Reply to What is Middle Class....Really?

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[quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous]This discussion has taken an interesting turn.

A poster some pages back brought up another element to all this: When upper-income parents (say, $300 to $400K and up) tell their kids that they are living a regular, middle-class lifestyle, it does set up for a challenging "standard" - a level that some children, once they're grown, do not achieve. If a child is led to believe that the lifestyle provided by a $350,000 income - a nice house in the city, upscale cars, fancy restaurants, international vacations, private schools, etc. - is your run-of-the-mill middle-class life, how will they feel if they go to college and study a field they enjoy that tops out at around $80,000 or $90,000? (I'm thinking teachers, but there are many fields like that.) Will they be made to feel like failures because they can have to live in the suburbs to buy an equivalent house to the one they grew up in, and can't really afford the annual trip to Paris or London (although who'd want to go now)?

I think it's important that we transmit to our children that we are indeed living a life that most people cannot afford, and that we are unusual in that regard. Because I see problems related to this all the time. Kids grow up in really nice houses and then are either resentful or depressed when they are not at the same level as their parents. Friends of mine have subsidized their college-educated children (after paying the full tuition, so there are no loans) in luxury apartments their first few years in the workforce because "that's what the kids are used to." [/quote]

Yes, I wonder about this too.  
I live in AU Park where we and almost all of our neighbors make in the $300-400K range.  And we're generally all the first generation of our families to have this money...i.e. there isn't a lot of generational family money in this neighborhood.  Just smart people who did well in school and ended up in reasonably high paying jobs.  Anyway, not all of us will have successful kids.  And not all of us who have successful kids will have kids who go into high paying fields.  
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but all those kids will inherit those houses and more. that should help especially with buying their own houses.[/quote]

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