MY MOTHER grew up on the black side of segregated Mississippi in a family of teachers, preachers, and sharecroppers. She won money to go to college from an oratorical prize. My father - the son of an Italian immigrant - spent his childhood in a small town in Pennsylvania. He saw himself as middle class because he had two pairs of pants. (Poor people only had one.)

Like millions of Americans, they climbed the socioeconomic ladder painstakingly, through scholarships and federal loans and research grants. They became university professors. Yet I have never heard either of them ever claim to be “self-made.’’

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Meanwhile, the setbacks that push middle class families downward abound - illness, job loss, divorce. Last year, the Pew Charitable Trust’s Economic Mobility Project found that fewer than half of all Americans believe their kids will have a higher standard of living than they do.

Read the full article at boston.com.