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What's it like growing up poor/on benefits/underprivileged?

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Reply 40

Herr

Original post by PinkMobilePhone

I'm fairly sure that my kids don't care that we're on benefits. Maybe they will when they're older, who knows.

I'm sure they will when they start having friends who ask "what does your parents do?"

Reply 41

PinkMobilePhone

Volunteer Team

Original post by Herr

I'm sure they will when they start having friends who ask "what does your parents do?"

By then we'll be working I should imagine. Besides I don't do nothing - I'm a carer.

Reply 42

s.a.u

Original post by GdotL

Everyone gets child benefit, regardless of income.

we don't get it, actually

Reply 43

PinkMobilePhone

Volunteer Team

Original post by s.a.u

we don't get it, actually

presumably then you aren't a child and do not have a child.

It's CHILD benefit.

Reply 44

s.a.u

Original post by PinkMobilePhone

presumably then you aren't a child and do not have a child

actually, i'm 18, and my sister is 15. probably just outside the bracket, so get your facts right

Reply 45

PinkMobilePhone

Volunteer Team

Original post by s.a.u

actually, i'm 18, and my sister is 15. probably just outside the bracket, so get your facts right

If your sister is 15, and your parents are British Citizens, then your parents should get child benefit for her. There is absolutely no reason why they shouldn't be getting it unless they never bothered to claim it in the first place.

Reply 46

Annie72

Original post by s.a.u

actually, i'm 18, and my sister is 15. probably just outside the bracket, so get your facts right

Child benefit is paid out to everyone that has a child/children under 19 and still in full time education.

I always thought I grew up poor, but after reading some of the replies I've realised I had more than I thought.

Reply 47

xXxiKillxXx

Being on benefits doesn't mean you are poor. You are poor when you've never met your father and your mum is a crack fiend who spends most of her benefits money to satisfy her addiction whilst her kids are starving.. Then when the kids get a bit older, they do crime to make ends meet.

Reply 48

ShredMaster

Original post by GdotL

Why are people negging my earlier true statement? - so pathetic.

Dumb bitches commenting on **** that they don't understand. Airhead.

Reply 49

Lamptastic

Grew up in Hackney on a council estate, Dad worked in security and Mum only started working in security when I was at Uni so didn't qualify for the grants I really needed. I have 3 siblings, 1 of which is disabled and 2 pets in a cramped 2 bed council flat so I knew what it was like being underpriviliged.

We weren't REALLY poor, we had Sky/Cable and my parents skint themselves bare for us to enjoy Xmas whereas our bdays were celebrated but not incredibly so. I went on all of the school trips, I had hand me down clothes and my siblings inherited them off me. I lived in tracksuits with a bowl cut hair do and I was bullied because I didn't wear name brands or snazzy trainers. We didn't eat in restaurants or go abroad, we ate fishfingers and waffles for dinner and a luxury meal was spag bol.

I remember resenting the other kids who had money or those poorer who had free school meals/free uniform etc as I hated packed lunches, a thin sandwich with jam and an apple wasn't really exciting! My parents did their best and the estate was full of youths that picked on the weak. My Dad is a tall, large man so they feared him and left us alone.

Those days shopping in Oxfam was frowned upon and people used to laugh at me, these days it's seen as trendy. *sigh*

Times have changed. :smile:

My parents always wanted us to do well and better than them because they struggled back when the state didn't really care. It's easier now in comparison but I remember Dad picking up dole cheques when he was unemployed and how stressed he was and would never want to join that queue.

It wasn't easy but we didn't suffer.

(edited 11 years ago)

Reply 50

VannR

Original post by RebeccaLydia

This is just the furthest away from the truth.

Being poor is not about the amount of income one has specifically; it is about the spiralling, condemning, detrimental effects.

Clever children from working class backgrounds have the worst opportunities, the most wasted talent and the least positive expectations from society.

There is a profound socio-economic disability that comes when someone is born into the lower rungs of British culture, no matter what good character or intelligence they possess.

I understand exactly what you are talking about. I am from a working-class, inner-city borough of London, and I have a keen scientific intellect. In my area I see youths wandering without a direction or a hope, crime, violence and the eyes of outsiders looking down on the "riff-raff" that fill the places in low-performance secondary schools and vocational, un-academic courses at colleges, who then go on to make up the bulk of the struggling working class. The odds are against me from the start.

Fortunately for me though, I do not have to start off from the bottom. My father is extremely academic (doctorate and Phd in Electronic Physics) so his influence and guidance have allowed me to counter the drag of the low academic expectations associated with people from area. My ambition is to study for a MSc in computer science in a couple of years, and to go on to help extend the boundaries of the very cutting-edge of my field.

I am fascinated to hear the views of people who may be from a similar social and financial background, but still less fortunate then I am.

Reply 51

lil-mazie

I guess it's different from people to people my mum had been getting benefits from the day i was born, the fact we have quite a large family isn't much help too. We used to live in tiny flats and there would be 3 of us sharing a double bed but we use to treat that sort of things like it was a game because that’s just what kids do.

My auntie moved in with us at a young age of 16 she did her GCSEs and got a small job working in a cafe we used that money to pay for the little things (the council didn't know she lived with us) Over the years she worked her way up got a degree in business and now runs her own company

So we eventually got older and my big brothers had to start fixing up and taking the role as men of the house, so they pushed to get the best grades always keeping my mother in their mind. Funny enough did really crappy in GCSEs but when it came to A-levels they smacked it and the eldest graduated from Kings the other one is still doing a degree in SOAS. I won’t lie and say it was perfect because we had many struggles my mother is always stressed out and we always arguments she tells us about the money issues she has which always stirs up conflict.

Regardless of our upbringing we were a very happy family and I can truly say that I was a much loved child, but back to my point when I said people have it different for example my friend on the other hand had it really bad she is the eldest child of 4, she is only 16 and her mother is a single mother like my mother.

The difference between us is that I had a large family and my older siblings were always there to take care of us she on the other hand at the age of 10 had to take her brothers school and clean the house as well as make her and her little sister breakfast. The worst part was when benefits were getting cut off she came in school crying telling me that she was scared about what she was going to do and asking me how her family are going to cope. Luckily she got some help and is doing fine but she has it pretty hard compared to others.

I guess the fact I come from a poor upbringing makes me feel more privilege to have a better life than those who live in harsher environments and it makes my appreciate the role of a mother more as well as make me more aware of how lucky I am to have free healthcare and education :smile:

Reply 52

alexlduffy

Growing up, my dad had a pretty decent job with an electricals company, even having his own massive workspace. It doesn't mean we had loads of money, but we had enough for food and stuff. I later found out my parents were saving up for their own business, which they started when I was about 9. Business wasn't exactly booming, so we'd have very little money. There were a few times where I wouldn't have meals because we couldn't afford food (although I partly attribute that to the fact that my brother ate loads), but at least my parents were in a job they liked. We didn't really get too many nice things after that, the nicest one being one Christmas where my parents had saved up for ages to buy my brother a PS2 and it turns out I'd gotten one too. Mine was second hand while his was new, but I didn't care because I liked the PS2.

I wasn't too bothered about not having much money, because when I wanted something I'd either save up or I'd find the best place to buy the item from. All my clothes were from Tesco or charity shops, which I didn't care about because I didn't really care about fashion. What bothered me was the attitude towards being poor. In school, while most people were from similar backgrounds to me or worse, there were still some who were pretty well-off, and they'd walk around like the Queen. One girl would look down on me a lot, and she even told me it was because I'm poor. We had another girl who "couldn't understand how people can be poor" and bragged about how her daddy bought the house next door so everyone in the house could have more rooms for themselves. And one girl annoyed the hell out of me because in the middle of class, she moaned to her friend about how terrible her life was because her dad bought her and her sister the wrong style iPod - he got them the 32GB version and she wanted the 64GB so she shouted at him and told him what a terrible father he was. Truth or not (and poor or not), it's a crap way to treat someone.

Anyway, I'm going off the subject now. When I got to college, many people were pretty well-off, especially people from further away from the college. Many of them pretty much exuded the negative stereotype of a rich person, which is bad because there were many positive qualities too but these were the main ones people saw. One girl I know was extremely spoilt, and she would regularly bring up all the stuff she had (her own car, a villa, etc). I wasn't jealous really, mainly because a lot of the stuff she had was just for show. However, what bothered me was her attitude towards those without much money. She'd refuse to go to certain places because she considered them "poor places" and she even refused to hang out with a friend because "he was poor". It was hard not to see her as just this stereotypical stuck-up girl.

There's one friend that bothered me more than anyone else though, because he has a remarkable lack of understanding about poor and rich. He's never worked a day in his life and regularly gets money off his parents, and he "can't understand how other people can survive without less than £100,000 a year". He even has a spare house he never uses, given to him by mummy and daddy. I can't help but feel that when he finishes university, he's going to be screwed in some way or form.

tl;dr version: It's not the lack of money that bothered me, it's the way I'm treated for it that I get annoyed with.

Reply 53

joefoxon

Original post by Genocidal

Surely it would just be like rich people with less stuff?

That shows just how out of touch the richer people are. You have no idea what it's like.

I grew up with only my dad and my brother, and it was hard. When he was not in a relationship, he would try so hard to give us things that he knew he couldn't afford. As young children, we weren't able to appreciate the sacrifices he was making. When I was in Year 6, they changed the school dinners, so my dad gave us a packed lunch every day, because he knew that we wouldn't get enough to eat, even though he couldn't afford it. In secondary school, I was never allowed friends round, just because my dad didn't want them to see where we lived. In college, I was on EMA, and I had to give £20 of it to my dad, because there wasn't enough coming in. I started as a football referee, to try and earn some money to get food of my own.

Eventually I had to move out of my dad's for personal reasons, at the age of 16. For about a year, I had to live off £30 EMA plus whatever I could get refereeing, just because I didn't want to live on benefits. I had to take benefits in the end, because after EMA had been cut to £20, there was no way I could keep it up. And Student Finance will STILL only give me the least amount of loan, because I was wrongly told that if I was on benefits, I wouldn't be asked for parents' income.

Reply 54

Herr

Original post by PinkMobilePhone

You don't need to be British citizens in order to receive CB.

Reply 55

GdotL

Original post by ShredMaster

Dumb bitches commenting on **** that they don't understand. Airhead.

Airhead? Dumb bitch? I'm neither of those things. I grew up on benefits in a single parent family in social housing - what don't I understand? Yes, I could have been worse off but I'm assuming all these other posters were in similar levels of poverty...? Yet seem to have had much worse lifestyles than I have had (food/bills/experiences).

Reply 56

-chiquitita

I've a close friend on benefits and her life is just really different in lots of small ways... for instance, when my friends and I are talking about childhood, we'll all be chatting about all the clubs we were in like gymnastics, athletics etc, but she didn't really do anything because her family couldn't afford the fees or transport there. Or, say, if we go into town and I'm skint I can borrow money from my dad and pay it back later - if she doesn't have money, she can't borrow it because her parents don't have the spare cash to give her. She never wastes money on buying pointless stuff when shopping like the rest of us, she shops mostly in Primark and on occasions New Look rather than heading to Topshop/River Island/Zara like the rest of us...

Basically, what I'm trying to say is that she (like many other people on benefits, I think) leads a perfectly okay life, but she skips over all the little luxuries and really thinks about it when she spends even a small amount of money, whereas I'm happy to waste 10 or 20 quid on nothing.

This was posted from The Student Room's iPhone/iPad App

Reply 57

BoxesAndBangles

I wish I could post this as Anon but oh well. My mother was kicked out by her stepdad for refusing to wear slippers in the house at 16 - she's academically very smart but couldn't afford to keep going to school - she met my dad, her first boyfriend and had me at 17. My father, however, turned out to be abusive over the years, even though he was fresh and sober as a teenager when she met him. He never let her work, beat her, threatened to kill her if she left and me and my sister (2 years) younger along with my mother lived in fear. We didn't have much money as my dad spent it all on dope. We had always wanted to escape - but we didn't have money to do so.

I remember having times when there wasn't enough food for my mum because how my dad was. I never got to go on school trips and had to make up excuses. I never had a computer. We didn't get to have sweets etc. often. I felt so different to my friends who'd go on holidays.

My mum saved up £5 or £10 here and there in a sock, hidden, and we finally managed to escape to a woman's refuge when I was 15. I remember my 13 year old sister was so stressed about it, but she kept it to herself. Things were really hard then, but they got better. I went to work at 16 in a supermarket to make money for textbooks and my mother became a civil servant.

My mum always valued education, always took the time to read to me and teach me and I finished with the award for best marks in the school for 3 of my Highers, and now I'm nearly finished my physical therapy degree - I'm currently on a 1:1 and was awarded the Dean's letter of excellence. My sister is an investment banker. So education wise it's been fine - though for most where I'm from, the kids who might have succeeded in different circumstances, have ended up staying in the spiral of poverty. My mum has had another baby with her new partner and things are a bit better now, I'm really thankful for that for my new sister, but I don't have support financially for example so it's been really really difficult to not get a student loan over summer and finding work is essential for me to stay at Uni - whereas for some people it might not be such a big deal.

The reason I mention the crap we went through at home is because I believe if we had more money and social support we could have gotten out sooner. My mum wouldn't have had to live the way she did. Kinda crying now thinking about my poor mum :frown:

In the end, it's taught me a lot of life lessons and I would be a different person if I had grown up differently. I really value everything I have, my family has, and that I achieve now. Seeing your family go through difficult times also instills in you a sense of protection over them. What's important to me is life, education and family, not so much 'things' as I never grew up with 'things' anyway.