Can’t help but wonder if she was under the influence and didn’t want to be tested at the nearby hospital (some hospitals do drugs screens on mothers in labor and report results to protective services). I also find the whole “I’m going to go to casinos to try to induce labor” a questionable decision, but then again…

From the link: Pangborn’s mother, Dianna Williams, told the Associated Press a different version of how her daughter wound up giving birth in the forest.

I grew up in a pretty comfortably middle-class neighborhood (I had a friend whose dad played for the Astros, and their house was ridic, but there were also a lot of families where both parents were high-school teachers), with a golf-course right outside my backyard. It wasn’t a super exclusive, fancy golf-course.…

I always thought we were poor. My Mom was extremely frugal and clipped coupons. We never really ate out and if we did it was like Denny’s or McDonalds. But I never wanted for anything at all. And some of my friends in high school would not shut up about the size of my house. It always weirded me out because they would…

It has always been clear to me that the money my parents had was not my money. So if I wanted to grow up and be “comfortable” like them and able to go on vacations and afford nice things I would need to get a good job. There has never been any assumption that I would get any money from them. (Though, I HAVE gotten…

I’m an old, but my parents had an absolute horror of discussing money with any of us—and there were six of us. I doubt that my parents would be considered rich by people on this thread, because they are mere Mainstreet Millionaires. But they put six kids through college with no loans, and none of us ever had to save…

Money isn’t weird. We live in an unfair class structure where there are social sanctions against acknowledging it. There is nothing weird about it. It’s the norm.

ARE YOU THERE ME, IT’S ME, ME.

Are you me? I think you might be me. I hope this isn't weird, Me.

This almost exactly mirrors my experience. My parents never gave the impression of there being trouble, but they were also pretty focused on value, not getting anything flashy, putting my brother and I in hand-me-downs when we were still growing like crazy....

I had the opposite experience. I thought my family was rich because my mom and grandmother worked for our Tribal government. We had a phone! We had a TV! We had a newish truck!

This is so true it’s painful.

Part of your story seems to be the reason why integrating public schools more would help our education system. I’ve gone to public and private schools (with the latter mostly rich students), and it really does make you think twice about the bs you hear when your friends and clasmates are representative of a broader…

I wish that people were more open to their children about how much money they make and how that compares to the average person. My family went out to dinner with my dad’s high school friend’s family (who are rich in my eyes), and they were just so oblivious. We were talking about cars, and the daughter said that she…

I thought exactly the same thing when I was growing up, that we were comfortable. I considered us to be middle class. I had no idea until I was almost an adult that the “comfortableness” was much more thin than I thought it was. We never lacked for your basics, but it wasn’t until I was older that I noticed more that…

I think mostly my parents are relatively good people who were both raised in various levels of poverty/lower middle class (mom was LMC, dad was just straight up poor af) who didn’t forget the struggles of their younger realities just because they managed to escape their situations.

My mom always told me that I was very lucky while I was growing up. She would say most people don’t have what we have and I should count myself lucky. She grew up super poor, so I think she wanted to make me see what she saw. But when she said that, I always thought she meant we were lucky in America compared to third…

My dad was a warrant officer in the Army until he retired when I was in high school and went to work for the post office. I went to nice private schools when we lived somewhere with a dangerous public school system, but I knew we weren’t rich even though we took nice trips and had nice stuff. It was pretty obvious…

Ha, something very similar happened to me. I learned the details when my parents laid out their finances in case their plane crashed (they were flying trans-Atlantic separately for the first time since I was a child and my mum is paranoid :P). It was a very “whoa” moment.

I thought I was poor as a kid since me, my sister, and 2 other kids were the only ones who got in the line for the free lunch at school and lived in one story homes (Texas). Then I got to jr high and met real poor kids. Turned out I was just lower middle class.