Middle Class Child Syndrome

Many people who grow up in the relative affluence of the middle class have a hard time adjusting the the reality of their situations. We do not realize that our parents really don't have all the money we could ever want and we think that the world is going to hand us everything that crosses our minds.

This is due, in part, to never really having to do without anything essential. We never get to be truly hungry for longer than a couple of hours. We always have a coat. Shoes are always season appropriate. We get told "No" because our parents choose not to give us something, not because they CAN'T give it to us.

The fact of a Budget never crosses our minds. Even when we hear the word and are told that we must stay within it, the range is large enough that truly doing without is just not happening.

And that there is a budget of sorts for other things, teachers' patience, parents' tolerance for attitude, etc., never occurs to us either.

So, we get to become chronological adults with no real grasp of shortfall. Until our parents no longer support us and we fall on our asses.

MCCS is marked by not getting your shit together until after you have failed dramaticly. Not every child of the middle class has to endure it, but I have seen a LOT of friends and relatives go through it.

Note that I used self-inclusive pronouns.

I will be letting C live with his choices about schoolwork and I will not be nagging him any more than I have because I hope for him to learn the lessons of failure sooner, rather than than later.

I don't want him to fail, but I willing to allow him to.

Perspective

I think that the way we see people is very complicated.

When we are little, someone is nice to us and we associate their bodytype and facial structure with niceness. Someone is mean and we do they same thing. So, by the time we are in elementary school, we have a fairly large encyclopedia of associations and as time goes by it just increases.

In addition to the visual associations, there are situational associations. We learn from watching our parents, family, friends, and seeing how they respond to the people they interact with. Bakers are friendly or surly. Cops are protective or authoritarian. Clergy are distant or reassuring. Etcetera.

And I think those associations hold for a long, long time. It takes heavy retraining to unlearn them.

So, we start with an assumption, based on that "layered" collection of impressions, then we start adding pieces of the individuals we spend time with. We learn that this person laughs when we tell a certain joke. That this touch gets a positive response. Or withdrawal. We share experiences and build something...an idea of who that other person is,

The thing is, all we get are bits and pieces. Stories about our childhoods. Knowledge of how we behave with our families. Seeing responses to incidents that are based on all that layered perception. And filtered through our own layers of understanding.

Some days, I think it's a wonder we are ever able to communicate at all.