Does coming from a deprived background really seal your fate?

[Pinkjenny]

Just wondering, really, listening to Nick Clegg on R5 live. I come from Anfield in Liverpool, not deprived really, but certainly not affluent. My mum worked in a shop, and my dad was (and still is) an engineer.

I credit all of my success (relatively speaking, of course) to the way in which I was brought up, and the attitude of my parents, who told me I could be whatever I wanted to be, as long as I put my mind to it.

Does giving children money for their first shoes and first suit really help break that poverty cycle?

Or does it depend on the attitude of their parents and their general upbringing?

So is that a matter of their brain chemistry then = their seratonin and beta endorphin levels, their mental state, their happiness v depression, their optimism v pessimism? Things have often gone badly for me but I just keep on and on, like Robert the Bruce, if at first you don't succeed you try and try again and it will always be better and always get better and each year is better than the last.

Brain chemistry can alter at any given time it's not consistently good, up or bad, down is it ?

Xenia - you show optimism levels that are off the scale and thus you have amazing persistence and resilience to adversity. You know how to explain it when things go wrong so that it doesn't stop you in your tracks. Someone somewhere showed you that was a good way to be - or more likely quite a few people.

Completely agree with all the posters saying that positive self esteem is the key to success, way more important than academic success imo. And that starts imo in the cradle and is a continual process through childhood, to teach children to see the world with positive eyes, and not get stuck in a negative cycle of blame or self-deprecation. It's our duty to make our babies and children feel like they are masters of their universe. The world will knock them back enough, they do not need it from their parents as well. Unfortunately this was a very common child-rearing method until recently in the UK.

My father can remember "being knocked across the room by my father for saying something rude to my grandfather". Aged 3. My father seems to think that was acceptable. And I look at him aged 72, and and see the frightened and bruised little boy, and I know that throughout his life he has had to fake self-esteem.

I decided when I was 21 that the only way to create success in a family was to learn to take adversity on the chin to a certain extent. The world is a very big place and lots of things happen in it, very few of them the fault of one person, and very unlikely to be little old me. I entirely changed my mindset at 23/24, and managed to shed the depression that had plagued me for over 15 years.

"No amount of affirmitive action schemes, good schooling, money for computers or textbooks, different curricula or improved parenting methods are going to help improve how we are educated and think if, in our heart of hearst, those who do most of the deciding as to how the rest get to learn harbour elitist pretensions. We should not expect to see any deduction in the numbers of children labelled as 'modern day delinquents' wherever enough of the people who have more control over how others are treated still believe strongly enough that they themselves and their offspring are a little more inherently able than most.

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It is not a matter of money, but belief. Eradicating poverty is cheap because a little money goes a long way when you're poor. Poverty, as defined by social exclusion, is a relative measure; people are poor because they cannot afford to take part in the norms of society, and these norms only become affordable because the better off have been allowed to become even more better off [massive chapter about how the better off are often parasitical i.e they feed off others' poverty- Interest on debt and loans is a good example, CEOs of major companies exploit women and childrens' labour etc]

----

The poor in particular are now subject to a widespread prejudice whereby , it is nastily and quietly said, they must have something wrong with them if they are not able to work themselves out of poverty . IN the end the rich [and I class anyone who can afford private school as 'rich' even though they themselves might have pretensions of being poor] have to believe there is something wrong with other people...
[Dorling, pp28]

I don't remember being told I was useless and I certainly don't tell my children that either.

I agree for me it is unusually positive. At the moment 4 days a week a whole load of people write what they think of me every single day (as I'm doing a lot of speaking) and some of that will be negative although a lot of great. Often I don't even read it because I'd prefer not to read negative stuff and know I'm good. I suppose I deliberately avoid negative influences whenever I can. it's not that niothing has gone wrong. I've probably had more initiatives failing than succeeding. Indeed ask most successful buinessmen or women and you'll find many have even had bankruptcies. it's the can you pick yourself up and dust yourself down and not think about what went wrong too much (except to seek to avoid previous mistakes) which makes it possible to carry on. Same I suppose about my divorce which of course for most of us is a big life failure or nothing like as bad a failure as staying in a bad marriage which is the lot of many because they won't take risks.

I do take some risks so I wonder if it is partly that too, not being too risk averse because you know things will go well and even if they don't you'd have more fun taking the risk than not. So our ability to take on risk I wonder what determines that? could even just be testosterone levels (although I don't have a beard as far as I nkow...)

Also I don't discount brain chemistry. When people's seratonin levels etc are very very low they can hardly get out of bed never mind enthusiastically jump out at 5.30am to seize the day suffused in enthusiasm and happiness because life is so good.

[This message was brought to you from the Xenia Polyanna Life Coaching Association]

It's not even that, Lenin. IT's that BRitish society is structured in a way that does not allow social movement. There is no meritocracy- the term was dismissed by the man who coined it when he got sick of the smug middle classes patting themselves on the back for doing better in life than others.

Even if you look at one or two exceptions who do actually make it out of poverty, if you researched their background in detail, you tend to find some extenuating circumstances that enabled them to do so: random windfall, inherited money from a long lost aunt, lucky enough to have been born with a healthy constitution [the operative word being luck etc.

We are talking about people in poverty here. From reading the posts on here, I've no doubt some people are so divorced from the truth of poverty, that they believe they actually know what poverty is when it is clear from their posts that they don't.

If you knew what poverty was, you would never blame those people for not being able to "make it out". The despair of poverty, the despair itself, is enough to crush a person's spirit.
And lets not forget all the debt- debt makes the rich richer and the poor poorer.

So inegalitarian societies like the UK are structured to make sure as little upward social mobility takes place as possible.

Xenia I think you are a good business woman, I think you have the get up and go, I think by chance, you were born with brains as well as money.

However, you must realise it is disingenuous to assert that you have reached your position in life without a boost.

You were not born on a council estate on Moss-side, that I know. And if you had been, you wouldn't be were you are today, regardless of how much nouse, drive or business acumen you had.

I worked as a teacher in 'good' independent and state schools, and I was quite shocked at the difference between the two sectors.

In the independent schools, teachers used a conceptualisation on an 'ideal type' of pupil and pushed the kids towards that by hook or by crook. Aka business class education.

In the state schools, teachers had a notion of the 'average' pupil and allowed things to settle at around that level. It was too near the idea of a lowest common denominator for my liking. Aka no-frills education.

Until more schools adopt the business class model, we are pretty doomed on the societal front, I reckon.

I have a lot of time for Xenia, but I think she has often been in the right place at the right time professionally, and been able to benefit. Other people have the same intellligence, drive and industriousness, but find it very difficult to capitalise on that properly for a variety of reasons. Luck has a lot more to do with it than it should do.

Every time Xenia posts on a thread, she words her post in such a way that the original thread gets lost and everyone ends up talking about 'Xenia'.

I came from the wrong side of the tracks. Although we were financially very poor, we were emotionally quite rich. I'd felt we were 'better off' than many of my friends. My parents valued good decisions - about friendships and self worth - over and above a 'good education'. That said, I've gone on to Uni and enormous success in my chosen career field. I've never tolerated shit from a boyfriend and feel I deserve to be treated as well as I treat others.

I think emotional poverty is different to financial poverty.

We have very good social mobility in the UK, much better than in the past and much better than in cultures with castes and the like. Go to India, South Amercia and many other places and you will see places where it is much harder to get yourself out of poverty in the UK.

Also ultimately those people who will never be much good at anything presumably sink to and stay at the b ottom and the fact they stop rising might eventually indicate how good social mobilty has been as those with the abilities have been able to rise and the only ones left are those with very low IQs and inabilty to manage normal life for genetic and other reasons although I am not saying we have yet reached that point.

I do think if people studied people like I am and LG and others who whatever their background did "well" (whatever that means) they might find the reasons. My suggestions are things like testosterone levels, seratonin levels, drive, capacity for hard work, genetics. I suspect it may be softer factors than because you came from a comfortable home although of course those with an easier start tend to do better overall.

That's because Xenia is intriguing!

I come from a reasonable sort of background but very many people went out of their way to crush my spirit over the years. It did not work, otherwise I would not be able to do the job I do, but it did mean I have been rather handicapped at various points. I think that's the experience of a lot of people, women in particular, and we should all take care to make sure we don't inadvertently behave like that too other women.

Can't spell - to - that's going to annoy me now.

I have just read that the inequalities are getting wider. SO upward mobility was more feasible when you were young compared to today, Lenin.
I don't wish to take away from those people who do make it out. It's hard graft. BUt it's also very hard graft for the middle classes to maintain their position- their children have to study like maniacs. It's also very very hard graft to live in poverty and despair and sending your kids to school without breakfast because you need the money for heating.
Society must become more egalitarian than it is right now. In the UK the rich already live in gated communities, just like the US and RUssia. HOw much do you have to dehumanize 'the other' in order to justify keeping a certain group, or class, of people away from you? How do people in these gated communities feel? Scared and worried about being robbed, I should imagine. What a way to live, seriously.

No, it's not genetics Xenia. You're going into the dangerous realm of eugenics there. The myth that genetics are involved is dispelled. YOu only need to look at all the thick, rich people about to know that anyway.

Yes, the problem with the big stick approach to poor people is that it is reinforcing their already skewed beliefs about their failure.

If people already believe they are useless and already find it difficult to get off their arses because of what they believe about why they are there, you be rest assured that if a government telling them that they are useless scroungers will make things a whole lot worse. It sounds purile and rose tinted I realise, but at an individual level it is very dangerous to have these broad sweeping negative statements about people who are on benefits etc. It will only make things worse

Attitude is the key. We all know that. Because most of us have it already - that is what is making the difference. Boffin, yes to Independent schools - I went to one late in secondary from a comprehensive. The difference was staggering, and it was not in the teaching of the subjects, yet in the attitude that was instilled. Amazing the difference it makes.

That is why I believe that the policy of beating already failed people will have no positive affect overall. I have a small business that works to change people's attitudes in this way and afaik it is the only business in the UK doing it atm, yet I can only do it in the private sector......the work we could do with the unemployed would be amazing, but it is totally prohibitive with policy at the moment.

Maybe white males rule the world because they're just generally better than everyone else. They have the testosterone, drive and serotonin levels you need. Maybe it's inherited.

On the other hand, it could be because they were raised with privilege and they have no qualms about exploiting others to their advantage and they have a vested interest in keeping the status quo.

It's ironic that all the arguments being used here against people on benefits have been used against women and other races in the past, and continue to be used today...

sorry, that wasn't to anyone on this thread, just talking about the general arguments you hear that people are poor because of their own doing, and if they'd only try harder they'd be okay.
No they wouldn't. NOt while society is structured the way it is.

If you were to test IQs of different social groups you would probably be a bit surprised at how similar the distributions were, so assuming an automatic correlation between IQ and income/social status is wrong. It's gender that is the interesting one for the purposes of this debate.

If you look at the distribution of IQ amongst men, there are more in the top and bottom centiles than in the case of women. WRT women, there are fewer in the top and bottom centiles but more in the middle. Therefore women's IQs are more similar to each other than men's tend to be, although obviously some women are going to be just as bright as men. This might be an explanation for discrimination - perhaps in the past the default position was to assume a woman was not in the top centile, whereas men were given the benefit of the doubt?