If you had money problems as a child and teenager (if you come from a poor family), you are more likely to have money problems in the future. That is how bluntly various international and national studies put it (in Spain, the study was carried out by the University of Oviedo and the University of Castilla-La Mancha).
At first glance the reasons might seem very clear: in poor families the level of education tends to be lower, and in that environment people also drop out of school early because they need, or want, to get a job.
The study found that those who manage to overcome that barrier, even though they come from poor families, and who earn a university degree or advanced qualifications, tend to be better protected against the risk of poverty.
Seen this way, it even makes sense. But I think the problem of “hereditary poverty” goes much further, and many authors have already written about it: it is not about inheriting a lack of money and opportunities, but about inheriting a poor mentality and mindset.
The poorer a family is, the less it understands how the game of life and money works.
It may sound too harsh, but the truth is that the poorer a family is, the more it tends to leave things in the hands of God and luck. And the poorer a family is, the more comfortable it feels repeating the typical line that “money isn’t the most important thing”. Unfortunately, money is very important, and your happiness, in a way, grows as your financial freedom grows and your money problems disappear.
Inheriting a mindset.
I recently had the chance to give several talks to secondary school pupils. One school was private, with pupils from middle- and upper-class families; the other had pupils from rather poor backgrounds, and many of their parents were unemployed.
Asking each group the same questions, I immediately noticed an astronomical difference in their aspirations. Most of the first group had big dreams, purposes and goals, some of them very ambitious. The second group seemed switched off, even though some of them have great opportunities and talents. But what was surprising was how they had mentally closed off so many possibilities for themselves, as if professional success were something that exists for other people.
The factors that play a part.
Let’s be honest: we are all shaped by internal factors (where we are born and into which family) and external factors (who we spend our time with and who educates us). Being born in Somalia is not the same as being born in the United States, either.
Being born poor puts you at a disadvantage, in principle, compared with someone born into a middle-class or wealthy family. That is obvious. But in those circumstances, faced with those disadvantages, all we can do is work even harder than the person who has the advantage, to cancel out the unfair disadvantage we were born with.
Will you have to work in the evenings after university while a rich kid is out partying with friends? Probably. That is a disadvantage today, but it will be your biggest advantage tomorrow.
Poverty and wealth are a question of mindset.
Parents are sometimes not aware of everything they pass on to their children. As a parent, you turn your child into a left-wing or right-wing voter, into a football fanatic, into a Real Madrid or Barcelona fan.
As a parent, you can also turn your child into a poor person or a rich one if you don’t take care with the message you send to prepare them for the real world.
The education system is what it is (somewhat outdated for my taste), but it’s what we have.
Someone once said that we are all born geniuses and over time we become idiots. Someone asked him who or what was responsible for this. And he answered: “the education system”. The fact is that you cannot teach the same thing to people with different talents, full stop.
(Read: Conclusion: university students knowing the capital of France is just a waste of time)
As parents, we also play an important role in sparking our children’s interest in the subjects that will help them most in the future, and that is not football, unless your child is going to be a professional player.
In his famous book Rich Dad Poor Dad, Robert Kiyosaki described perfectly this problem, which still exists today. The children of the poor believe a job will bring them happiness, while the children of the rich and of business owners know that this is not exactly true. And there is nothing wrong with working at McDonald’s, as long as you know it is temporary.
Earning money to spend or earning money to build assets is something that children of poor families today learn neither at home nor from the education system.
So, do you come from a poor family and want to stop being poor? A university degree probably won’t solve that problem for you (although having a degree is necessary, ideally in something you are passionate about). To get out of poverty, the only recipe is to stop thinking like poor people and start acquiring other points of view and knowledge that are not acquired by those who are destined to depend on a single, unstable income from a job that probably doesn’t pay much but covers the mortgage, until the day that income stops and we can no longer pay it.
A business owner’s child is not afraid of starting a company, while a worker’s child will probably think the solution is to find a job.
You are what you think, and your thoughts shape your future. Sometimes all it takes is changing the way you think to change everything around you. As Bill Gates is said to have put it, being born poor is not your fault, but dying poor is.
These three articles complement what we are trying to say perfectly, setting out the difference in mindset between one group and the other.
Further reading
- Why are the poor getting poorer and the rich getting richer?
- 10 ways the rich think differently from everyone else
- The 4 most notable differences between how the rich and the poor think
Featured image: David Perez, CC BY-SA 4.0, via Wikimedia Commons.
