What Expectations Did You Have Growing Up Poor? | People Stories #283

▶ Fresh AskReddit Stories: Redditors who grew up poor: Besides practical money-saving measures, what were the unwritten social expectations of your world growing up? 🔥 2nd channel with exclusive Reddit stories!

[lonner]

I don't know if I'd say poor but pretty damn close. My father was a retired Marine, so I had free medical care until I was 21ish. But I knew better than to ever ask for anything for Christmas or birthday. No sports because they cost too much. No field trips and extremely cheap Walmart shoes and goodwill clothes that were very faded and a hole or two. No regrets. It just makes me realize just how blessed I am now.

[Magavynhigara]

Eat as little as possible so the food can last a few more days. Never tell anyone your hungry.

[kumi]

What I really get mad about is the parents want to see normal and regular even though they are in desperate need of help. It not just embarrassing yourself its hurting your children.

[johannasweet]

This makes me sad that people are taught not to ask for help or necessities when they really need it. Makes you wonder how many people you see everyday actually have a worse living situation than you think. It makes sense though, you could be made fun of or looked down upon for being poor, or someone could tell their parents and their parents could call CPS :/

[mirageseekr]

I could relate to a lot here and would add that you may not get a present for your birthday (Christmas mom always made sure we had something) but you would get an I.O.U. And would get it once the tax return cleared the bank. Tax return was the best day of the year, we would “go out to eat” usually McDonalds but we did go to Red Lobster a couple times to be “fancy” “and live like “rich people” Once every few months my mom would by a one dollar lottery ticket and for days until the drawing we would talk about all the things we would get if we won. I look back on it and think it was pretty ingenious of her to be able to entertain 3 kids for days with just a dollar. My mom tried her hardest though to make us not feel like we were missing out. When the carnival came, we couldn’t afford to go. Mom had us make a carnival in the basement with homemade games like a beanbag made out of an old sock with rice filling toss it in the hamper basket. Another was a piece of cardboard with different colored circles in markers on it and we tossed pennies trying to hit certain colors for tickets. The tickets were redeemed to pick out a piece of candy out of the mixed bag she bought and we had the other poor kids allowed to come over that day while everyone else went to the “real” carnival. The best present I ever received was a piggy bank my mom made. She had the guys at work save their Pringle chips containers (something we rarely had) and she used a glue gun and felt and made different characters out of each of them for my brothers, myself and my cousins by cutting a slit in the top. Mine was a witch doctor with a bone in his nose and my one brothers was a pirate, I can’t remember the rest. It’s always been my favorite gift because Even as a small child I realized how poor we were and how hard my mom worked. It meant a great deal to me that she snuck around making those after we had gone to bed because she didn’t want us to have nothing for Christmas. She passed away almost a year ago, I hadn’t thought of this things in awhile and it’s actually making me tear up right now. Moral of the story: my mom tried to make being poor fun, and succeeded.

[TheShadowless]

Video barely started and I’m already getting sad over how much I relate to the first one

[senzugoat]

Growing up poor means you can't go to the doctor unless it's a literal emergency and you have to make sure you're living in the moment because food isn't always promised

[karliscika]

Damn, i felt this. now i see a lot of people have it worse than me. wow

[flamelily]

We were poor but my parents always made sure we had food on the table. I didn't have fashionable clothes or any luxuries. We lived in a country where schools all have uniforms so my mother had to get uniforms for me and my siblings. The girls schools had patterns that my mother would get and she would buy the material from a store that stocked uniforms and material. Every year my mother sewed school uniforms for me and my three sisters. She made us three uniforms each. I never thought about it at the time as our basic needs were met and we never went hungry but looking back I can see how hard our parents worked to make sure our basic needs were met. My dad worked on the railways and we had a railway house which was a little small but had a decent sized garden which my dad loved. The parquet wooden floor was polished like a mirror. The worst thing we faced was hearing a teacher refer to us as "railway trash".

[dogwithhat]

Never waste anything, never throw away anything metal

[debshaw]

As a kid (when I was a kid):
eat what’s in the table

wear what you’re given even if it doesn’t fit properly

you don’t need toys, go play outside

turn the lights off when you leave the room/you don’t need lights on in daytime

As the mom (when I had kids):

Outside is fun so get your kids interested in nature

Make cheap meals seem like fun.

Biscuit dough, spaghetti sauce, and cheese for kids making pizza makes a great birthday party activity.

Dollar store toys make great prizes for a scavenger hunt

Make musical instruments from rubber bands, cardboard, string, washers, and whatever else you have.

My kids didn’t realize we were poor til they were in high school. They just thought I was very eccentric and fun.

[didyasaysomethinme]

The one about the OP whose dad taught him the value of community helping community and paying it forward was probably my biggest takeaway. Everybody has their strengths and weaknesses, some little thing to contribute that keeps life working like a well-oiled machine if everybody would just do their little part. Somebody even thought to write a story about it. They called it "Stone Soup." Go figure.

[daviddavid]

I remember "Eat what's put in front of you if you want to eat". I'm rich af now and I still have a very difficult time supressing the knee-jerk rage around finicky people.

[ragingraichu]

Started off living a decent life in a nice area. Went all downhill after my parents divorced and mom got custody of me. It was alright for a few years, until I became a teenager. My teenage years, I lived in poverty. It was awful. We had pets to feed too, so any money we scrounged up went to them and bills. We were on food stamps, so we didn't need to worry about our own food.

[samoanjoseph]

Wasn't poor, but both parents came from big families and my mom was very fixated on saving money and never wasting food.
-Don't use the whole paper towel, tear it in half and leave the extra for the next person. (drove me nuts, two is the standard for drying hands in any reasonable amount of time, and I was glad to see that if you're really in a hurry, 9 out of 10 people even use three)
-Never order a burger with cheese or fries or a drink, we have cheese and chips and soda at home.
-When you get a sub sandwich, always get a BLT, then add your own lunchmeat at home.
-Clean your plate, people in Africa are starving and no we can't send them our leftovers.
-Save the extra ketchup and hot sauce packets when eating fast food, we can use them later.
-Expiration dates are not ironclad, keep using it until it tastes bad.
Self-invented: put sauce on chips for when you really want fries but can't have them.

[Sunset]

I thought we had so many restrictions because my parents were just mean. I didn’t realize we were poor, but I wished for things like one more bedroom in our house, and food. I didn’t see a problem with having 1 bedroom for all the kids, until they separated us and had my brother sleep in a pull out chair in the dining room.

I recognize quite a few things similar to the examples in the video: no one is allowed over and you aren’t allowed to visit others; only eat when we feed you. If you eat anything else, it’s stealing and punished.; school lunch was a slice of deli meat on white bread. Punishments were often, “no lunch”. We usually got one new outfit for the school year. Then there were years with no new clothes at all. For years, my Christmas present was a simple nightgown. At that time I could then throw away our tattered old one from the year before. After a certain year, there were no presents at Christmas for me (the only kid at home). Also birthdays went from a cake to no acknowledgement. The kids were not allowed to talk on the phone. No toys

There were also all the things that “only rich people” did, like going to a movie theater, shopping at department stores, and eating at restaurants.
There were bizarre rules like never accepting charity. My father only allowed us to go to school and come home and study. We weren’t allowed to do any school activities, like drama or sports which required staying after school. He would often complain about work by saying we should stay in school as long as possible.I was expected to get multiple phDs. I didn’t.

I did go on field trips at school. I never saw any request for payment, though.
weird writing this. I realized we has some cutting back on things and that they all happened around the same year. It’s been so long now that I have no idea what the precipitating event was.

[AshesAshes]

The heck?! Many of these are just not being wasteful. No restaurant every week? It's *normal* to eat at home, you're supposed to.
SMH, I grew up upper middle class, but I took care of my things, didn't wash unless it was full, valued education, requested according to the circumstances, etc.
Perhaps some of these should be prefaced with 'strictly not optional' on top of other needs unmet. Now I'm going to go make bread with perfectly good over ripe bananas-- it's delicious and a treat, instead of wasteful (40% of food is trashed!). Not because of poverty.

[Pannenkoekenplantje]

My mum grew up very poor due to my grandfather being unfit for work and on benefits. The family of 6 had to live on one person's benefits. She bought one pair of nicer clothes as a teen and after that clipped the labels and sew it onto about 6 consecutive other items of clothing so that no one would be able to tell she got her clothes from thrift stores, hand-me-downs and clearance sales and thus wouldn't be bullied in high school

[winsterphilipp]

Brooms. Never throw away the whole broom. You can unscrew the stick buy the bottom part and reattach the new bottom to the old stick. Then use the old bottom as a brush. Or use as an outside broom.

[melkiorwiseman]

My family wasn't the level of "poor" which some people here talk about, but we sure didn't have money to throw away on friviolities. Our bath room (as in literal bath) was also the laundry room, and just around the corner was the toilet which had once been an outhouse but had been plumbed, but you still had to either open an umbrella or run fast when it was raining.
No electric light in the bath room. The only electricity was an extension cord from the kitchen to run the washing machine from. The only light after dark in the winter was a kerosene lantern. When you went to the toilet after dark, you took a torch (flashlight).
Baths were once a week, with water heated in a copper cauldron over a fire in a brick enclosure. You used a metal bucket to scoop out enough water, diluted it with cold water from the tap (faucet) and then had your bath before it got too cold. In-between baths, you washed your face and hands each evening in the kitchen using a dish and hot water from the wood-burning stove.
But there was always sufficient food, even if it wasn't always as much as we would have enjoyed.
It feels really strange these days since I made a reasonable success of my life and now usually have more than enough money to support myself. I still have these instincts to not waste stuff and I sometimes tend to take them too far even though I don't need to be so terribly thrifty any longer.