

Stretchandsnap

I can relate to that too.
No books in the house apart from a bible, no internet, no phone.
I never went to the theatre or restaurant ,even a train ride as a child, never mind abroad.

@Mellowyellow222

I am in my forties and was raised by parents who had junior managerial positions.

My mum especially always tempered my ambitions. Always know your place - don’t get carried away, don’t make waves.

She was alienate very intimidated by educated people - and let people walk all over her and us.

I have done well - have a senior position and high income. She always puts me down - acts as if I am very junior - if I say something about work both she and my dad will talk about how I couldn’t possibly be expects to take decisions and manage people etc - that’s my bosses job!

I am a director with a few hundred staff!!

They just believe people should’ve get above themselves - I should live in a certain type of house and drive a certain type of car - nothing too expensive because how could I possibly afford that - I’m just a little girl!

That was my mum.

I did well in spite of her sabotage and cruelty.

I graduated top of my class at uni with many awards and she refused to come to my graduation.

When I first began consulting work, she would refer to me as a temp worker and kept telling me I needed to get a real job.

I didn't manage to read the full thread, but money is incredibly enticing when you've never had it. Getting a minimum wage job straight after school seems more enticing than spending years on a degree for a potentially higher salary...

@Ohwhere2021

Horrible judgey thread Grew up in a council estate now a surgeon.

You find this a horrible judgey thread? Clearly being a surgeon doesn’t endow you with emotional intelligence.

You find this a horrible judgey thread? Clearly being a surgeon doesn’t endow you with emotional intelligence.

Agreed.