The privilege of choice

Not starting school
this week

I posted something about N not starting school this week on Facebook yesterday. Very quickly, a friend called me out on the tone of the post (which I hadn't written myself) saying it highlighted the privilege N has of being born into a family that could afford to have a parent stay at home to educate her.

Point taken, and post taken down because he was right - but I do have a few thoughts about privilege. There are two contexts of it, global and national / local.

Globally, we are the privileged few.

We are a well educated couple living in a developed country where health care is free, food is assured, our income is reliable; we have no major disasters, war or famine to fear. This means we are, along with most people in the Western world, among the most privileged people in the world. In this context, we cannot boast of any of our choices because globally, few people even have the choices we do.

We eat vegan to avoid harming fellow creatures - while others feel relieved when they get anything to eat at all.

We minimise our plastic use and buy almost everything second hand - while others have to scrimp and save to buy the very essentials of life and haven't the luxury to care what it's made from.

Is it therefore wrong for me to make choices?

If I compared myself to the millions of people living on less than £1 a day I would spend my days under a cloud of guilt for everything. And how is that going to help anyone? I don't truly believe that anything I do or don't do, buy or don't buy, makes any real difference in the wider world. I make my choices according to my personal integrity, not because I think they'll change anything. I know that for every one plastic bag I avoid, thousands don't even think twice! That's how it is, but I still choose to avoid it for my own conscience.

So this is the first part of my response. I'm aware I am one of the privileged few; that is not due to my own merits and there's nothing I can do about it; but does that mean I must feel bad for it at all times and cannot make the choices available to me - so long as they don't harm others? No!

I have choices. That's a privilege. I will make the best choices for me and my family that are available to me.

Nationally, we are really not more privileged than most.

Coming back to our national context, rather than global - or even speaking of the Western world in general - many, many people have more choices than they think.

We aren't rich in our context, even though globally speaking we are. We bought our house in the cheapest available area and are still fixing it up over 2 years later with no end in sight. Our car is now 17 years old (and going strong, hallelujah!); our money barely sees us through a month despite careful budgeting, buying second hand, and eating the cheapest diet on the planet. But, this is a choice! We could live a much richer lifestyle if I brought in a full income, I could pretty much double our household income with a full time job.

The trade off of doing that would be that I would have to send the kids to nursery/school to be looked after and educated by other people.

Millions of people have that same choice available. They may not be aware they have it - just following society's norm without questioning it - but the choice is theirs. My choice is to keep my children close and be the main influence in their lives through their early years.

In short: yes we are privileged globally. I can't change that. But in our context, many more people could make choices but simply don't... we are not privileged here. We are not rich here. We have simply thought it through and made a choice according to our convictions.