Yeah, see, I grew up in the South. You did not talk about things like that outright, in front of other people!
But what all this reminds me of are math contest rankings. Because that was interesting!
Ah, that is interesting and makes sense! State contest rankings were one of many accomplishments that got broadcast to all and sundry at my schools, but since contests were only once a year and there were only a few contests, and since only a handful of people from your school would compete in a contest and you never interacted with the people from the other schools, that only gave you a few days' per year worth of bragging time, and only with the few people from your own school who competed. Whereas everyone had grades to talk about, every day, all year. ;)
I didn't mean kid struggles, I meant adult struggles! There is a whole family story with my family, starting with my father's grandmother, who identified education as the way to get out of the horrible living conditions in rural Korea (e.g., no indoor plumbing or electricity, that's just for starters)
Ahhh, yes, that makes sense! And that's the thing: my parents did not see poverty as something to avoid. Homelessness, yes, and education was the key to making sure you didn't starve and could support yourself. But I was getting an education, so they had nothing to worry about! All they cared about was us finishing high school with passing grades, and then maybe getting some kind of post-secondary vocational training or community college if that made sense.
See, my parents (my mother, speaking on behalf of the parental team) gave us long lectures about how rich people aren't any happier, and if you go to someone's house and you see lots of fancy things, they could have bought all that on credit and the bank is about to repossess us, and so forth.
We were told that being a garbage collector was a fine respectable job that would make them proud of us. (And it is and that's good! It's just their particular application of this laudable belief intersected badly with my particular unmet intellectual needs.) Living at home until 30 like my mother did, and getting married and becoming a stay-at-home mom like my mother, totally fine, as long as we had enough education that if our husbands died or left us we could find an emergency job and keep from starving.
My parents were so explicitly anti-classist in so many different aspects of life that it just permeated my entire upbringing, sometimes in surprising ways. My wife and I talk about this sometimes.
Perhaps the most surprising knock-on effect of my anti-classist or reverse-classist upbringing: it took me until I was 25, staying at a friend's house (which as I'm sure you can guess, almost never happened), to get a shampoo that kept my scalp from itching. Because I had been told that paying more for more expensive products was a waste of money that people did just for conspicuous consumption class status symbol reasons (not in those words, but that's what the lecture meant).
When I complained about my scalp itching, my mother said that was because I had gotten my hair used to being washed every day, and I should only wash it every other day. I said I couldn't, because I was going crazy scratching by the end of each day and wouldn't last a second day. She shrugged at me.
Stayed at a friend's house while attending a conference in grad school, used what she had, realized to my shock that my hair was not only shinier/healthier looking the next day, but it was not! itching! anymore. I then decided that no matter what my mother said, paying $3/bottle instead of $1/bottle was worth it for me. (Even though I felt bad because I wasn't just paying a little more, I was paying three times as much! Which felt borderline immoral and was definitely something I felt defensive about.) That was also a huge eye-opener in which I discovered that sometimes if you pay more, you do get better results.
There is a whole family story with my family, starting with my father's grandmother, who identified education as the way to get out of the horrible living conditions in rural Korea (e.g., no indoor plumbing or electricity, that's just for starters)
So my parents grew up with plumbing and electricity, but my mother's parents did not. They grew up in rural areas, poor in different ways. And my mother always talked about how my grandfather's mother sewed their underwear out of flour sacks, and she would go to the river to do their laundry and have it hanging out on the line by the time the sun came up, and such stories of farm/ranch life in the early twentieth century. And she talked about how her father and his family didn't feel poor, because all their neighbors lived exactly the same way, and since they grew their own food (and weren't like in the Dust Bowl), they always had enough to eat and didn't even notice the Great Depression.
There's a country music song that goes, "Well, somebody told us Wall Street fell, But we were so poor that we couldn't tell," and everytime I hear that, I think, "Hey, that's Grandpa's childhood!"
My grandmother grew up in a more varied poor childhood, born in a log cabin and then moved to different small towns as her mother found work to support them, and they might have had more electricity at different times, but she also didn't have enough to eat. Like at one point there was nothing in the house to eat but popcorn, and she had to see a doctor for digestive issues (probably hunger/malnourishment).
And so the only thing my parents cared about was whether you had a roof and food! Everything else was a luxury, and you better not act like it was anything other than a luxury.
Why wouldn't they do all they could to help their one kid who had a chance of getting out to a better life to do so??
As far as I can tell, they literally considered it immoral to divert resources from other children to the one child who was already going to be self-supporting. It would have been a waste of resources.
It was interesting because they were stuck with an either-or situation at one point:
- One child is almost certain to end up dependent on others, in diapers, unable to speak up or defend himself if he's being abused, for the rest of his life, no matter what you do.
- One child is pretty certain to end up independent, and even successful beyond the wildest dreams of anyone in your family, no matter what you do.
And to my parents, the dead obvious choice is to throw body and soul into the tiiiiiny chance of finding *some* treatment that might help the first child become independent.
Right as we moved to Arizona and my parents were faced with a choice between a school system that would be good for my brother and good for my sister, one of my teachers apparently (according to my mother) told them they didn't need to worry about my education, as I was already on top of it.
I FELT SO BETRAYED. I liked that teacher!
So my parents explicitly told me that, since they agreed with that teacher, they were picking a school district with a decent elementary special education program at the cost of me going to a high school that was primarily training the future farmers of America. All I had to do and all they had to make sure I did was stay in school and make passing grades until I graduated. At which point I would be on my own and could do what I wanted.
I was a solved problem in their mind, and all my insisting I wasn't a solved problem was just ingratitude and undeserved accusations of inadequate parenting.
It didn't always need to be as either-or as my parents made it, there was a lot of anxiety playing into their refusal to put in more effort for me* than they already were, but the school district choice was an either-or, and their values made it clear to them that choosing me would be a waste of resources because I was a solved problem.
* I've said this before, and I'll say it again: this was not avoiding work. This was avoiding scary things, because the motivation to face the fear of the unfamiliar wasn't strong enough. In my brother's case, the motivation was strong enough, so they did all kinds of work. And when neither the process nor the need for it was unfamiliar to my parents, like calling to get school records transfered to keep me from repeating classes I'd already taken, they did the work. Not repeating classes you had already passed: something my parents saw as familiar and understood why it was necessary! Skipping classes when you could just take them like everyone else, or taking extra classes: not something my parents understood why it was necessary, because they never did it nor did anyone else they knew.
I think the difference between my parents and yours is that they both see education as key to success, but because mine see survival as the goal and yours see upward mobility and outperforming the average as the goal, and mine see poverty as a perfectly fine situation and yours don't, my parents' idea of the necessary amount of education is"average amount", and your parents' idea of the necessary amount is "as much as humanly possible."
And that's related to why your parents supported your education on the one hand, but on the other were extremely invested in certain outcomes for you and hostile when you had goals that didn't match theirs, and mine were accepting of whatever goals I chose and whatever outcomes I got, but saw investing too much in them as a waste of resources.
my mom fought for me a lot, but she was also fighting for herself because any glory that came to me also reflected on her.
Yeah, mine came from a family where any of my mother's success was shot down immediately because it made *her* mother look bad, and then my mother and I got into a dynamic where my obnoxiousness (which was driven by my need to fight for my needs) about my success made *her* feel bad about my success, so...yeah. Not like your family.
In contrast, I'm sure a child as disabled as my brother would have made your mother feel he reflected badly on her, but not mine! She was more emotionally comfortable with a special needs disabled child with an obvious medical diagnosis than a special needs overachiever child who was constantly demanding that her parents do more. I've posted before (second half of this one) about how I think my parents were more mentally prepared for and thus more emotionally comfortable with my one sister's out-of-control disobedience and my other sister's normal disobedience than my pathologically obedient and obnoxiously argumentative self! One was "Well, kids do wrong things, being a good parent is teaching them and being patient," and one was "Kid is not doing wrong things and saying WE'RE doing wrong things??! NO! We're not bad parents!"
(You know, when I finish my dad's memoirs -- hopefully this summer -- I'll just send them to you and then you'll understand exactly where he was coming from.)
Yes, please do! As noted, I've read a bunch of memoirs about growing up in North Korea, including during the 1990s famine, so I have an idea of how bad it can be, but I have no idea about South Korea. I'm super curious about your father's experience.
(My dad's father worked in a steel mill, his mother worked in an office, his brother was not quite as disabled as mine, but still living at home and heavily medicated. The whole idea of a mother who worked was prevented to me as a perfectly valid life choice, but a super unusual one. Especially since she was the grandmother I had virtually no contact with. In being a woman with a career, I was basically trailblazing in my family. Especially as my sister had no career ambitions either and promptly got pregnant at 16.)
I've noticed most USians don't have the (very common Asian) idea that one's family is all in this together
Indeed, and my family is especially good at breaking up into splinter groups every generation, even beyond the usual American individualism. (Usually you have a dysfunctional family that gets together at the holidays and then remembers how dysfunctional they are. You don't just cut each other off promptly and permanently, which is my family's tradition.)
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Date: 2022-06-28 06:18 pm (UTC)But what all this reminds me of are math contest rankings. Because that was interesting!
Ah, that is interesting and makes sense! State contest rankings were one of many accomplishments that got broadcast to all and sundry at my schools, but since contests were only once a year and there were only a few contests, and since only a handful of people from your school would compete in a contest and you never interacted with the people from the other schools, that only gave you a few days' per year worth of bragging time, and only with the few people from your own school who competed. Whereas everyone had grades to talk about, every day, all year. ;)
I didn't mean kid struggles, I meant adult struggles! There is a whole family story with my family, starting with my father's grandmother, who identified education as the way to get out of the horrible living conditions in rural Korea (e.g., no indoor plumbing or electricity, that's just for starters)
Ahhh, yes, that makes sense! And that's the thing: my parents did not see poverty as something to avoid. Homelessness, yes, and education was the key to making sure you didn't starve and could support yourself. But I was getting an education, so they had nothing to worry about! All they cared about was us finishing high school with passing grades, and then maybe getting some kind of post-secondary vocational training or community college if that made sense.
See, my parents (my mother, speaking on behalf of the parental team) gave us long lectures about how rich people aren't any happier, and if you go to someone's house and you see lots of fancy things, they could have bought all that on credit and the bank is about to repossess us, and so forth.
We were told that being a garbage collector was a fine respectable job that would make them proud of us. (And it is and that's good! It's just their particular application of this laudable belief intersected badly with my particular unmet intellectual needs.) Living at home until 30 like my mother did, and getting married and becoming a stay-at-home mom like my mother, totally fine, as long as we had enough education that if our husbands died or left us we could find an emergency job and keep from starving.
My parents were so explicitly anti-classist in so many different aspects of life that it just permeated my entire upbringing, sometimes in surprising ways. My wife and I talk about this sometimes.
Perhaps the most surprising knock-on effect of my anti-classist or reverse-classist upbringing: it took me until I was 25, staying at a friend's house (which as I'm sure you can guess, almost never happened), to get a shampoo that kept my scalp from itching. Because I had been told that paying more for more expensive products was a waste of money that people did just for conspicuous consumption class status symbol reasons (not in those words, but that's what the lecture meant).
When I complained about my scalp itching, my mother said that was because I had gotten my hair used to being washed every day, and I should only wash it every other day. I said I couldn't, because I was going crazy scratching by the end of each day and wouldn't last a second day. She shrugged at me.
Stayed at a friend's house while attending a conference in grad school, used what she had, realized to my shock that my hair was not only shinier/healthier looking the next day, but it was not! itching! anymore. I then decided that no matter what my mother said, paying $3/bottle instead of $1/bottle was worth it for me. (Even though I felt bad because I wasn't just paying a little more, I was paying three times as much! Which felt borderline immoral and was definitely something I felt defensive about.) That was also a huge eye-opener in which I discovered that sometimes if you pay more, you do get better results.
There is a whole family story with my family, starting with my father's grandmother, who identified education as the way to get out of the horrible living conditions in rural Korea (e.g., no indoor plumbing or electricity, that's just for starters)
So my parents grew up with plumbing and electricity, but my mother's parents did not. They grew up in rural areas, poor in different ways. And my mother always talked about how my grandfather's mother sewed their underwear out of flour sacks, and she would go to the river to do their laundry and have it hanging out on the line by the time the sun came up, and such stories of farm/ranch life in the early twentieth century. And she talked about how her father and his family didn't feel poor, because all their neighbors lived exactly the same way, and since they grew their own food (and weren't like in the Dust Bowl), they always had enough to eat and didn't even notice the Great Depression.
There's a country music song that goes, "Well, somebody told us Wall Street fell, But we were so poor that we couldn't tell," and everytime I hear that, I think, "Hey, that's Grandpa's childhood!"
My grandmother grew up in a more varied poor childhood, born in a log cabin and then moved to different small towns as her mother found work to support them, and they might have had more electricity at different times, but she also didn't have enough to eat. Like at one point there was nothing in the house to eat but popcorn, and she had to see a doctor for digestive issues (probably hunger/malnourishment).
And so the only thing my parents cared about was whether you had a roof and food! Everything else was a luxury, and you better not act like it was anything other than a luxury.
Why wouldn't they do all they could to help their one kid who had a chance of getting out to a better life to do so??
As far as I can tell, they literally considered it immoral to divert resources from other children to the one child who was already going to be self-supporting. It would have been a waste of resources.
It was interesting because they were stuck with an either-or situation at one point:
- One child is almost certain to end up dependent on others, in diapers, unable to speak up or defend himself if he's being abused, for the rest of his life, no matter what you do.
- One child is pretty certain to end up independent, and even successful beyond the wildest dreams of anyone in your family, no matter what you do.
And to my parents, the dead obvious choice is to throw body and soul into the tiiiiiny chance of finding *some* treatment that might help the first child become independent.
Right as we moved to Arizona and my parents were faced with a choice between a school system that would be good for my brother and good for my sister, one of my teachers apparently (according to my mother) told them they didn't need to worry about my education, as I was already on top of it.
I FELT SO BETRAYED. I liked that teacher!
So my parents explicitly told me that, since they agreed with that teacher, they were picking a school district with a decent elementary special education program at the cost of me going to a high school that was primarily training the future farmers of America. All I had to do and all they had to make sure I did was stay in school and make passing grades until I graduated. At which point I would be on my own and could do what I wanted.
I was a solved problem in their mind, and all my insisting I wasn't a solved problem was just ingratitude and undeserved accusations of inadequate parenting.
It didn't always need to be as either-or as my parents made it, there was a lot of anxiety playing into their refusal to put in more effort for me* than they already were, but the school district choice was an either-or, and their values made it clear to them that choosing me would be a waste of resources because I was a solved problem.
* I've said this before, and I'll say it again: this was not avoiding work. This was avoiding scary things, because the motivation to face the fear of the unfamiliar wasn't strong enough. In my brother's case, the motivation was strong enough, so they did all kinds of work. And when neither the process nor the need for it was unfamiliar to my parents, like calling to get school records transfered to keep me from repeating classes I'd already taken, they did the work. Not repeating classes you had already passed: something my parents saw as familiar and understood why it was necessary! Skipping classes when you could just take them like everyone else, or taking extra classes: not something my parents understood why it was necessary, because they never did it nor did anyone else they knew.
I think the difference between my parents and yours is that they both see education as key to success, but because mine see survival as the goal and yours see upward mobility and outperforming the average as the goal, and mine see poverty as a perfectly fine situation and yours don't, my parents' idea of the necessary amount of education is"average amount", and your parents' idea of the necessary amount is "as much as humanly possible."
And that's related to why your parents supported your education on the one hand, but on the other were extremely invested in certain outcomes for you and hostile when you had goals that didn't match theirs, and mine were accepting of whatever goals I chose and whatever outcomes I got, but saw investing too much in them as a waste of resources.
my mom fought for me a lot, but she was also fighting for herself because any glory that came to me also reflected on her.
Yeah, mine came from a family where any of my mother's success was shot down immediately because it made *her* mother look bad, and then my mother and I got into a dynamic where my obnoxiousness (which was driven by my need to fight for my needs) about my success made *her* feel bad about my success, so...yeah. Not like your family.
In contrast, I'm sure a child as disabled as my brother would have made your mother feel he reflected badly on her, but not mine! She was more emotionally comfortable with a special needs disabled child with an obvious medical diagnosis than a special needs overachiever child who was constantly demanding that her parents do more. I've posted before (second half of this one) about how I think my parents were more mentally prepared for and thus more emotionally comfortable with my one sister's out-of-control disobedience and my other sister's normal disobedience than my pathologically obedient and obnoxiously argumentative self! One was "Well, kids do wrong things, being a good parent is teaching them and being patient," and one was "Kid is not doing wrong things and saying WE'RE doing wrong things??! NO! We're not bad parents!"
(You know, when I finish my dad's memoirs -- hopefully this summer -- I'll just send them to you and then you'll understand exactly where he was coming from.)
Yes, please do! As noted, I've read a bunch of memoirs about growing up in North Korea, including during the 1990s famine, so I have an idea of how bad it can be, but I have no idea about South Korea. I'm super curious about your father's experience.
(My dad's father worked in a steel mill, his mother worked in an office, his brother was not quite as disabled as mine, but still living at home and heavily medicated. The whole idea of a mother who worked was prevented to me as a perfectly valid life choice, but a super unusual one. Especially since she was the grandmother I had virtually no contact with. In being a woman with a career, I was basically trailblazing in my family. Especially as my sister had no career ambitions either and promptly got pregnant at 16.)
I've noticed most USians don't have the (very common Asian) idea that one's family is all in this together
Indeed, and my family is especially good at breaking up into splinter groups every generation, even beyond the usual American individualism. (Usually you have a dysfunctional family that gets together at the holidays and then remembers how dysfunctional they are. You don't just cut each other off promptly and permanently, which is my family's tradition.)