Not to be blasé about anything that happened in your childhood, Alice's or your mother's, but you seem to be saying that any deprivation you felt was ok in the end because at least you had money. And I find it interesting that you are comparing your deprivations against those of the very poor vs the middle class. It's better to live with neglectful parents in a mansion vs a run down tenement, but why isn't the comparison to working class or even middle class? Or are those kids too 'striver', so they would in fact change things about their childhood?
And regarding lice, my daughter had it TWICE, infecting my son and myself, and those were the days when my husband was bathing the kids and I was combing their hair and we both missed it... until we didn't.
Perhaps the middle and working classes are a happy medium of effective parenting. Generally, there's neither material deprivation nor super wealthy parents who have the option to live inside their wealth and use hired help as substitute parents for their kids.
As for everything being ok, I think it's somewhat of a rationalization on my part. A personal myth, which doesn't mean it's entirely false, just that it's a glamorized or simplified version of the truth.
When I taught, the calls to social services for abuse and neglect did not differ depending on social economic status; teachers and other mandatory reporters working in the top preforming schools refer to CPS/DHS just as often as those serving the underprivileged.
The biggest difference, and one I experienced first hand as a teacher, is the wealthy have the capacity to pressure witnesses, move across state lines, and hire lawyers to ensure their behavior goes unpunished
Thanks Megan. You have good perspective/expereince on this.
The ability to escape consequences for behavior that is either illegal or parentally disqualifying is troubling. Equal justice under the law remains an unachieved ideal.
David, what a poignant and provocative essay. I felt both your silent fear that the lice would be discovered, and your determination to get rid of them yourself. At seven, you already had a strong sense of purpose. You and your tormented mother, who intrigued me in your previous post, both arrived at a place of self-acceptance and fulfillment. Had life treated either of you more gently, you would not have become your battered yet grateful selves.
Studies of resilience have shown that people who flourish after terrible childhoods have in common the loving presence, early on, of at least one adult who believed in them—in your case, a governess who was effectively a surrogate parent. Others have a teacher, a grandparent, an older sibling. In my former career as a journalist, I met a woman who was mothered by a kindly neighbor. When her violent parents started fighting (with guns), she would run to the neighbor, who kept a bed made up for her.
I carry the formative memories of a sad, isolating childhood in which I was often scapegoated by my parents. My beacons were a family friend and a tenant in my parents’ basement apartment. Like you, I have made a full life that I love. My parents were not particularly well off. Their priceless gift to me was early baptism in art and literature, the family faith. A rich imaginative life has been my wellspring. Jeanette Winterson writes in her powerful memoir WHY BE HAPPY WHEN YOU COULD BE NORMAL? about the power of reading to save her from a harrowing mother who waged war against her spirit.
As a writer and reader of memoir (and a lifelong student of human nature through the art of conversation), I look and listen for that hopeful thrum that keeps people going through their hardest times. I don’t believe that privilege has a lot to do with it. Frank McCourt writes in ANGELA’S ASHES about a childhood of grinding poverty in which he was so hungry, he would lick the cast-off paper that fish and chips had been wrapped in. Love fed him, along with language and story.
Alice’s new memoir is on my must-read list. Thank you for telling us about it. One of these days I will update my list of great memoirs and make it available on Substack. I’m sure readers here will have many other gems to suggest.
Thanks Rona. Sometimes we retreat into something that pays off forever like a love of literature and writing. And having that one non parental person's love makes a big difference.
Great article, I love your stuff. I agree that kids growing up with difficult parents and family situations are in a better place if the family has money. But also think that too much money creates its own problems, having grown up around old money (but not having it myself) I saw lots of rich spoiled kids go off the rails, too much too soon, with no direction in life. Veruca Salt is a great literary example of such.
I think the most successful and happiest people are raised in circumstances like a family farm, with hard work and discipline built into them, with just enough comfort to make the feel safe and happy but not so much as to spoil them.
Hi David - I think as a child you don’t have any choice but to endure whatever your environment is. Wealth or not, there is no escaping the reality that your parents create for you, and so you adapt to endure, and that adaptation becomes your personality.
My own experience, which I wrote about this week, shows how the scars of childhood follow you in some rather insidious ways. I didn’t grow up with privilege like yours, though I would still say I was incredibly privileged. My mother, however, grew up in extreme poverty. My childhood home was one of massive disparity in a lot of ways. My mother was neglectful in ways that went unnoticed, because she didn’t see us as having needs - so while she smothered us, it was to meet her own unmet needs. But when her needs were being met elsewhere, it was as if she didn’t have children. So was it the comfortability she had as an adult that led her to be neglectful, or was it the poverty of her childhood that drove her to smother? Or is all of it just the byproduct of mental illness (which I believe is the reason for almost all child abuse and neglect - I sincerely think most parents do the best they can with what they have).
Because my mother’s abuse was more focused on me, I have had more of a cushion than my younger sister. I’m not sure if that is why I have had a harder time getting it together, or if it’s a result of the abuse itself. It’s a question I ask myself often. I also wonder about birth order in this regard.
But to your point, I would not change my childhood - I can see the benefits of the challenges I had, and I have compassion for my mother and the challenges she had in her childhood, and forgiven her for how they manifested in her as a parent (unless I get triggered, and then I am angry again). My material life is largely unaffected by my ability to create it for myself, but my emotional world and the offshoots of it is a constant source of pain and anxiety. That said, I still think the best parts of me are because of my childhood, not in spite of it.
Thank you, as always, for your insights and vulnerability in writing.
I'm with you on parents doing their best, woefully flawed as it may be. No parent ever gets up in the morning and says, "How can I torment my kid today?"
And if they do, it’s because they’re unwell. Which, on its own, is an access point for compassion. It certainly doesn’t excuse bad behavior, but it offers a foothold to heal and move forward.
I read your post and related it to mine. I don't think I can say that " I still think the best parts of me are because of my childhood, not in spite of it." But I think it's incredibly healthy that you can.
Maybe I live in delusion about that, but I feel like because of everything we go through, we develop superpower sensitivities which, when used in the right way, can be the very best parts of us. I obviously don’t know you well, but through your writing I can tell that you’re incredibly intuitive, generous, thoughtful and intentional, among many other wonderful attributes. I personally place tremendous value on those qualities (maybe because I’m a woman?), and think that that kind of character can only be achieved through some kind of fire. That’s just my perspective, of course, and definitely a reflection of how I spin things to make them have meaning.
Yes, expectations were a large part of it: my cousin was trotted out at dinner parties with business clients to perform on the piano, etc. my father told me my uncle expected her to marry into the city elite. But also the parents were very busy runny a corporation.
I grew up in a trailer. I know a woman whose family had several vacation homes. I share more cultural touchstones with my husband (a European) than I do with her! I endeavored to give my children a childhood full of love and free from the corporal punishment I endured. I managed those things but couldn’t prevent a divorce that made things traumatic for a while. I don’t think there’s any way possible to give a child a perfect childhood. If it’s too perfect, they learn nothing about life.
- Are highly privileged parents more prone to be neglectful? No, because they are still human and can have feelings and aspirations of having loving families.
- Are highly privileged children more likely to endure that neglect? I think if they come to feel they need to maintain or live in that lifestyle, they will grin and bear it to get the clothes and the goodies and vehicles and activities they cannot yet afford. If the child says "to heck" with that entire lifestyle, then they are freed to reject that neglect.
What if a privileged parent doesn't RECOGNIZE his OWN privilege (boarding schools and Yale) and, instead, believes he made it on his own and believes in the existence of a merit-based society, therefore, each of his three kids should all be out of the house (boys and girls) at age 18 and to hell with them? Then YES, they will be neglectful because they don't realize how important a role they play. Even if only to ask about their day or plans for life and how to get there. :)
Not to pile on regarding my and David’s mother, but I remember two inflection points in our relationship and will dwell on one. When she kicked me out of the apartment my freshman year the Wednesday before Thanksgiving. Why? Because I missed a dentist appointment. She berated me and yelled cruelties. In fact she raised her hand to me as if to slap me across my face; I remember grabbing her wrist, her tiny wrist, rather forcefully and staring into her shocked eyes. She was unaccustomed to her sons standing up to her. To anyone standing up to her. She yelled for my father. Shrill. Loud. “Billy!” Billy, a sweet man, hated discord in the household. I forget what he said but something along the lines of “I think you are both a little in the wrong here.” No. She was in the wrong here, and I left home with just my book bag. (At 18 a book bag can be a home. A place.) I took the Amtrak back to Philly feeling full, masculine. Poetic, even. I spent Thanksgiving at a diner counter, having green-ish turkey (gravy fixes everything). Seated solo among fellow Turkey Day losers, I felt such exhilaration. I was in the world. I was indestructible. Not even my mother, who, like the author, I had feared, could mess with this new version of me. This recently self-anointed man who still had no need to shave but could neuter the hand of a scary, scary woman. My mother, whom of course I loved and love. We share the same temper. Both have addictive personalities. Are both, as brother Samuel once asserted “control freaks.” I once told Samuel that if he were us, he’d be a control freak too. I believe my mother respected my actions that Thanksgiving break in 1987. She applauded strength and she was nothing if not strong. She and I always planned to hold hands when she passed away. (She’d held her mother’s hand as she died.) Due to Covid I could not hold the hand that could not slap me. I end with a poem:
"A book bag can be a home." Yes. "I could not hold the hand that could not slap me." Beautifully put. Small wonder that writing seems to run in the family. It's the best way I know to make sense of the incomprehensible.
Interesting that she hated to go to the doctor and was a serial canceller. The cliche that we are most critical of what we dislike is true in this case.
You can’t change the past, must accept and piece your life together for your health and functioning. But, the parents like that did you no favors. No free passes. They cause enormous dysfunction in society and their behavior should be condemned. Their inability to perceive their evil does not matter.
Like you, and many others here, I had a difficult parent and I wouldn't change that. My father was emotionally abusive to me. But he had values that were progressive way beyond his time and I am grateful for that. He was raised in great privilege in Britain. Living in mansions with servants. And he ended up despising class and walking away from his family in his very early twenties and coming to Canada where he spent the rest of his life. When I was born (the last of three) we were quite poor but by the time I was adolescent we were reasonably comfortable. Mostly due to my mother going to work as a teacher. I grew up on the east coast of Canada in the seventies which was decidedly not a progressive place/time! My father brought a steady flow of diverse people through our household and spoke very strongly against sexism, racism, classism, homophobia Etc. At the same time, he was disciplining me with a horse whip and constantly criticizing me. I don't think I really got out from under his shadow and came into my own till I was almost 40. Now I'm 60 and pretty comfortable and happy with the person I've become and I'm continuing to become. I resent the decades it took for me to cast off most of the baggage my parents saddled with me but I am eternally grateful for the values he planted in me.
David, I’m so moved by this. My mother also had a challenging childhood and I’ve just assumed, if given the option she’d go back in time and change everything. But your mother’s response gives me pause. Maybe one day, I’ll get to have a similar conversation with mine 🤍
Debbie said the same thing about feeling itching!
The wound heals and you have a scab after you have scar and after that it becomes character.
Well stated.
Poignant. Thanks.
Not to be blasé about anything that happened in your childhood, Alice's or your mother's, but you seem to be saying that any deprivation you felt was ok in the end because at least you had money. And I find it interesting that you are comparing your deprivations against those of the very poor vs the middle class. It's better to live with neglectful parents in a mansion vs a run down tenement, but why isn't the comparison to working class or even middle class? Or are those kids too 'striver', so they would in fact change things about their childhood?
And regarding lice, my daughter had it TWICE, infecting my son and myself, and those were the days when my husband was bathing the kids and I was combing their hair and we both missed it... until we didn't.
Good point.
Perhaps the middle and working classes are a happy medium of effective parenting. Generally, there's neither material deprivation nor super wealthy parents who have the option to live inside their wealth and use hired help as substitute parents for their kids.
As for everything being ok, I think it's somewhat of a rationalization on my part. A personal myth, which doesn't mean it's entirely false, just that it's a glamorized or simplified version of the truth.
You still recall it so vividly some 49 years later!
I find that suppressed memories come back with a roar.
When I taught, the calls to social services for abuse and neglect did not differ depending on social economic status; teachers and other mandatory reporters working in the top preforming schools refer to CPS/DHS just as often as those serving the underprivileged.
The biggest difference, and one I experienced first hand as a teacher, is the wealthy have the capacity to pressure witnesses, move across state lines, and hire lawyers to ensure their behavior goes unpunished
Yes, it’s the resources that make a difference.
Thanks Megan. You have good perspective/expereince on this.
The ability to escape consequences for behavior that is either illegal or parentally disqualifying is troubling. Equal justice under the law remains an unachieved ideal.
I answered your question before I personally spoke to your experience. My heart grieves for the childhood withheld you.
David, what a poignant and provocative essay. I felt both your silent fear that the lice would be discovered, and your determination to get rid of them yourself. At seven, you already had a strong sense of purpose. You and your tormented mother, who intrigued me in your previous post, both arrived at a place of self-acceptance and fulfillment. Had life treated either of you more gently, you would not have become your battered yet grateful selves.
Studies of resilience have shown that people who flourish after terrible childhoods have in common the loving presence, early on, of at least one adult who believed in them—in your case, a governess who was effectively a surrogate parent. Others have a teacher, a grandparent, an older sibling. In my former career as a journalist, I met a woman who was mothered by a kindly neighbor. When her violent parents started fighting (with guns), she would run to the neighbor, who kept a bed made up for her.
I carry the formative memories of a sad, isolating childhood in which I was often scapegoated by my parents. My beacons were a family friend and a tenant in my parents’ basement apartment. Like you, I have made a full life that I love. My parents were not particularly well off. Their priceless gift to me was early baptism in art and literature, the family faith. A rich imaginative life has been my wellspring. Jeanette Winterson writes in her powerful memoir WHY BE HAPPY WHEN YOU COULD BE NORMAL? about the power of reading to save her from a harrowing mother who waged war against her spirit.
As a writer and reader of memoir (and a lifelong student of human nature through the art of conversation), I look and listen for that hopeful thrum that keeps people going through their hardest times. I don’t believe that privilege has a lot to do with it. Frank McCourt writes in ANGELA’S ASHES about a childhood of grinding poverty in which he was so hungry, he would lick the cast-off paper that fish and chips had been wrapped in. Love fed him, along with language and story.
Alice’s new memoir is on my must-read list. Thank you for telling us about it. One of these days I will update my list of great memoirs and make it available on Substack. I’m sure readers here will have many other gems to suggest.
I look forward to your list of great memoirs.
Thanks Rona. Sometimes we retreat into something that pays off forever like a love of literature and writing. And having that one non parental person's love makes a big difference.
Great article, I love your stuff. I agree that kids growing up with difficult parents and family situations are in a better place if the family has money. But also think that too much money creates its own problems, having grown up around old money (but not having it myself) I saw lots of rich spoiled kids go off the rails, too much too soon, with no direction in life. Veruca Salt is a great literary example of such.
I think the most successful and happiest people are raised in circumstances like a family farm, with hard work and discipline built into them, with just enough comfort to make the feel safe and happy but not so much as to spoil them.
Thanks Steven. There may very well be a golden mean as you suggest.
My daughter does a great Veruca imitation that always makes me laugh.
Hi David - I think as a child you don’t have any choice but to endure whatever your environment is. Wealth or not, there is no escaping the reality that your parents create for you, and so you adapt to endure, and that adaptation becomes your personality.
My own experience, which I wrote about this week, shows how the scars of childhood follow you in some rather insidious ways. I didn’t grow up with privilege like yours, though I would still say I was incredibly privileged. My mother, however, grew up in extreme poverty. My childhood home was one of massive disparity in a lot of ways. My mother was neglectful in ways that went unnoticed, because she didn’t see us as having needs - so while she smothered us, it was to meet her own unmet needs. But when her needs were being met elsewhere, it was as if she didn’t have children. So was it the comfortability she had as an adult that led her to be neglectful, or was it the poverty of her childhood that drove her to smother? Or is all of it just the byproduct of mental illness (which I believe is the reason for almost all child abuse and neglect - I sincerely think most parents do the best they can with what they have).
Because my mother’s abuse was more focused on me, I have had more of a cushion than my younger sister. I’m not sure if that is why I have had a harder time getting it together, or if it’s a result of the abuse itself. It’s a question I ask myself often. I also wonder about birth order in this regard.
But to your point, I would not change my childhood - I can see the benefits of the challenges I had, and I have compassion for my mother and the challenges she had in her childhood, and forgiven her for how they manifested in her as a parent (unless I get triggered, and then I am angry again). My material life is largely unaffected by my ability to create it for myself, but my emotional world and the offshoots of it is a constant source of pain and anxiety. That said, I still think the best parts of me are because of my childhood, not in spite of it.
Thank you, as always, for your insights and vulnerability in writing.
I'm with you on parents doing their best, woefully flawed as it may be. No parent ever gets up in the morning and says, "How can I torment my kid today?"
And if they do, it’s because they’re unwell. Which, on its own, is an access point for compassion. It certainly doesn’t excuse bad behavior, but it offers a foothold to heal and move forward.
I read your post and related it to mine. I don't think I can say that " I still think the best parts of me are because of my childhood, not in spite of it." But I think it's incredibly healthy that you can.
Maybe I live in delusion about that, but I feel like because of everything we go through, we develop superpower sensitivities which, when used in the right way, can be the very best parts of us. I obviously don’t know you well, but through your writing I can tell that you’re incredibly intuitive, generous, thoughtful and intentional, among many other wonderful attributes. I personally place tremendous value on those qualities (maybe because I’m a woman?), and think that that kind of character can only be achieved through some kind of fire. That’s just my perspective, of course, and definitely a reflection of how I spin things to make them have meaning.
I would say my very privileged cousins had a more difficult childhood than ours. The main difference was stress. Tension.
Perhaps expectations? I felt expectations as pressure but I think that was because I was the oldest boy.
Yes, expectations were a large part of it: my cousin was trotted out at dinner parties with business clients to perform on the piano, etc. my father told me my uncle expected her to marry into the city elite. But also the parents were very busy runny a corporation.
I grew up in a trailer. I know a woman whose family had several vacation homes. I share more cultural touchstones with my husband (a European) than I do with her! I endeavored to give my children a childhood full of love and free from the corporal punishment I endured. I managed those things but couldn’t prevent a divorce that made things traumatic for a while. I don’t think there’s any way possible to give a child a perfect childhood. If it’s too perfect, they learn nothing about life.
Thanks Michelle. Perfection as a parent is definitely a chimera. We all mess up.
Hello David. Great essay and great questions.
- Are highly privileged parents more prone to be neglectful? No, because they are still human and can have feelings and aspirations of having loving families.
- Are highly privileged children more likely to endure that neglect? I think if they come to feel they need to maintain or live in that lifestyle, they will grin and bear it to get the clothes and the goodies and vehicles and activities they cannot yet afford. If the child says "to heck" with that entire lifestyle, then they are freed to reject that neglect.
What if a privileged parent doesn't RECOGNIZE his OWN privilege (boarding schools and Yale) and, instead, believes he made it on his own and believes in the existence of a merit-based society, therefore, each of his three kids should all be out of the house (boys and girls) at age 18 and to hell with them? Then YES, they will be neglectful because they don't realize how important a role they play. Even if only to ask about their day or plans for life and how to get there. :)
Interesting perspective Mmerikani. That last scenario is insidious for both the family and society. Not recognizing your own privilege is toxic.
Not to pile on regarding my and David’s mother, but I remember two inflection points in our relationship and will dwell on one. When she kicked me out of the apartment my freshman year the Wednesday before Thanksgiving. Why? Because I missed a dentist appointment. She berated me and yelled cruelties. In fact she raised her hand to me as if to slap me across my face; I remember grabbing her wrist, her tiny wrist, rather forcefully and staring into her shocked eyes. She was unaccustomed to her sons standing up to her. To anyone standing up to her. She yelled for my father. Shrill. Loud. “Billy!” Billy, a sweet man, hated discord in the household. I forget what he said but something along the lines of “I think you are both a little in the wrong here.” No. She was in the wrong here, and I left home with just my book bag. (At 18 a book bag can be a home. A place.) I took the Amtrak back to Philly feeling full, masculine. Poetic, even. I spent Thanksgiving at a diner counter, having green-ish turkey (gravy fixes everything). Seated solo among fellow Turkey Day losers, I felt such exhilaration. I was in the world. I was indestructible. Not even my mother, who, like the author, I had feared, could mess with this new version of me. This recently self-anointed man who still had no need to shave but could neuter the hand of a scary, scary woman. My mother, whom of course I loved and love. We share the same temper. Both have addictive personalities. Are both, as brother Samuel once asserted “control freaks.” I once told Samuel that if he were us, he’d be a control freak too. I believe my mother respected my actions that Thanksgiving break in 1987. She applauded strength and she was nothing if not strong. She and I always planned to hold hands when she passed away. (She’d held her mother’s hand as she died.) Due to Covid I could not hold the hand that could not slap me. I end with a poem:
This Be The Verse
BY PHILIP LARKIN
They fuck you up, your mum and dad.
They may not mean to, but they do.
They fill you with the faults they had
And add some extra, just for you.
But they were fucked up in their turn
By fools in old-style hats and coats,
Who half the time were soppy-stern
And half at one another’s throats.
Man hands on misery to man.
It deepens like a coastal shelf.
Get out as early as you can,
And don’t have any kids yourself.
"A book bag can be a home." Yes. "I could not hold the hand that could not slap me." Beautifully put. Small wonder that writing seems to run in the family. It's the best way I know to make sense of the incomprehensible.
Daniel is a novelist. For more of his writing, see below.
https://www.amazon.com/Bar-Maid-Novel-Daniel-Roberts/dp/1950994279
Thank you. Thought he was a lawyer.
I think that's Samuel.
Interesting that she hated to go to the doctor and was a serial canceller. The cliche that we are most critical of what we dislike is true in this case.
You can’t change the past, must accept and piece your life together for your health and functioning. But, the parents like that did you no favors. No free passes. They cause enormous dysfunction in society and their behavior should be condemned. Their inability to perceive their evil does not matter.
Like you, and many others here, I had a difficult parent and I wouldn't change that. My father was emotionally abusive to me. But he had values that were progressive way beyond his time and I am grateful for that. He was raised in great privilege in Britain. Living in mansions with servants. And he ended up despising class and walking away from his family in his very early twenties and coming to Canada where he spent the rest of his life. When I was born (the last of three) we were quite poor but by the time I was adolescent we were reasonably comfortable. Mostly due to my mother going to work as a teacher. I grew up on the east coast of Canada in the seventies which was decidedly not a progressive place/time! My father brought a steady flow of diverse people through our household and spoke very strongly against sexism, racism, classism, homophobia Etc. At the same time, he was disciplining me with a horse whip and constantly criticizing me. I don't think I really got out from under his shadow and came into my own till I was almost 40. Now I'm 60 and pretty comfortable and happy with the person I've become and I'm continuing to become. I resent the decades it took for me to cast off most of the baggage my parents saddled with me but I am eternally grateful for the values he planted in me.
Such a nuanced take Geoffrey. Almost as if when inhabiting his role as a father he was a different person.
And also so wise to hold on to the good and try to discard the bad.
David, I’m so moved by this. My mother also had a challenging childhood and I’ve just assumed, if given the option she’d go back in time and change everything. But your mother’s response gives me pause. Maybe one day, I’ll get to have a similar conversation with mine 🤍
Thanks Caroline.