I grew up poor. Literally across the street from the projects, which we absolutely qualified for, but didn't because my parents refused to for a myriad of reasons (mostly to avoid shame). We were Section 8 for the first 15 years of my life.
My parents valued education in theory, but not as much in practice. My father learned the hard way and redeemed himself in his 20s -- managing to get into the Army Corp of Engineers after initially dropping out of high school. They pounded the importance of education into my sister and I when I was very young, but that seemed to taper off when I was about 9 or 10, when we were left to our own devices.
How did I thrive? Simple. At around the age of 12 I realized that they were mostly idiots. They made terrible financial decisions (which they're paying for now, as they have no retirement savings), my father -- mostly working in factories/landfills -- made no career moves (on account of my mother discouraging him at every opportunity), and my mother simply parroted the advice spewed by the TV, but did the exact opposite. My goal was to avoid ending up like them at all costs -- ending up in a crappy part of a city 50 years in decline with "a good job" being something like working in a furniture store, and being complacent with it.
I was fortunate in my early 20s (after I dropped out of a state college in which I felt I was getting a bad deal for my $) to work with an older QA engineer who took a similar path. He had it much worse than I when he grew up, but he could empathize with my upbringing, as it felt all too familiar to him. At the time he felt I was getting a raw deal from my employer, so he would invite me over on the weekends to have lunch with him and his wife (and his daughters, who were my age) to drive into all our heads on how to better make informed decisions about our current state at a given moment.
Solid, extremely pragmatic advice from the two of them. As well as painful examples of mistakes both of them made along the way, to show they were far from perfect themselves. Much of it focusing on the long term even if it involves temporarily stunting yourself in the short term, or cutting ties with people you may have had relationships with but were ultimately toxic. Some of the advice was certainly hard to follow in practice, but I'm still to find a case where it wasn't the best move I could've made, and regretted not following some of it earlier.