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

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[quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous]This a useful, fascinating, and somewhat depressing thread. I totally identify with the OP; we were small-town middle class and now have a gross income that puts us in the 1%-ish demographic. I feel like my entire life since college has been spent trying to crack the code of all the things that I didn't know that everyone else did. It's even more extreme for my husband, whose family lost everything in a revolution before they fled here. He looked in amazement at our kids when they were ordering in a restaurant one day and said "I didn't know how to do that until I was in my 20s." His family never had the money to go out to dinner.

Here's the thing though - we don't try that hard to make our kids fit into some social standard of UMC. We want them to be smart, kind, well-behaved, interested in the world, and have a powerful moral compass. Beyond that, well, if they want to learn to ski, great, but it's not a priority.

Maybe we're just lazy, but part of being a once penniless, clueless immigrant helped give my husband incredible disdain for peer pressure. He literally could care less [b]if other people don't think he's good enough because he can't ski[/b]; he knows he is because he knows what it took to get where he is. I don't have that inner confidence at all. One of our kids takes after him in that department and I really wish that both did.[/quote]

I don't think that's the point at all. No one cares. It's more like...wealthy people have the money to go skiing, so if you also have money, you might get invited to go skiing, so you might want to learn (or have your kids learn) so you can do this winter activity. That's all. No one is judging.

Someone posted upthread some basics--ice skating, swimming, tennis, golf. Where I grew up skiing was definitely on that list, along with waterskiing and sailing. All things people with money did (lots of people had a ski cabin or a lake cabin or a sailboat) and you might be asked to go along. I'm sure in other parts of the country it's other kinds of activities, like surfing or hunting.

I also agree about the "free" skills like being polite, table manners, knowing how to act in a restaurant/at a church service/at a formal party (like a wedding reception), etc. That's stuff you just have to model and reinforce. [/quote]

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