Reply to Teach Me to Raise an "Upper-Middle Class" Child

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[quote=Anonymous]I feel you, OP. I grew up extremely working class (to put it kindly), and even after years of living UMC, I feel like there's a code I've yet to crack and there are constantly things that I didn't grow up with and have never really thought about in terms of how I'm parenting my kids.

For instance, on a recent thread about weight, someone was talking about having the advantage of growing up with a mother who worked out regularly, bought fresh food and made from-scratch healthy meals as part of the reason it was easier for her to stay thin -- those habits had been ingrained in her from an early age and weren't a struggle to develop as an adult. My mother was a single parent to two children, she worked full time and was barely able to make ends meet, our meals were whatever was on sale at the grocery store (things like hamburger helper, ramen and rice-a-roni were frequently on sale for 19 cents a box, so we ate a lot of that) and fresh produce was usually too expensive, and there was no money for a gym membership or exercise equipment, nor was their childcare for her to even just go for a speed walk around the neighborhood without two small kids following so she never really exercised. I know about healthy nutrition and the benefits of exercise, but I'd never really thought about the extent to which I was impacting my kids' future health in terms of what habits they would take into their futures. I figured that if I made sure there were protein and veggies on their plates they were getting good food and hadn't thought before about how prioritizing exercise in my schedule (because I have the luxury of doing that in a way my mother never had) would teach my kids about prioritizing exercise. It's not that people in lower classes can't know and teach these things, but the reality is that they tend to be very tied to class status. Obviously I don't want my kids to struggle the way I have, so I need to take some of my resources and improve my lifestyle for them.

I don't have a whole lot of advice for how to get over it. I tend to follow stuff on DCUM a lot because I feel like, for all the negative attitude, I have actually learned a lot about the "right" way to be from this place. I do a lot of asking casual questions to figure out what I should be doing (e.g., once I realized that camp registration starts in January, I started asking other parents in January, "So, what camps are you looking at for the summer?" Not to copy what they're doing, but to help figure out what's out there and what's typical). If we're at someone's house, I try to take quiet notice of what's in their pantries or what kinds of toys are around. I'm not snooping, just trying to pick up cues. It's hard to feel like I fit in.[/quote]

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