Interesting story I heard today as a person was concerned that their grandchild was going to grow up being bad with money while having a very elite type of mentality when it comes to things like transportation. It started with the grandparent telling them how to get to various places with public transit and surprisingly the child told them that they would never use pubic transit. The reason was that in their mind only poor people use public transit and so they aspire never to have to use it.
These are the types of things you would stereotypically hear in movies of say kids growing up in rich families who feel they would never use cheaper transportation options or even as far as claiming they would never work at a “low class” job as an example such as a fast-food restaurant. I was thinking if there was a way to reverse that mentality for say a teenager and the only real way I could think of is hands on experience in meeting a wide variety of people.
For example, having them work at a job where you get to meet a lot of people where a common scenario is people would often see that one person who seems so good at their job you can’t help but to be impressed. Then when you find out all the things they don’t have or need to do to survive you learn quickly not to pre-judge these types of things versus just recognizing that you had a more financially relaxing upbringing. Not every teenager gets a new car as an example.
But this shows how it is important to start early on before a child grows up to have this kind of mentality in which I can only imagine makes them more susceptible to spending in order to impress people as an e example.