A Norwegian study finds that middle-class parents teach their children security and control, while upper-class parents see money as opportunities and teach their children to invest. This may reinforce social inequality in Norway according to the researchers.
https://www.oslomet.no/en/research/featured-research/parents-teach-children-about-money-class-divisions
6 Comments
Yeah, let’s teach rich people to just save more without investing, and let’s teach middle class people to take more risky investments…
This a case where education is a consequence, and most probably a rational/optimal one, of starting conditions; it’s the outer system that makes it self reinforcing, it’s not the education policy (if I’m middle class I educate for saving) nor the policy taught (if I’m middle class I should save).
It’s an interesting study, but also rather obvious. My parents were poor when I was a kid, we never invested anything, we were too busy buying the bare minimum to maintain a household.
I’d be surprised if similar things weren’t happening in basically all societies.
> The database consists of interviews over time with 81 young people in four different environments in Norway. The first interview round was conducted with 13-year-olds in autumn 2018. The adolescents have since been interviewed multiple times, and the researchers have also interviewed their parents.
So self reported and 20 in each group. And followed them for 6 years.
This, of course, has very little qualityÂ
If you’ve ever been around both the upper and lower class, you already knew this.
Kids from wealthy parents are told to study and work hard, invest and build a network from the moment they can talk. I know a kid that was sent to Singapore alone from Europe just to attend a Lego technics “engineering” program at age 12. He’s now in an ivy league uni.
While kids from poor parents are told to apply for social housing on the day they turn 18 so that by 28 they “at least can leave the home” and become an underpaid nurse so that “they have job security” (not saying that nursing is bad but it won’t make you rich either). Also most of these kids get thrown on the street at age 10 so that their parents can enjoy some peace time at home, getting in touch with kids from bad neighbourhoods and drugs from an early age. While the rich have nannies and after school activities like sports and musical education.
My dad repeatedly made poor choices in regards to his finances that thankfully didn’t break him. He signed 20% of his company over to his part time account that helped him start the company. The guy didn’t even have his CPA. He invested a bunch of his money too and consistently did worse than any standard mutual fund or the stock market. To this day, my dad won’t say he was scammed.
Investing is scary. I just close my eyes and do it. If the money is taken automatically, I’m fine.