> They had to move into a much smaller apartment, and at the age of 16, Sayman found himself in the strange situation of helping his parents make the mortgage payments on the new place.
This part sounds strange to me.
If Mom and/or Dad are also working minimum wage jobs, it's impossible to pay mortgage payments in even relatively-inexpensive large cities.
As a personal anecdote, my grandmother helped her family pay the rent when she was a teenager by working as a waitress. Her father had died at a young age. My parent's and my generation were both fortunate enough to not have to worry about this.
Unfortunately, here in the US, this type of family arrangement will only increase in the future, given the fact that this generation is the first generation in modern US economic history where the a generation is worse off financially than their parents were at the same age.
Why?
The public school system in Florida is known to be very bad. My parents felt it was more important for their children to get a good education than it was for them to eat out, go on vacation, drive a nice car, etc. I am eternally thankful to them for that, and, in my opinion, since they were never able to save for retirement or have an emergency, my brother and I are just that.
My guess is that this kid's parents also felt the same way. Obviously, they made the right decision.
This is a culture I'm very much unfamiliar with. Thank you.
In those cities, any caring family who can beg, scrape or borrow the funds sends their kids to private schools, including most middle class families, and many poor families (off a combination of scholarship money and extended family contributions).
Maybe they know the kids are technically/scientifically inclined so they are sending them to a school with a better science program than the local schools. Maybe they are religious and believe that their children need a religious education. Whatever it is, it's because how their children are educated is more important to them than owning a home.
For me, I moved and changed schools my senior year of high school. I was happy to do it. I had lots of friends at my old high school, my parents bought a business that was located an hour from our residence, and they pitched the idea of buying a house and moving.
I was in a private school, Catholic, but professed atheist so not very popular with my religion teacher, among other religious teachers, and it was causing my overall GPA to suffer when I had long been a Straight-A student. I switched to a public school more local to the business, graduated third in my class (better than my previous rank in about equal class size), and wound up being able to go to RIT (Rochester, NY) on a decent set of scholarships, with lots of help from my parents.
But more importantly I had just recently gotten really good at making friends, and recognized that taking a year to make some new friends before going off to college was going to be good practice for later.
Anyway, there was no end to the line of people ready to tell me how good it was of me to go along with the idea in my last year of high school, and to not throw tantrums or put up a zillion roadblocks, tell my parents they were ruining my social life by making me change schools, or feeling any of the thousand other ways that a teenage kid can feel gravely slighted by their parents or family when they need to move or make some other major change for some reason, when they are just trying to go on living their lives and do what's best.
A lot of my friends would not have been nearly so happy to move and change schools, I'll admit that. I mentioned enough things that went well, so it's also easy to recognize that any of those things could have turned out differently.
Source: While I live in the valley now I grew up in Miami and still own a house there.
Which does kind of make sense, considering they are in all other regards the exact same thing.