Attitude & Mindset

1. 85

   gmwilliamsposted 4 years ago

   
   Is your attitude & mindset similar or vastly different from your parents & family?   Is your parents'  & family's attitude & mindset regarding education, religion, & success similar or vastly different from yours?

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   1. 93

      MizBejabbersposted 4 years agoin reply to this

      Partly different, and partly the same. I think it is a generational thing. We agreed that it is important to get a good education, but we disagreed on what constituted a good education. My parents both attended college, my dad got his teaching certificate. Back then a college degree wasn't required to teach school. My mom's goal was an associate's degree in secretarial sciences, but she had to drop out to take care of her mother who died of cancer. Now knowing this, it makes me wonder why they both seemed to think that a high school diploma was all that was required to make it in this world.
      Being a child of the 50s, I set my sights higher than being a secretary or some other job that didn't require a college education. My parents thought it wasn't necessary to send a girl to college because "girls just got married and had husbands to support them." I felt like there was more to the world than wiping little noses and said so. My dad was supportive of his daughters going to college if they went to the college in our hometown, a college owned by the Presbyterian Church, that he and mom both attended.
      
      Many years later my first marriage didn't work out, and I struggled to raise my two kids basically in poverty because I didn't have the finances to graduate. I did finish my degree and get a post-graduate degree during my second marriage. Ironically, my brother married a systems analyst who ended up making much more money than his lab technician career and their daughter was born with a silver spoon in her mouth. My dad had passed away by then (he was older than my mother by 12 years), but I didn't let my mother forget how wrong she'd been.
      I encouraged my two boys to get a college degree. The older one got two degrees, but the younger one was a college dropout. My brother's daughter has her doctorate. So our generation's focus has been on college degrees.
      My dad was atheist and my mom was Christian, so their attitude was pretty loose about religion. We chose our own paths without any nagging from them. I gave my children a base in the church, but then let them choose their own religious path, and they both became church dropouts.
      As far as success goes, money has never been a big deal in our family. My parents considered their children more successful than they were. However, if my mom hadn't chosen to be a wife and mother, she could have had a great career with the federal government. She lucked into a federal job that was under the auspices of our district's congressman. If I'd  had a job like that, wild horses couldn't have pried me away to be a housewife. So I believe there was a considerable change in attitudes, probably brought about by the freedom women were beginning to acquire in the 1960s.

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   2. 81

      Mark O Richardsonposted 4 years agoin reply to this

      While I've certainly came to my own conclusions and learned things on my own, my attitude & mindset on education, religion & success is similar to my parents. However, most of my siblings are different in many ways.

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