A friend of mine has two daughters who provide a case in point. When the older girl entered adolescence, my friend and his wife experienced the usual parent-versus-adolescent struggles for control. Often, the battles with their daughter were about buying clothes. Their daughter was style conscious and had expensive taste, and her ideas about what she absolutely “needed” differed from her parents’. Then my friend and his wife had an idea. They negotiated a clothing allowance with their daughter, allocating funds for a reasonable number of reasonably priced items in the various categories of
...more
Spending quota
