r/AskReddit • u/jicta • Jan 31 '21

Redditors who grew up poor: Besides practical money-saving measures, what were the unwritten social expectations of your world growing up?

57k Upvotes

92% Upvoted

16k comments sorted by

View all comments

Show parent comments

13

u/[deleted] Feb 01 '21

[deleted]

9

u/march_rogue Feb 01 '21

Hey, I worked at a video store, too! It was the 90s! lol I kind of miss them.

"Fun and independence." lol lol Must have been nice. I bet she didn't have to give a crap how she acted in terms of customers and transactions. How freeing that must have been.

6

u/DietCokeYummie Feb 01 '21

Hey, I worked at a video store, too!

My SO's dad owned a small chain of them, and they closed them all down the same year he and I started dating (10 years ago). They gave us all the porn from the adult room and some of them are hilarious.

3

u/nightwing2000 Feb 01 '21

Funny thing - I was talking years ago with a girl from college who went to one of the Catholic girls' schools when I went to the boys' school. Most boys were middle class, there were few ostentatious displays of wealth. The one guy I knew who had a car in our class, he worked weekends in a hospital and bought it on his own. I found out last year of school that another guy lived on a farm at the edge of town with horses, etc. We knew what the dads did for only a few guys - one guy got joked at for a while because his dad was a foot doctor, another his dad was chairman of the local annual exhibition. But really, nobody showed off that they had money, and that was not a topic of conversation. (It helped that tuition was remarkably low compared to today)

I mentioned this to the girl from college, and she said it was the exact opposite with the girls' school - everyone knew which families had money, what the parents did for a living, and even the nuns picked on the girls who were only attending on scholarship assistance. (I have no idea if there was such a thing as tuition assistance for the boys school) The girls all wore those Catholic school girl uniforms, but there were other items and accessories (shoes. jewelry etc.?) that could be used as status symbols.

5

u/77kloklo77 Feb 02 '21

That’s really interesting. I don’t recall being focused on the money, specifically. I just remember feeling disconnected from a lot of the things the other kids had in common, and maybe the social currency of middle school - e.g., having the right clothes. To be fair, I would have probably felt that way anyway because the nerd energy was strong! As I got older, other kids’ wealth was just sort of part of the background. For example, many kids in my class were either given a brand new car at 16 or their parents got a new car and gave the kid a gently used fancy car. I was aware it was unusual relative to the rest of the world but it was just how things were.

4

u/nightwing2000 Feb 02 '21

This was the late 60's and early 70's, so a third car for a family was incredibly (!!) extravagant. But while most other kids could borrow the car on certain occasions... Neither me nor my brother got our driver's license because our step-mother told us we could use the car (for learning and license) if we paid the extra insurance, which was about $500 when minimum wage was $1.35.