8 ms·

A nice idea, but my experience working with poor kids has led me to believe lack of access to resources is not the biggest issue these kids face. The biggest is

by umvi 7y ago

A nice idea, but my experience working with poor kids has led me to believe lack of access to resources is not the biggest issue these kids face. The biggest issue is lack of good parents. My next door neighbor is 11 years old. He has basically dropped out of middle school. Even before covid-19 he was constantly truant. Now that school has moved to online, he doesn't attend at all. His math teacher e-mailed me (I had previously contacted her to get a copy of his curriculum) and asked if he had access to a computer and WiFi because he hadn't attended a single online Zoom session. I assured her he did as I could hear him playing Fortnite all hours of the night. He often comes over for snacks at 10 pm. I ask whether he's had dinner and he claims his mom doesn't make dinner until 12 or 1 am. I ask what time he goes to bed and he replies "7 or 8 am". I've tried to motivate him to do Khan Academy courses for rewards, but his mom always undermines me. For example, I promised to buy him a Dragonball Z game if he completed the 6th grade math module on exponents. Half-way through the course he announced his mom bought him the game and he lost all motivation to continue. Even money doesn't seem to have much effect unless there is something he currently wants to buy. This happens every time though - his mom doesn't encourage school at all. She can't help him because (I'm pretty sure) she dropped out herself. There's no dad in the picture, and any motivation I try to use to get him to learn stuff gets instantly gratified by his mom. So basically, we have this kid with an inverted sleep schedule who is years behind his peers, has access to everything he needs to be successful, except parents who care about his future, and thus he is on a trajectory to fail.

cosmodisk 7y ago
I think people should go to prison for shit like this.The cost to the society of such a person throughout their life is astronomical.
- meddlepal 7y ago
  Oh good, now we have two problems... parents in prison and a kid without parents.
  - ashtonkem 7y ago
    I’m genuinely shocked at the idea that anyone thinks more prison will solve issues like this.
    - lobotryas 7y ago
      When someone wishes to use prison they are just voicing their frustration at perceived injustice. Same reason some people want to send bankers to prison despite no court having proved their guilt. The real challenge is that the tools available to is, as a society, to punish perceived injustice are very few. We have fines, prison, and social stigma. You won’t get far with fines for a person already on social assistance. Social stigma is a non-starter in our climate; she’s a single mother trying so hard for her kids! This either leaves prison (as bad of an idea as that is) or admitting that we have not criminalized bad parenting and some people will absolutely RUIN their kids’ lives. Just giving you context because it’s easy to roll your eyes at someone (“that dummy wants to send her to prison lol”) when I believe there is a deeper explanation.
      - ashtonkem 7y ago
        That’s a fair and nuanced argument. I will caution though that “they should be in prison” goes from a frustrated response to actual policy quite quickly for some demographics.
        cosmodisk 7y ago
        Well I do agree that it was somewhat simplistic comment from my side. In reality,I'm not even sure what would work best: a school dropout not encouraging their kids to read or learn in general is catch 22 situation, because they won't know how the life would have been for them should they continued to attend the school. If you fail to see all the opportunities that could have opened because of education, it can be hard to tell your kids to do it. So in such situation, either the parents pull their shit together and do what they need to do, as responsible parents,or the state intervenes to help them,or if the help doesn't work, punish somehow.
leetcrew 7y ago
from this brief blurb, I find myself wondering whether the mom is deliberately thwarting your efforts. your actions essentially imply that she isn't doing a good job parenting. probably true, but she may resent that signal. you've already gone above and beyond your duty as a neighbor, but have you tried talking to the mom directly?
- umvi 7y ago
  I don't think she's doing it maliciously, I think she is just easily guilted/convinced to buy her kids stuff when they want it (she also has a daughter older than the son who always has the latest iPhone, so it's not unique to the boy). They don't have much money (they are on both SNAP and HOC), but enough for short term luxuries like smartphones and video/computer games. > have you tried talking to the mom directly? I have not talked to her directly, though I'm starting to come to the same conclusion that it is necessary if I want to help her son. I'm slightly apprehensive that it might be a touchy subject though and I'm not the best at confrontation.
  - ptero 7y ago
    It is a touchy subject, so I would not talk about her actions "you do X, please stop". At all. Maybe say that you met her son, he is a nice kid, you have some experience teaching kids and would like to help him get through the class Y. What does she think? One step at a time, and start with a small one. My 2c.
dvaun 7y ago
I agree that poor role models and bad influences negatively affect kids, whether poor or not. However, from my wife’s experience teaching at Title I schools, many of these kids DO have the motivation to do well in their classes. What is glaringly apparent to teachers at these schools is the inequity due to lack of resources (poor parents and poor school funding). Many of these kids do not have access to internet, do not have access to computers, and rely on their schools to provide them with regular meals. Parents are not the only important part of the equation here.
- Zhenya 7y ago
  And yet we were all educated without internet and computers! Let's put it this way 1) motivated parents with poor school funding = most likely success 2) unmotivated parents with great school funding = demonstratably bad outcome
  - akiselev 7y ago
    > 2) unmotivated parents with great school funding = demonstratably bad outcome Demonstrably not true. There are plenty of people with poor parental role models who did well in school and broke the cycle. Technology drops the threshold that the disadvantaged students have to overcome. Whereas before they needed to be lucky enough to have a great school library or transportation to the municipal libraries every time they wanted to go, now they just need internet access. Governments and schools can't do anything to give the kids motivation or better parents, but they can work on the technology angle and remove more barriers to success. There will never be a single solution to the myriad of problems facing education - this is marathon that requires solving one problem at a time.
    - bradlys 7y ago
      I would hesitate to say that with just a bit of tech access, kids can break the cycle. I lived with parents who were educationally poor and never involved in my school work. I saw other people with similar backgrounds as I had (maybe even more educated parents) and they never broke the cycle. I think it takes something special to truly break the cycle and move upwards. I don’t see many people do it. Then again, I came from one of the worst schools and towns in my state and now live in SV where everyone was a rich kid. I check Facebook to see if any alumni from my HS ever got anywhere. Nope...
ashtonkem 7y ago
There was a study a while ago that found a correlation between book ownership in a child’s house and educational achievement. So some municipality (can’t remember which) kickstarted a program to mail a few age appropriate books to kids in their per month. The result was no change. It turned out that the actual cause wasn’t books, it was parents who would value books enough to purchase them. Buying books for children whose parents hadn’t valued reading and education enough to already own some books didn’t help at all.
- jwmerrill 7y ago
  I have to admit that this sounded apocryphal to me because it’s an almost-too-convenient illustration of a general point, but a quick search at least turned up the original study: https://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2010/05/100520213116.htm https://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2010/05/100520213116.h...
GordonS 7y ago
I agree this is an issue in poor areas. As another anecdote, my wife grew up in a poor housing estate in central Scotland, in a household with bad parents and some domestic violence. There was a fair bit of violence and drugs in the area too. Almost everyone in the area was claiming at least some kind of benefit, and benefit fraud was absolutely rife. I got to know the extended family quite well over time. Almost every parent seemed determined to continue the cycle of poverty, and pushed their children to sign up for a council house as soon as they were 16. Fraudulent tactics were often used to get their kids further up the waiting list, or to get their kids into newer/better housing once they had a house. One father set fire to his daughter's house with the hope she'd be moved into a better house. Another smashed in the windows of his son's house, so they could claim he was in danger from imaginary drug dealers in the area. My wife (and indeed her brother) were however determined to get a decent education and do better, in spite of their parents. She applied to university, but her mother hid the acceptance letter and tried to push her into a crappy low/paid job and a council house. Thankfully my wife came across the letter my chance, and her life has been very different from that of her parents.
- champagneben 7y ago
  Feel free to not respond as this might be too personal, but I'm very interested. Does your wife keep in contact with her mother? Presumably yes, as you have gotten to know them?
  - GordonS 7y ago
    This all happened a long while back, but yes, she has kept in touch all that time. But they don't get on at all, and have a very turbulent relationship. I think she feels a sense of familial duty more than anything else.
    - winter_blue 7y ago
      It was definitely truly horrible to read that her mom hid her acceptance letter from her. What sort of thing would make someone do that? What kind of person doesn’t wish best for their children, and tries to make their life bad instead? It’s just too much.
dragonwriter 7y ago
> A nice idea, but my experience working with poor kids has led me to believe lack of access to resources is not the biggest issue these kids face. The biggest issue is lack of good parents. Very nearly everyone in, around, or who has even remotely studied the field knows that social context (which includes but is not limited to parents) is the biggest issue for these kids in general. That's not even remotely controversial. But, aside from the fact that most of that is outside of the scope of school district authority to address, the WiFi busses aren't even in theory about fixing their general long-term issues, but are to mitigate the degree to which the gap gets worse as schools temporarily switch to online instruction due to COVID-19. The second-hand article currently linked as the main one for HN doesn't make this explicit, but the one that it links as it's source does: https://www.routefifty.com/tech-data/2020/05/buses-wifi-broadband-students/165192/ https://www.routefifty.com/tech-data/2020/05/buses-wifi-broa...
lonelappde 7y ago
The wifi provides an opportunity for someone outside of the home to "babysit" the kids. In can provide improvement at the margin, if managed well. Also, people have greed that can be exploited. If you want to continue your (admirable!) effort you can offer a different bribe. Another point to note is that if the kid got halfway through the chapter on exponents, he's doing pretty well! Failure at math education means years behind, not weeks behind.
Mela1998 7y ago
That's terrible! It really irks me when parents do not encourage education to their children.
siruncledrew 7y ago
That sounds accurate. Conversely, there are also poor people that still care about education and use what they have to push their kids to succeed. In the late 1990s, I lived near an apartment block with many Vietnamese immigrants who were poor (worked at min. wage or below in asian restaurants for crazy long hours), knew very little English, and they had almost no stuff since they arrived with a few suitcases. Despite this, most of their kids ended up graduating, and those who got scholarships went to community college or state college and those that couldn’t got jobs to support their families. These kids had few resources, but they had a work ethic. They had a lot of responsibility from a young age. The neighbors of those kids whose parents were poor and already Americans (raised here) - those kids turned out more like your neighbor. Zero motivation, zero responsibility, parents gave such little of a shit about everything, dropped out of school, and held random min. wage jobs in brief spurts until they would get fired for no-showing. Idk...it was such a jarring contrast to see. Both groups started poor from the same place, yet one group turned themselves into something and the other group just already gave up without even trying.
- devdas 7y ago
  If the American group was people of colour, they would have a family history of everything being stolen or destroyed even if they actually did better. This is barely the third generation since the civil rights act was implemented, and social change takes far longer than that.
  - ls612 7y ago
    Given that the immigrants were Vietnamese I'd posit that that very history also applied to them in their home country in the 1970s (causing them to flee for their lives and end up in America). And yet somehow they didn't have the same mentality.
    - herdodoodo 7y ago
      >And yet somehow they didn't have the same mentality. Please avoid racist snark like this.
yters 7y ago
I guess if it works for them, they see no reason to change. Free housing, food, money for the luxuries they want, what more could someone ask for? The 'successful' people work themselves to death and stress out to gain some things that are a bit nicer, but not enough to justify all the bother.
- deleted 7y ago
  [deleted]
hysan 7y ago
As with most things in life, it’s a multi-layered problem. Mass media tends to simplify the issue to a single headline that’s usually along the lines of “we can fix everything if we solve X!” because that gets you clicks. Everyone wants to believe that there’s a magic bullet to solve Y. Taking your experience, you’ve run into a different layer of the issue. If you’ve heard about Maslow’s Hierarchy of Needs[1], then you might recognize this as being an issue at the psychological level (esteem needs). It sounds like this child has their basic needs already met (not poor). So your anecdote provides a useful data point but doesn’t disprove the need to solve for the problem of basic needs. A lot of people are trying to tackle the resource need simply because it would have the largest visible impact. However, it would be really nice if the media acknowledged that the problem isn’t so simple and that this is just step 0. [1] https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Maslow's_hierarchy_of_needs https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Maslow's_hierarchy_of_needs
BurningFrog 7y ago
> A nice idea, but my experience working with poor kids has led me to believe lack of access to resources is not the biggest issue these kids face. The biggest issue is lack of good parents. That's an important point, not made often enough. Still. The school district can't replace parents, but they can provide WiFi.
dillonmckay 7y ago
At least his mom is not selling his donated clothes for pill money. I have a friend that works as a teacher at a Title I school, and some of the students they try to help (clean clothes and shoes that fit), the parent will take the donated clothing and literally sell it for money.
johnsimer 7y ago
Not to critique your selfless efforts too much, but try to instill an intrinsic love of learning in him. Developing an extrinsic motivation for learning ( a video game) is likely to back fire
- umvi 7y ago
  I've tried, it's really hard though. At one point I started reading him a chapter from Harry Potter per day in the hope it would get him hooked on reading like it did for me. Well, it did get him hooked on the story, but since his reading skills were so low he would never read on his own so instead he begged his mom to rent the movies, and he promptly binge watched all 8 movies and proudly announced all the spoilers he knew. He also wasn't interested in hearing me read to him from Harry Potter anymore after that despite me hinting that the books were far superior to the movies.
PopeDotNinja 7y ago
My personal observations have led me to think that a lot of life's problems can be simplified to "poverty sucks".
freepor 7y ago
And the flip side of this is that if you have really dedicated parents then they can often overcome huge amounts (although not unbounded amounts) of privation to help their children succeed. I had a Vietnamese cleaning lady who would bring her kid with her to clean my house. While she cleaned she would be asking him math questions from a sheet of paper she had in her shirt with the answers. She’d read out something like “73 times 27” and the kid would get working on it and he would have to do it until he got it right. No treats or video games or money offered.

by umvi 7y ago

cosmodisk 7y ago

I think people should go to prison for shit like this.The cost to the society of such a person throughout their life is astronomical.

meddlepal 7y ago
Oh good, now we have two problems... parents in prison and a kid without parents.
- ashtonkem 7y ago
  I’m genuinely shocked at the idea that anyone thinks more prison will solve issues like this.
  - lobotryas 7y ago
    When someone wishes to use prison they are just voicing their frustration at perceived injustice. Same reason some people want to send bankers to prison despite no court having proved their guilt. The real challenge is that the tools available to is, as a society, to punish perceived injustice are very few. We have fines, prison, and social stigma. You won’t get far with fines for a person already on social assistance. Social stigma is a non-starter in our climate; she’s a single mother trying so hard for her kids! This either leaves prison (as bad of an idea as that is) or admitting that we have not criminalized bad parenting and some people will absolutely RUIN their kids’ lives. Just giving you context because it’s easy to roll your eyes at someone (“that dummy wants to send her to prison lol”) when I believe there is a deeper explanation.
    - ashtonkem 7y ago
      That’s a fair and nuanced argument. I will caution though that “they should be in prison” goes from a frustrated response to actual policy quite quickly for some demographics.
      - cosmodisk 7y ago
        Well I do agree that it was somewhat simplistic comment from my side. In reality,I'm not even sure what would work best: a school dropout not encouraging their kids to read or learn in general is catch 22 situation, because they won't know how the life would have been for them should they continued to attend the school. If you fail to see all the opportunities that could have opened because of education, it can be hard to tell your kids to do it. So in such situation, either the parents pull their shit together and do what they need to do, as responsible parents,or the state intervenes to help them,or if the help doesn't work, punish somehow.

leetcrew 7y ago

from this brief blurb, I find myself wondering whether the mom is deliberately thwarting your efforts. your actions essentially imply that she isn't doing a good job parenting. probably true, but she may resent that signal. you've already gone above and beyond your duty as a neighbor, but have you tried talking to the mom directly?

umvi 7y ago
I don't think she's doing it maliciously, I think she is just easily guilted/convinced to buy her kids stuff when they want it (she also has a daughter older than the son who always has the latest iPhone, so it's not unique to the boy). They don't have much money (they are on both SNAP and HOC), but enough for short term luxuries like smartphones and video/computer games. > have you tried talking to the mom directly? I have not talked to her directly, though I'm starting to come to the same conclusion that it is necessary if I want to help her son. I'm slightly apprehensive that it might be a touchy subject though and I'm not the best at confrontation.
- ptero 7y ago
  It is a touchy subject, so I would not talk about her actions "you do X, please stop". At all. Maybe say that you met her son, he is a nice kid, you have some experience teaching kids and would like to help him get through the class Y. What does she think? One step at a time, and start with a small one. My 2c.

dvaun 7y ago

I agree that poor role models and bad influences negatively affect kids, whether poor or not. However, from my wife’s experience teaching at Title I schools, many of these kids DO have the motivation to do well in their classes. What is glaringly apparent to teachers at these schools is the inequity due to lack of resources (poor parents and poor school funding). Many of these kids do not have access to internet, do not have access to computers, and rely on their schools to provide them with regular meals. Parents are not the only important part of the equation here.

Zhenya 7y ago
And yet we were all educated without internet and computers! Let's put it this way 1) motivated parents with poor school funding = most likely success 2) unmotivated parents with great school funding = demonstratably bad outcome
- akiselev 7y ago
  > 2) unmotivated parents with great school funding = demonstratably bad outcome Demonstrably not true. There are plenty of people with poor parental role models who did well in school and broke the cycle. Technology drops the threshold that the disadvantaged students have to overcome. Whereas before they needed to be lucky enough to have a great school library or transportation to the municipal libraries every time they wanted to go, now they just need internet access. Governments and schools can't do anything to give the kids motivation or better parents, but they can work on the technology angle and remove more barriers to success. There will never be a single solution to the myriad of problems facing education - this is marathon that requires solving one problem at a time.
  - bradlys 7y ago
    I would hesitate to say that with just a bit of tech access, kids can break the cycle. I lived with parents who were educationally poor and never involved in my school work. I saw other people with similar backgrounds as I had (maybe even more educated parents) and they never broke the cycle. I think it takes something special to truly break the cycle and move upwards. I don’t see many people do it. Then again, I came from one of the worst schools and towns in my state and now live in SV where everyone was a rich kid. I check Facebook to see if any alumni from my HS ever got anywhere. Nope...

ashtonkem 7y ago

There was a study a while ago that found a correlation between book ownership in a child’s house and educational achievement. So some municipality (can’t remember which) kickstarted a program to mail a few age appropriate books to kids in their per month. The result was no change. It turned out that the actual cause wasn’t books, it was parents who would value books enough to purchase them. Buying books for children whose parents hadn’t valued reading and education enough to already own some books didn’t help at all.

jwmerrill 7y ago
I have to admit that this sounded apocryphal to me because it’s an almost-too-convenient illustration of a general point, but a quick search at least turned up the original study: https://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2010/05/100520213116.htm https://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2010/05/100520213116.h...

GordonS 7y ago

I agree this is an issue in poor areas. As another anecdote, my wife grew up in a poor housing estate in central Scotland, in a household with bad parents and some domestic violence. There was a fair bit of violence and drugs in the area too. Almost everyone in the area was claiming at least some kind of benefit, and benefit fraud was absolutely rife. I got to know the extended family quite well over time. Almost every parent seemed determined to continue the cycle of poverty, and pushed their children to sign up for a council house as soon as they were 16. Fraudulent tactics were often used to get their kids further up the waiting list, or to get their kids into newer/better housing once they had a house. One father set fire to his daughter's house with the hope she'd be moved into a better house. Another smashed in the windows of his son's house, so they could claim he was in danger from imaginary drug dealers in the area. My wife (and indeed her brother) were however determined to get a decent education and do better, in spite of their parents. She applied to university, but her mother hid the acceptance letter and tried to push her into a crappy low/paid job and a council house. Thankfully my wife came across the letter my chance, and her life has been very different from that of her parents.

champagneben 7y ago
Feel free to not respond as this might be too personal, but I'm very interested. Does your wife keep in contact with her mother? Presumably yes, as you have gotten to know them?
- GordonS 7y ago
  This all happened a long while back, but yes, she has kept in touch all that time. But they don't get on at all, and have a very turbulent relationship. I think she feels a sense of familial duty more than anything else.
  - winter_blue 7y ago
    It was definitely truly horrible to read that her mom hid her acceptance letter from her. What sort of thing would make someone do that? What kind of person doesn’t wish best for their children, and tries to make their life bad instead? It’s just too much.

dragonwriter 7y ago

> A nice idea, but my experience working with poor kids has led me to believe lack of access to resources is not the biggest issue these kids face. The biggest issue is lack of good parents. Very nearly everyone in, around, or who has even remotely studied the field knows that social context (which includes but is not limited to parents) is the biggest issue for these kids in general. That's not even remotely controversial. But, aside from the fact that most of that is outside of the scope of school district authority to address, the WiFi busses aren't even in theory about fixing their general long-term issues, but are to mitigate the degree to which the gap gets worse as schools temporarily switch to online instruction due to COVID-19. The second-hand article currently linked as the main one for HN doesn't make this explicit, but the one that it links as it's source does: https://www.routefifty.com/tech-data/2020/05/buses-wifi-broadband-students/165192/ https://www.routefifty.com/tech-data/2020/05/buses-wifi-broa...

lonelappde 7y ago

The wifi provides an opportunity for someone outside of the home to "babysit" the kids. In can provide improvement at the margin, if managed well. Also, people have greed that can be exploited. If you want to continue your (admirable!) effort you can offer a different bribe. Another point to note is that if the kid got halfway through the chapter on exponents, he's doing pretty well! Failure at math education means years behind, not weeks behind.

Mela1998 7y ago

That's terrible! It really irks me when parents do not encourage education to their children.

siruncledrew 7y ago

That sounds accurate. Conversely, there are also poor people that still care about education and use what they have to push their kids to succeed. In the late 1990s, I lived near an apartment block with many Vietnamese immigrants who were poor (worked at min. wage or below in asian restaurants for crazy long hours), knew very little English, and they had almost no stuff since they arrived with a few suitcases. Despite this, most of their kids ended up graduating, and those who got scholarships went to community college or state college and those that couldn’t got jobs to support their families. These kids had few resources, but they had a work ethic. They had a lot of responsibility from a young age. The neighbors of those kids whose parents were poor and already Americans (raised here) - those kids turned out more like your neighbor. Zero motivation, zero responsibility, parents gave such little of a shit about everything, dropped out of school, and held random min. wage jobs in brief spurts until they would get fired for no-showing. Idk...it was such a jarring contrast to see. Both groups started poor from the same place, yet one group turned themselves into something and the other group just already gave up without even trying.

devdas 7y ago
If the American group was people of colour, they would have a family history of everything being stolen or destroyed even if they actually did better. This is barely the third generation since the civil rights act was implemented, and social change takes far longer than that.
- ls612 7y ago
  Given that the immigrants were Vietnamese I'd posit that that very history also applied to them in their home country in the 1970s (causing them to flee for their lives and end up in America). And yet somehow they didn't have the same mentality.
  - herdodoodo 7y ago
    >And yet somehow they didn't have the same mentality. Please avoid racist snark like this.

yters 7y ago

I guess if it works for them, they see no reason to change. Free housing, food, money for the luxuries they want, what more could someone ask for? The 'successful' people work themselves to death and stress out to gain some things that are a bit nicer, but not enough to justify all the bother.

deleted 7y ago
[deleted]

hysan 7y ago

As with most things in life, it’s a multi-layered problem. Mass media tends to simplify the issue to a single headline that’s usually along the lines of “we can fix everything if we solve X!” because that gets you clicks. Everyone wants to believe that there’s a magic bullet to solve Y. Taking your experience, you’ve run into a different layer of the issue. If you’ve heard about Maslow’s Hierarchy of Needs[1], then you might recognize this as being an issue at the psychological level (esteem needs). It sounds like this child has their basic needs already met (not poor). So your anecdote provides a useful data point but doesn’t disprove the need to solve for the problem of basic needs. A lot of people are trying to tackle the resource need simply because it would have the largest visible impact. However, it would be really nice if the media acknowledged that the problem isn’t so simple and that this is just step 0. [1] https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Maslow's_hierarchy_of_needs https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Maslow's_hierarchy_of_needs

BurningFrog 7y ago

dillonmckay 7y ago

At least his mom is not selling his donated clothes for pill money. I have a friend that works as a teacher at a Title I school, and some of the students they try to help (clean clothes and shoes that fit), the parent will take the donated clothing and literally sell it for money.

johnsimer 7y ago

Not to critique your selfless efforts too much, but try to instill an intrinsic love of learning in him. Developing an extrinsic motivation for learning ( a video game) is likely to back fire

umvi 7y ago
I've tried, it's really hard though. At one point I started reading him a chapter from Harry Potter per day in the hope it would get him hooked on reading like it did for me. Well, it did get him hooked on the story, but since his reading skills were so low he would never read on his own so instead he begged his mom to rent the movies, and he promptly binge watched all 8 movies and proudly announced all the spoilers he knew. He also wasn't interested in hearing me read to him from Harry Potter anymore after that despite me hinting that the books were far superior to the movies.

PopeDotNinja 7y ago

My personal observations have led me to think that a lot of life's problems can be simplified to "poverty sucks".

freepor 7y ago

And the flip side of this is that if you have really dedicated parents then they can often overcome huge amounts (although not unbounded amounts) of privation to help their children succeed. I had a Vietnamese cleaning lady who would bring her kid with her to clean my house. While she cleaned she would be asking him math questions from a sheet of paper she had in her shirt with the answers. She’d read out something like “73 times 27” and the kid would get working on it and he would have to do it until he got it right. No treats or video games or money offered.