Trope Workshop:Prideful Poverty

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Being poor sucks for a variety of reasons. In fiction, it boils down to two:

1. Not being able to afford the basics - food, clothing, medical care, rent, etc.
2. Shame. Necessities aren't so much a concern as the idea of people knowing you can't afford the cool stuff they have, or being pitied for the former.

This is not that trope. This is the inverse of the second reason, where a person or a family is not only okay with being dirt poor, but the very idea of accepting help is borderline offensive. Doubly so if it's help from the government. Parents who are this trope may punish their kids for accepting gifts from other people, or lash out at social workers who want to help.

Maybe they wanted to prove they could make it on their own and now they're embarrassed to admit they need help. Maybe it was the way they were raised (with poor parents who refused help, or in a rich family they hated and want to spite by living the opposite way). Or maybe they were betrayed once by someone who offered to help them and can't trust another offer.

Note: This is not people who are proud and just happen to be poor, this is people who cling to being poor to the point of rejecting aid.

Examples of Prideful Poverty include:

Live-Action TV

• One episode of 7th Heaven sees Eric struggling to help a poor family who lives in their van and is refusing his aid.
• While the Lopez family in The George Lopez Show wasn't poor, Carmen got punished for accepting expensive gifts from a friend, and her mother told her that she shouldn't accept scholarships either because her father was working himself to the bone to pay for her college education.
• Despite usually embodying Pretty Freeloaders, Penny in The Big Bang Theory displays a variation of this attitude in "The Financial Permeability". After using Sheldon's borrowed money to pay her rent, she becomes hyper-paranoid around Sheldon and goes to great lengths to cut her expenses and raise back enough money alone rather than accept Leonard's help (lest she become indebted to him) or heed his advice that Sheldon honestly does not care when she'll pay him back.
• An early episode of Sister, Sister has Lisa angry at Ray for giving Tia and Tamera a fancy birthday party in a Chicago hotel, citing that she doesn't want Tia to grow up with "distorted values" and that Ray spoils Tamera. (Though it turns out she's actually jealous he's able to afford such nice things, and all she could do was make the girls a set of pretty dresses.)

Western Animation

• Stan Smith of American Dad! has shades of this. Having been raised in low income household by his single mother, he's very much against handouts and will always choose to survive on his own merits and thinks everyone else should, hating that the US has any kind of social programs to help the poor that didn't exist when he was a kid. "Less Money, Mo' Problems" is the best example. So desperate to prove that Hayley and Jeff can indeed live on minimum wage, Stan is brought to near death rather than admit that that's not enough money to live off of. By the end of the episode, two days later, he thankfully saw the light.