Social difficulties & low parental status?

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“low status,” I don’t mean low income or low-ranking jobs. I mean something closer to: how much do parents participate in the world outside the home? How much of society’s rhythms and norms do they actually engage with?

In my case, the answer is: very little. My parents seem to live at the bare minimum. Eat, sleep, repeat. Anything beyond basic functioning — daily habits, social routines, the small rituals that connect a household to the wider world — they just don’t do. If something sort of works, they never touch it again. The result is a kind of drift: over time, they’ve become disconnected from how most people operate, in ways they don’t seem aware of. Socially, this is especially stark. There’s simply no template for me to observe.

Ideally, the first layer comes from family: watching your parents host friends, handle conflict, make small talk, navigate daily life. That’s the raw material you build on. If that layer isn’t there, you don’t just have a gap — you don’t even know the gap exists until you’re in a situation where everyone else seems to have a script and you don’t.

I don’t think there’s a fix or a lesson here. It’s just something I’ve been turning over in my head — this idea that the “social difficulty” part and the “parental status” part might be connected in a way that isn’t about money or class at all, but about whether the home was ever plugged into the social world in the first place.

The same is for my mother (I don't have a father, she left him when she was pregnant with me, I saw my father just twice in my life - every time it was when I was an adult woman of 26). My mother is spending her whole time on the couch, watching TV, doing crossword puzzles and calling our relatives and her former workmates - that's her whole daily "activity". She doesn't have any friends she could visit but for one neighbor across the hall she sometimes does visit - very, very rarely. But this lady who used to be her workmate back in the past, has an early stage of Alzheimers, I believe. That's all for my mom's participating in any sort of life outside of our home.

My mother is besides this, as I have expressed it on WP many times, very narrow-minded. Her credo is "what are people going to say?"