Reply #23: Actually, in a sense that happens . . [View All]

[msmcghee]

Here's how:

From age 2 through 4 we learn the general outlines of who we will become. No 3 year old has the ability to say, "Gee, I don't like the way these people are living. Think I'll look around for a different lifestyle."

Instead they learn ways to deal with life that are consistent with their surroundings - and using as role models those people around them who care for them. During this time they learn to love and depend on those people and to imitate their ways of dealing with life.

From ages 3 on they start filling in their personality. Remember the ad on TV where the little girl says to her little brother, with her hands on her hips, "I think someone needs a time out"?

A good ad that showed how children use imitation to fill in their personality. They are not just pretending - they are growing their "self". If they have a single mother who lives in poverty they grow into imitating their mothers ways of coping. This becomes ingrained into their personality. It is who they are. And that will no doubt include ways of dealing with life (poverty) that minimize whatever discomfort that brings, that provide self respect, that lets them acquire friends who cope in similar ways, etc.

Children don't choose to live in poverty. Instead, if they are raised in poverty they have to choose to become a different person than have become - when they get old enough to do that, if they want to stop.

And that's not easy to do. Many who choose to leave poverty can't manage to do it. They get negative feedback from society when they try. They have become a person who gets more positive feedback from their society by staying in poverty - and they can't give that up for an imagined new set of positive reinforcements that may appear sometime in the future - and may not ever appear as far as they know since they've never lived otherwise.

A long post just to say that's it's easy for a middle class person to wonder why anyone would choose to live in poverty. Probably for the same reason most of us here have "chosen" not to be millionairs.