To question rich child/average child friendship

[FireworksAreFantastic]

We are average.
Average careers.
Average income.
Smaller (much smaller ....meaning TINY) than average house.
DS aged 12 is a gorgeous boy. Bright. Funny. Intelligent. Lovely. Kind. Sociable. Active. Loves going out on his bike.
Goes to the local comp which hasn't got a great reputation.
He's been biking on his own a lot down this certain area through the countryside and keeps bumping in to another kid the same age who's also out on his bike in the same area.
Today they got talking.
Other kid lives in a gigantic double fronted detached listed building surrounded by lakes and land, and attends a public school an hour away.
We live 10 min drive away in a tiny weeny semi in a tiny close with a tiny back patio.
My DS and this kid seem to have a connection and want to swap numbers to meet up and go biking together.
Can it work???
If you send your DC to a public school and live in a country pad, would you be OK with them hanging out with a kid from the local comp who lives in a house so small it's cramped?!

Your response suggests you are ashamed of how you live. You don't need to be. If you took a positive slant on it, you might think: my son can teach this boy that perfectly decent, lovely, intelligent pupils exist in state schools. And maybe this boy's home life can teach my son that if he wants material goods, he needs to focus on a high earning career. But he might learn something else. The rich boy might learn that you don't need immense wealth to have a happy, cosy, secure home life. It might let him off the hook from having to pursue a high earning career. He might think: I can do what I really want to do and scale down. Unlikely, but you just don't know.

In my DC's friendship group the richest boy also happened to be one of the nicest. Really thoughtful and sensitive. Lovely parents who welcomed anyone. No snobbery. Lots of generosity. But... they were always at work. This boy liked coming to our house because we were around, making pizzas with them, not ordering them in, asking all about his news, his plans etc. The friendship group loved hanging at the rich house and the poorer house.

I'm off this month to a reunion of my teenage friendship group. It was a big crowd who got together through a shared hobby. In our group there were lots of private school teens, lots of state school teens, a couple from boarding school, some SEN and autistic teens, some in care, some from deeply dysfunctional families, some who lived alone from age 16. We just loved each other. No one was ever excluded. I see a bit of that mood in my sons' friendship group. it is possible.

My son is in a very similar situation. He also rides his bike a lot but with his friends. During summer holidays, they met a boy who goes to a boarding school who was on his bike on his own.

They befriended him and arranged to see him again because they felt sorry for him because he doesn't have any local friends. They definitely measure wealth in a different way to yours.

Well, anyone who knows what the words ‘lifetime’ and ‘upper class’ mean would know that. It’s good to challenge and not perpetuate the idea that private school attendance, or generational wealth in general, is linked to hard work or sacrifice from parents.

One of my DS’s good friends lives in a very affluent leafy area. Lovely big house.

We live in a tiny 2 bed council house.

Their lives are inevitably like chalk and cheese.

But they get on so well and have a really good friendship which I would never discourage. I’m glad his parents aren’t the type to discourage it either, even with us being lower in class to them. I do get admittedly get very embarrassed when his friend comes to our house and the house is a bit chaotic/ds doesn’t have his own room. And when I take them out to bowling or something and we have to get 2 buses/ get a taxi rather than me driving them around everywhere. I do wonder what his parents must think sometimes.

In contrast, when his best best friend comes here who is in the same boat as my ds, he’s basically coming from home to home and things are much more laid back. He doesn’t care about waiting for a bus and the concept of sharing a bedroom is nothing new to him. He’s also from a big family and has lots of siblings like my ds, so loads of kids being around is again just normal.

It makes me sad to see, given the OP's entrenched attitudes, that the most vicious snobbery in the UK is still the "inverted" variety.

Just let the friendship playout naturally, either it will work or it won't. I live in a beautiful area of the UK, home to the extremely wealthy, hanging about on their yaughts at weekends and also home to some of the worst poverty in the UK. Kids mix, many of the wealthy ones travel quite far to school or board Mon-Friday so they're very keen on making local friends and their parents aren't snobby about it.

Indeed it is. They truly hold their children back with this crab in a bucket shit.

I've found that inverted snobbery the worst. They look down on those better off far far more than any better off person looks down on them.

My mum was like that, always jealous and critical of anyone who had more. She had very very low expectations of her children.

She hated that I went to university and became a success.

The utter beauty of kids is they just don't care about this shit.

They meet, they click, they hang out.

My child goes to a private school, when asked about his friends all he can tell you is whether they're good guys to hang with.

In return, because he started there in Y7, I have no idea whatsoever about the parents. They do seem to have raised really smashing kids though, so who cares about their house?

You’re hiding behind ‘protecting’ your son as an excuse (protecting him from what? People who are, by the sounds of it, perfectly decent?), but I’m not sure who you’re trying to kid tbh, us or yourself.

It isn’t about your son being exposed to people that have more, it’s about your own discomfort in proximity to wealth.