My entire paternal side of the family grew up in extreme poverty. They lived in a plywood shack in the dust bowl of Oklahoma. They often ate only cornmeal. They never saw a doctor. Six children slept in two beds.
They all made it out of poverty. My dad credits the GI bill. He served in WWII and was rewarded with a free college education. But even without the college education, the others worked hard at blue collar jobs. None were addicted to drugs and they all married before children came.
I understand that some people can become addicted. But there is no excuse for taking that first shot of heroin or the first hit of whatever drug. I do not understand that.
Note that the decision to move to a different country is a selection bias â the immigrants are a self-selected subset of the source population, with the selection for a high level of motivation and risk taking compared to others.
Seems that people have missed the point of the article, which btw is not particularly well done as regards its main contention: environmental conditions cause genetic changes in people through the expression of genes at various stages of life (this is essentially the definition of epigenetics). Thus, the nature versus nurture argument is pushed even further in favor of nature, in that even when nurture matters it is only through the operation of genes.
The bad news is that very much of what we think constitutes âgoodâ or a âbadâ outcomes for people is caused by genetics, whether through initial genetic endowment or through environmental conditions operating on that endowment later in life through epigenetics.
The even worse news is that we simply have no idea what roles these environmental conditions play, and there is plenty of evidence to suggest that the roles played by such conditions are not intuitively obvious. Therefore, we have no idea what sorts of interventions might actually be effective (outside of the basics: decent nutrition, donât drop your baby on its head, etc.). There is almost no serious research being done in this area from what I can tell.
Iâm struck by how many of the stories of young people who made it out of poverty feature some sort of mentor. It may have been a parent who encouraged the young person to make academics a priority, even if it meant decreasing the amount of money that the young person could contribute to the family through part-time work. It may have been a teacher who noticed the studentâs academic ability and clued the student in to the language of GPAs and SATs. It may have been an employer at a part-time job who pushed young people working there to stay in school. For immigrants and the children of immigrants, itâs sometimes an entire culture that supports education as a route to success.
Can kids really make it out on their own, without some sort of support? Does that happen often?
H grew up very poor in a large family in another country. He came here to work and send money back home for his widowed mom & younger siblings.
He had always wanted to go to school â college or trade school â but he felt like he couldnât stop working because his family needed the money he was sending home. He has some regrets about that.
Over the years, we have experienced the âfamily taxâ, sometimes acutely. That is, the suck on our resources in order to help family members (mostly MIL) and always feeling like it was never going to be enough and never end.
We were hit hard by the crash in 2008. H lost his job. Then, when he found work it was at a fraction of what he was making before. He lucked out when he landed the job he has now. We are not rich, but we are no longer living paycheck to paycheck. I donât know where weâd be if he hadnât landed that job â we knew somebody who knew somebody who was hiring.
Itâs curious to me, the different outcomes in his siblings and in the lives of his siblingâs children. You donât get to pick your parents. There seems to be a lot of variables, timing, luck, effort, good health.
We tell our kids that life has sand traps because that seems to be how it has played out in our extended families. Some people get stuck. Some people get out.
Are you saying that immigrants have an easier time getting out of poverty because they are more motivated/risk takers? Often, they donât hae any choices about leaving their country of originâyoung children who come here with their parents certainly donât. My mother was an orphan and came here with a much older sister (my mother had no choiceâshe was 6 years old).
@ucbalumnus this is certainly correct about immigrants, and Iâm not trying to contrast them with the native-born Americans, just providing an example of how parental values and guidance are probably more important than the economic situation of the family.
I wouldnât say parental values and guidance are more important than economicsâparental guidance/values are extremely helpfull in overcoming economic limitations.
My dad was one of eight children who lived in a two bedroom house with his mom and dad. My grandfather was an alcoholic and the children often went hungry. My dad played football barefoot because he could not afford shoes. He and his brothers would steal apples from a nearby orchard when they got too hungry. Luckily, he met my motherâs family who took an interest in putting him on the right path. Unfortunately, not all his siblings were so lucky. About half are doing well, while a few of his brothers have had alcohol and drug problems, as well as run-ins with the law. I agree with Marian that having a mentor or just someone who takes an interest in you can help with moving out of poverty.
The kids may not have made the choice to immigrate, but they are under the guidance of parents or other relatives who did make the choice to immigrate, and (as you note in reply #28) influence their kids as they raise them.
However, those who make the choice to immigrate are self-selected as those with higher levels of motivation compared to others (and there may be other selection effects applied by the immigration system). It is not necessarily true that immigrants are a representative sample of their origin population.
Immigrants are not only self-selected by motivation, but also benefit immensely by changing their surroundings in a profound way. The ability to reinvent yourself can make it possible to escape from the toxic hopelessness of poverty. Immigrant communities, even if they are poverty stricken, live in a lot more hope than other poverty stricken communities. Many immigrants are unable to get out of their poverty, as was seen by the slums of New Yorkâs Lower East Side or Chicagoâs Maxwell Street area. However, their kids almost invariably made it, because part of immigrant culture is the belief that it is possible to get a better life, and that there is a way to get out.
So kids are raised with that attitude, and parents are willing to sacrifice, because they have the belief that their sacrifice will help. In non-immigrant poor communities there often is a feeling of ânothing will helpâ. So parents donât see the point in sacrificing their few pleasures for nothing, and kids will often not even try, because they donât believe that there is a point, or are more easily discouraged, because any setback is just more proof that the deck is just too heavily stacked against them.
So, like a disease, sometimes a change in scenery can help.
PS. Self selection was not the case of the Irish and Jewish immigrants of the 19th and early 20th century. Most left their homes because they had no choice. So it was often just the hope and belief that things would and could be better that resulted in the success of these communities and their kids (especially Jewish communities).
@MWolf, this is the situation for many of the people from Guatemala, El Salvador and Honduras now attempting to seek asylum at the Mexican-U.S. border.
A number of my parentsâ friends made it out of poverty by simple demographics. The one guy got a job as a school janitor at a time when a blue-collar job like that was secure, had a decent salary, and retirement benefits were included. Plus, that cheap house on the side of the hill in Sausalito appreciated by a factor of 100 in a little over 30 years. San Francisco area real estate prices funded a lot of their retirements. Neither option is available today.
I did my best not to leak my survival anxiety to my kids. Now, at least, I can blame my genetics.
The personal stories of rising out of poverty here will most likely not be balanced by folks posting that they tried so hard but never could rise out. Right? Because those people are probably not posting on CCâs Parent Cafe. They exist, though, and thereâs lots of them.
When I worked at an urban public university, I got to see what it was like for the very poor who were trying to rise out of poverty. Trying to make it in college despite a substandard education, no access to reliable public transportation to get them to class every time it met, no adequate place to study (and staying at the library meant taking the bus after dark, thereby exposing themselves to danger), etc. Yet these were the lucky ones, because the ones in rural areas had no way to pay to live away at school, no transportation to get to school, etc. And the young people in the impossibly poor urban area on the other side of the state can add the fact that there is no way to get to the jobs that are available but impossible to get to without transportation.
While some of us have been able to move up in life, others who are possibly a lot like us are not able to do so ⊠and itâs not necessarily for lack of trying.
Mentors, being in the right place at the right time, dumb luck ⊠these can get folks where they want to go. Other folks are working hard & getting nowhere. Letâs at least acknowledge that it is not always about trying. If only it were that simple.
Getting out of poverty is something like winning the lottery. You canât win if you donât buy a ticket, but most people who buy a ticket wonât win. Similarly, you canât get out of poverty without working hard, but many or most of the poor people who work hard cannot get out of poverty.
The folks in public health have long recognized and been discussing âsocial determinants of health.â The socio-economic class you are born and raised in do more to affect your health than many other factors.
Iâm quite sure that if I and my kids and H didnât have the resources we did, we would likely have had a much shorter and more miserable lifespan, especially since we have chronic health conditions.