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- Thread starter lamina
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nice neighborhood, and for anybody who thinks kids don't suffer and get neglected in nice areas, i definitely can share similar stories
i have seen places similar to your area, and where i grew up on the monterey peninsula, 23 golf courses and all with pebble beach is one of them
most of the kids were spoiled rotten and many got fancy cars at 16 and i definitely would not do that if i had a kid
however, some rich kids i know were neglected like you, or at the very least not given a proportional amount of time and/or money
one kid i knew, whose father owned a corporate farm and who was worth several million, never got allowance and was very skinny all the time...he actually used to come to our house and we would feed him
i don't know if the parents thought they were raising a strong kid, or that if they felt some sort of guilt having starving immigrants work on their farm and thought it may be novel to starve their kid
when it came time for college, it was junior college which was almost free then or off to a state school and work full time...there was no way the parents were going to spend a dime on the kids education
another set of kids i know had parents who sit on a 10 million dollar piece of beach front property in carmel, ca, and their parents owned a motel business...the mother was so cheap, she actually used the left over food from the guests
both these families were great friends of ours, and neither lacked money, but it was so weird to see "how" they grew up
and in both cases, i don't know if neglect was the issue or if the parents were cheap, rich people (which is not all that uncommon)
i am glad you turned out ok and we should all love our parents, but still know that not all people are meant to be parents
and of course, there is physical abuse, crack, heroin, and all sorts of issues one thinks would only exist in the inner city happening all over cushy suburban neighborhoods
it's the human condition and many who become rich from a poor background are shocked when they find that money doesn't shelter them from human misery and that parenting is a tough job
it's prolly a major factor in why i didn't become a parent...and it's sad to see how some of my friends had kids way too early and later heard of their stories of their struggles and some of their regrets how they did not do as good of a job as they had intended
also, my cousin was a teacher who taught in a rather affluent area of kickback, pork barrel money, which consisted of many formerly poor folk who did well during the nuclear arms race (and yes, there is pork barrel and kickbacks in republican political projects, too and it's not just a symptom of the tax and spend democrats, but that's for another thread concerning tax and spend republicans 
)
he taught at a continuation high school and even though the kids came from an area with money and low crime, many of the kids had rap sheets like the poorer kids in neighboring oakland, ca
when he would tell people in other areas familiar with the nice neighborhood (where they developed nuclear and chemical weapons) about his experiences teaching in continuation high school, they were shocked and thought kids with those issues only came from oakland, inner city sf, and similar areas
there is always a great need for social workers everywhere, even in "nice" neighborhoods
)he taught at a continuation high school and even though the kids came from an area with money and low crime, many of the kids had rap sheets like the poorer kids in neighboring oakland, ca
when he would tell people in other areas familiar with the nice neighborhood (where they developed nuclear and chemical weapons) about his experiences teaching in continuation high school, they were shocked and thought kids with those issues only came from oakland, inner city sf, and similar areas
there is always a great need for social workers everywhere, even in "nice" neighborhoods
Really well said. We had a meeting with a kid the other day (kid currently living in a group home in an urban ring environment), and of the 3 social workers at the table (working for this kid in different places and different ways) all were interns from the same MSW program. None had yet graduated.
In situations like you describe above the educational and personal "failures" of kids reflects a larger, general feeling about the unimportance of education -- and other people. It's the marketplace at its worst (and that's not a condemnation of a marketplace that can do and does do wonderful things) -- greed, self-interest, and a radical conception of the value of use.
One of the questions we struggle with just about every day -- if the educational system has failed parents to the extent that they don't see its value (or worse, they see it as something that's done to them and their children), how on earth do we get the kids to see value in learning? Arguments about the "value" of a diploma only go so far and in some ways feed the problem we're facing.
Probably the main reason why I've never become a parent too. I really would hate to be responsible for screwing up the foundations of someone else's life.63dot said:
Plus it is scary to think that if I would have had a child within the first year of getting married, that child would be about 20 right now.
I sort of moved out when I went to college, but for the first three years I would come home during the summers to work. The fourth year I took the last couple of classes I needed to graduate and then after that never went back, except to visit. My room's not even the same anymore. It's been turned into a guest room.
