Am I a brokey and is my family poorer than the average Brit?

[Donnysredcard]

I think I’ve been deluded into thinking I was well off my whole life, to begin with I’m weird af so only had a handful of friends growing up who all had alcoholic/messy parents who didn’t teach them hygiene so no one else wanted to be friends with them except me. That kind of warped my view of things, the kids from normal families never invited me around so I was comparing my clean home (unemployed mum who stayed home and cleaned it) to the home of alcoholics. And in all honesty those families probably had more income than my mum because they had dads who worked. I also got free lunch at school and they didn’t even though they definitely could have done with it.

Obviously growing up we were all told to eat our dinner because other people were starving out there.

I had my children extremely young (massively pregnant at GCSEs) and then Covid hit while they were toddlers and I was always reading in the news headlines along the lines of “half of all British children don’t have a bed” “half of families rely on food banks” “X amount of children have rickets from malnutrition”. Again I thought I was doing better than a large percentage of the population.

Now my kids are in school and they are far more sociable than I was at their age and im socialising with their parents by proxy, it would seem everyone is going on foreign holidays constantly, other kids have branded clothes, not just a few branded clothes but branded everything down to their socks. Everyone seems to have a nice car while I can’t even drive. Etc

This is not an ungrateful whinge I know there are starving children all around the world I’m just wondering if anyone has had a similar revelation?
I’ve never heard anyone say they were unaware they’d been broke their whole life until they were well into their 20s.
Im a little worried about my kids feeling inferior to their friends too I guess

My DH had a similar thing. He grew up in poverty, he's from a different area than where we live now. The area he grew up in was and is very deprived, there seems to be a general difference in standards of homes and cleanliness there. It's normal for parents to spend there money in alcohol/drugs/cigarettes and not have nice homes and clothing for their DC.
We live in a very normal house for our area, on the cheaper side even. Average income but very carful with it. He said to my DC, who are teens, I bet your friends think you're rich. DC and I thought he was joking and laughed. He was deadly serious, he said that if he'd come to our house as a child he would've thought we were rich and our house is one of the nicest he's been in.

I'd imagine most of the other parents are a fair bit older than you, like 10 years or so? So they're 10 years further on in their careers and have the salary and savings that go with that.

There are stats about average household incomes if you search.

Yes I guess some of my childhood friends parents actually had higher incomes than us, 2 out of 3 of them actually owned their homes and my mum rented from the council. I thought I was richer than them just because my house was clean lol.

Someone who is broke.

You must still be quite young. That can be something other people may envy! But I’d be surprised if you were doing ‘well’ as a very young mother in comparison to the older parents at school. Are you still with your children’s father and do you both have good jobs?

Don’t fall in to the trap of comparing yourself with others. Never gets you anywhere. Everyone has problems and nobody will like you or your DC more if you have branded socks. (If they do care then avoid them!)

i have primary aged kids and have spare money for holidays etc, but then I am mid 40s.

when I was your age I couldn’t afford the rent on a one bedroom flat

even if the other families are 5-10 years older and two parents rather than one, their context is very different from yours.

at least as a young mum you won’t end up where half of us are juggling and elderly parent and a toddler

I don’t really understand how you didn’t understand that your mum being an unemployed single woman meant you were in a lower economic group…. Did you really think the majority of the country had no income bar benefits?

That is unusual. Most people work. Median household income is £36,700. You can work out from there if you are above or below average income.

You can also see where you sit within the statistics here: https://www.telegraph.co.uk/money/tools/how-rich-am-i-wealth-calculator/

Your kids are at school but you must barely be in your twenties. Surely you look around and see most parents at the school gate in their late thirties to mid forties. So those guys have had 2 decades to build up savings to afford Nike socks.

this can’t be surprising to you if you’ve met other parents in the last 5 years since you had a kid?

I think other things will always make you wonder- we’re in an ok situation but my eldest treats himself to branded clothes and when I see the price I’m shocked parents can afford to buy them for kids. I also wonder how people can afford activities and camps. I’d wonder about this more than cars or holidays as we pay these off over time but everyday things are harder to do that with if that makes sense

People have different assessments of ‘designer’. For some this means very expensive Dior, Mulberry, LV, Chanel, Hermes, Gucci etc. Others mean Nike, FCUK, Michael Kors.

At the time, as a kid. Only had a few friends whose parents were either alcoholics or had other issues. So my house was cleaner and nicer than theirs. Also was always reminded that there were people starving out there in other countries but also in this country.

Oh I knew we were poor. What I couldn’t understand was how come other people were not. I was popular with friends, so went to lots of different kids houses, I started always getting invited throughout my teens, and I’d always go. I mean it was shit at home, so why not.

I recall a group of us walking home one night and I must have been about 12 and one of our group said oh this is me, and went in, to this huge sandstone house, and I stood there looking at it so confused, my brain couldn’t work out how his parents could afford it, how they had this house, these cars. I was genuinely confused and so shocked.

I was thinking they are rich but how can they be, how do people become rich, I then started to realise as kids started to invite me, we really were poor, and it wasn’t just I had a sandwich of two bits of dry white bread and some crisps for dinner, as my parents couldn’t afford food. Or we lived in a council flat. It was the whole thing.

I started to realise people actually had proper evening meals. They had treats. Like fruit, or icecream, or soda. They had nice homes. They had stuff. And my life wasn’t the norm.

as I got to my late teens, I felt embarassed about it.i started working weekends, both sat and sun, from 16, so i bought my own clothes and shoes, worked full time in the hols, in a shop, and school kids get a lot of hols, I had much more disposable income than the kids who didn’t work and got pocket money, so I could go out, do stuff, buy stuff. My parents never asked for the money off me. They’d given me fuck all and were abusive, they never enquired about how much money I had, just glad I was out the flat I guess, and they didn’t need to subsidise me,

I then went ri uni and did the same again, got a grant,I didn’t need to. but worked seven days a week in the evenings and weekends, so again I was one of rhe richer students.

so I learned a lesson at a very young age, if I want money I had to earn it, and my focus was going to be on a career that paid. I have been successful in that. There is no joy in poverty and I never wished my child to feel the shame I did. Or the confusion. Not everyone can achieve it. I get that, but could my parents have, yeah, they could.

Don't sweat about Nike socks, supermarket socks are fine, rather invest in books or going to the library

Yes you said that but I mean how, past a certain age, did you think the country functioned? Or did you think your mum had some kind of income source that wasn’t the government?

I think I get where you are coming from, I grew up on a really grim council estate however we were the ‘posh’ ones on the estate. Then I passed my 11+ and went to a school in a much nicer area. When I visited my new friend’s houses which were mainly nice semis I realised where I fitted in society economically.

I didn't know we were poor but we did have a weird mix in our lives. We ate duck, pheasant, goose, venison, as well as international foods (before it was typical) regularly, because our dad went out game hunting and our mum was cultured.

Also got loads of gifts at Christmas, because our grandparents subsidised them. And we had foreign holidays long before it was common. But then had to wear truly awful old fashioned stuff, handed down to the family. I had the most god awful coat in middle school, something a granny wouldn't have wanted and was mocked horribly over it.

Now, we don't have foreign holidays, because DC is SEN and couldn't cope with the containment of prolonged travel. Our car is a banger. Our home is modest. I would never dream of buying designer clothes.

But I own 3 properties and am a highly qualified professional. So I think DC is going to grow up with the same mixed messages.

It's not really a proper word though is it? Just adding a y on the end 😂

I didn’t think about her income source the whole time I lived with her because I was a kid, after that I was too busy focusing on raising kids to think deeply about how the country functioned then Covid happened and I was busy focusing on those times. While reading articles about how large numbers of kids don’t even have beds and loads of people including doctors have to go to a foodbank.

Sounds kind of dumb I know.

How so?

You probably are poorer because you are younger than the other parents.

Possibly AI

I’m going to take this as a compliment 😂

Some people are not as well off as they would like us to believe, maxing out the credit cards continually and living in debt. Don’t worry about others, if your kids are happy then you are a success as a parent.

No I really don’t think so.

It was a very clearly worded thread. To me anyway.

OP I didn’t realise we were poor until I had my own home and my own wage.

I guess that makes sense if you got pregnant right about when people start to think about how the world works. You kind of skipped the teenage branching out segment.

I don’t think I’ve ever noticed an article about children not having beds. But I guess that would make you think you were doing OK. Did you not know about things like private schools, big houses and people going on holiday before you were 15/16?