Reply to If you grew up poor are you ever shocked at what you now spend money on?

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[quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous]Yes.

I grew up poor...4 girls to a tiny room in a tiny one bathroom leaky moldy house.

I cried when we purchased our first house because it was so nice compared to what I grew up in.

Eating out, school shopping, vacations, stuff, all so much more than I could have ever imagined.

I worry about my kids living such a comfortable life, particularly my younger two.  The older kid is more aware of our blessings but the other two just take it for granted as this is how "everyone" they know lives.  My husband grew up as upper middle class, so to him this is just normal lifestyle too.

They are are always a bit jolted when we visit my family and they see how their cousins (on my side) live.[/quote]

It's like you are describing me, PP. I also grew up in a house that should probably have been condemned and had a horrible rodent and roach problem, although we had a luxury of two bedrooms to go with our one bathroom. We got by on food stamps and food pantries, and toward the end of the month when the cupboards were bare my mom would send us to our friends' houses at dinnertime in the hopes they would feed us. I also cried when I bought our house in Chevy Chase because I couldn't believe how much better my kids' life would be.

I talk about it a lot to my kids, but they still just can't really get it. When I was a kid, our vacations were only going to my grandparents' house, a five-hour drive where multiple times we had our car break down en route because it was not in good enough shape to make the whole trip. One time when I was about 7 my cousins took me with them to the beach, and it was the only time until I was an adult that I saw the ocean. Flash forward to now, I just took my kids on a two-week vacation where they saw two shows on Broadway and spent a week on Martha's Vineyard in a fancy house with a pool where they had a blast, among many other fun outings. They threw temper tantrums in the car on the way home because I wouldn't take them to a water park as planned because it was raining. And I was really depressed and thinking I'm failing them that they don't get what they have. I tried to explain it to them, but they have no frame of reference since everyone they know lives that way.

And then I question whether my kids really do have it better.  [/quote]

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