“This statement should not be taken to imply that lower income parents do not care about their children or their education”
Gee,how kind.
As someone who grew up poor,surrounded by lots of poor or working class people, I find that statement very condescending. We all did very well.
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I also grew up poor, as did my wife, and we did very well. My parents couldn't afford to buy us books (five of us kids). So we used the library for our reading. My dad did buy an encyclopedia set, which we heavily relied on for our learning. Back then there were few distractions, no gadgets. With the proliferation of gadgets today, I see that as problematic in improving kids reading skills.
First you have to define poor. I grew up in conditions that most young people now might view as poverty but:
1. Our little forty acre farm and shack were paid for, no mortgage. The same property could probably be sold for two hundred thousand dollars now even though it is a mile off the nearest two lane blacktop.
2. As a child I could go out and roam for miles without worrying about being harmed by anyone. There were ponds belonging to others where I was welcome to fish, there were thousands of acres of woods and fields where I was welcome to hunt.
3. I had to work hard from a very early age which I thought was awful at the time but I learned things by the time I was fourteen that most adults never learn now and I learned by working.
4. I had more REAL education by the time I finished high school than any of the recent college graduates I know.
5. I went straight from high school into the US Navy and the Navy did far more for me than I ever thought about doing for the Navy and I did not have to put up with the PC garbage that has destroyed the current military.
6. At 21 with an honorable discharge, a high school diploma and a Navy electronics certificate I could land a job STARTING at what would be equal in today’s dollars to at LEAST 25 dollars an hour now with a real benefit package including medical insurance that was almost totally free to me. By the time I was 23 I was driving a new car, working in manufacturing engineering and earning pay and benefits equal to someone in the very high five figure to low six figure annual income range now.
That is the story of a “poor boy” born in 1944 in the “Cradle of the Confederacy.” I would hate to be a young person starting out now.
By the way, when I say “land a job” I don’t mean after a long struggle of months of applications, interviews, drug tests, background checks etc. I mean literally walking into the front office of a roller bearing plant, filling out an application and interviewing that same day and leaving with intstructions to report to work on Monday morning, I left the plant at three pm on FRIDAY! This was in a town with about five thousand population at the time.