This is how the economic landscape of childhood impacts your future career

I grew up as what many refer to euphemistically as “working class.” My mom was a single mother who didn’t receive child support and worked low-wage jobs to put herself through nursing school. My brother and I were well loved and cared for, but we were also acutely aware of our economic situation from a very young age. Those early experiences at the edges of poverty had a lasting legacy on my relationship with money as an adult and subsequently on many of my decisions around career.

The economic landscape of my childhood informed a lot more than just my career choices. Much of my planning about when to have kids and where to live has been to make sure I can provide my children with opportunities that were out of grasp for my mom. I’m now in my early forties with two young children; in some ways, I’m in a very different place than my mom was at the same age. But how much of that is due to my own ambition, and how much is a product of the circumstances I started in? 

For the first episode, in our four-part Ambition Diaries miniseries we are focusing on the American Dream, the belief that upward mobility is possible for everyone. We are sold on this notion from birth, and ambition is often at the core of it: Through determination and hard work, we are told, we can achieve what we want. But we know that is often not the case—especially for women.

Disparities in pay are a key part: Women still earn on average only 82 cents for every dollar men make, and the gap widens when race is taken into account. Black women, for example, are only paid 63 cents to every dollar white men are paid. But it goes well beyond the pay gap.The economic circumstances you are born into determine if (and where) you go to college, the amount of debt you are saddled with, what professions you pursue, what professional networks you have access to, and ultimately how much (and if) you are able to save for retirement.

One of the prevailing truisms of parenthood is the notion of working to make things better for your children. But that means vastly different things depending on the circumstances of your own upbringing. So I was interested to hear from the mothers and daughters we interviewed for this project how their economic circumstances informed their career, family choices, and opportunities. 

Damita and her daughter, Francesca, live in Miami. They both left corporate careers to pursue purpose-driven work. For Damita, this came after 30 years working in HR. Damita grew up in economic uncertainty, which left a lasting impression, and impacted the way she raised her own children. She shared with her daughter an experience she’d had as a child:

“I remember making a concerted effort for my children not to have an awareness of real life. I remember I was 8 years old, and it was my first awareness of struggle because that year Nana had taken me to a thrift shop to get my winter coat. I remember the zipper came to here and the strings only came to here, which meant that there was a gap that essentially exposed my whole neck. And I just remember being cold. I was so cold that winter, and I never, ever, ever wanted you guys to have that experience.”

There are a lot of stories about millenials’ so-called failure to launch. Millennials are, on average, waiting longer to get married and have kids than their parents’ generation, or they are opting out completely. Birth rates have continued to fall since hitting a low in 2008, and during the start of the pandemic in 2020, they hit their sharpest decline in almost 50 years. The marriage rate for millenials is only 26%, the lowest of any previous generation. Far fewer millennials are homeowners either—only around 48%, which is much lower than Gen X and baby boomers.

It isn’t that millenials refuse to grow up, it’s that the landscape for achieving those markers is much different than it was a generation ago. Many older millennials suffered career setbacks amid layoffs during the Great Recession. And unlike boomers and Gen X, millennials and Gen Z are contending with crippling levels of student loan debt. About 15 million millennials carry an average student loan debt of about $33,000. 

Many of the daughters we spoke to for Ambition Diaries are in their thirties—a point when many of their parents were able to own homes. But they find themselves at jobs that don’t pay as much as they expected, struggling to pay off student loans, and contending with rising housing prices, mortgage rates, and the worst inflation in a generation.

This is the case for Christina, a teacher from Lathonia, Georgia, who spoke with her mother Vickie about how hard purchasing a home—a lifelong dream—was with student loan debt:

“In becoming a teacher, I had to take out some loans that impacted my process, especially a couple of years ago when I had the townhouse, and the week before closing date, it just fell apart. And I was crying, saying to myself, ‘Maybe if I would’ve went to a cheaper school.’ My student loan debt is always a focus in my mind.”

It’s not easy to hear these stories of daughters struggling in ways their mothers didn’t and feel despair for the future; but looking at it another way, there are glimmers of progress. Damita’s struggles with poverty as a child helped her to raise Francesca with the encouragement to spread her wings a bit more; and now she’s thinking more deeply about the way she approaches work and purpose, inspired by her mother’s second-act career, which we’ll hear more about in the final episode in this series. 

For Christina, watching her mother’s advocacy for kids through her unpaid work with the PTA inspired her to become a teacher, which then evolved into her training other teachers. (We’ll hear about this in a later episode in the series as well.) She may be saddled with student loan debt, but she was able to complete a degree that was out of her mother’s grasp.

Listen to the full episode for more from these mothers and daughters, as well as several others.You can listen and subscribe to The New Way We Work onApple Podcasts, Google Podcasts, Stitcher, Spotify, RadioPublic, or wherever you get your podcasts.