Social Mobility

Running head: SOCIAL MOBILITY

Social Mobility

Courtney Moyer

Social Mobility

Children learn a great deal from their parents and grandparents. Over the course of childhood, children are taught everything parents deem necessary for their children to know. The learning cycle is an endless journey when family is involved, the learning process continues down through the generations. Children learn and evolve as they grow older, and a great deal of the time, the child's opinions and possibly even beliefs may change completely from what the parent's beliefs were. As society changes, people's beliefs and thought patterns change as well, and in present day, as technology evolves, higher education is a necessity.

My Childhood

I grew up in a small rural farming community, and I was raised by both of my parents. I have an older sister and a younger brother and my family lived in a three bedroom house in the country. While I was in elementary school, I never gave money a second thought, or how my family lived, or the house my family lived in. My mother worked in a factory, and my father worked at a sand quarry until the quarry closed down, after which my father received a job at the Wyandot County Highway Department. It was not until I was in junior high school and started going to friends houses that I realized how bad our house was, and our house was not the normal type of house people lived in.

My parents were not poor, they earned decent money at their jobs, but remodeling the house and painting the exterior were not priorities for them. My parents continued to live in that house until about two years ago when they purchased a mobile trailer and put it on the lot beside the house. My grandparents never lived in houses that looked as bad as our house did, so I think a difference in priorities existed between my parents and their parents.

My parents never went to church and never taught us anything about religion. Across the road from our house was a church, and my siblings and I used to walk over on Sunday morning and attend church services, but our parents never went. To my knowledge and to my parent's knowledge, my grandparents never attended church either. In present day, I do not attend church either, but my children go faithfully every Sunday.

My Adulthood

As an adult, I vowed I would not live like my parents and I did not want my children to live under the conditions I had to when I was a child. In my hometown, unless a person had a higher education, there was not much else to do other than factory work; there were many factories back then. I worked hard in the factory and worked my way up through the positions until I was making a good wage; I wanted a different lifestyle than the lifestyle my parents had. I met my current husband while I was working in the factory and eventually moved 100 miles northeast of my hometown to marry him.

My husband has a degree in electronics, and he inspired me to go to college and get a degree as well. I have achieved my Associate of Arts degree in Accounting and I am currently working towards achieving my Bachelor of Science degree in Accounting. My sister has a Bachelor's degree in Criminal Justice and is now pursuing a degree in pharmaceuticals, and my brother was a Marine and is now a prison guard, he never pursued higher education. My parents both graduated from high school, but did not receive any higher education. My paternal grandparents only attended school through the seventh and eighth grades. My daughter is attending college and is majoring in criminal justice and my son has been accepted to Hocking College after he graduates from high school next year.

Income

Combining my income with my husband's income, my husband and I would be considered middle class. I think my parents were middle lower income and I think both sets of my grandparents were middle lower income as well. My grandfather on my mother's side of the family was a truck driver and my grandmother was a homemaker. My paternal grandfather was a welder and a machinist and my grandmother was a homemaker as well.