Wealth can be inherited and, despite death duties, some inequality of income perpetuated. A high income enables parents to give to their children the advantages that money can buy. It is a great help to a child to live in pleasant surroundings, be provided with educational toys, to go to a private school with a high staffing ratio, to receive stimulating experiences such as foreign travel in adolescence, and to have the entry into the ‘right circle’.
The family not only transmits material benefits to its offspring, but also passes on some of the more indefinable and immaterial aspects of social class. The child undergoes social experiences of power and prestige upon which his ideas of class are built.
The ways in which his parents treat others and are treated by them give him the clues as to how he should later deal with his superiors and inferiors in class position.
