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Kindle Notes & Highlights
by
Ron Lieber
We should certainly do our part at home by making them do all kinds of chores. But they ought to do them for the same reason we do—because the chores need to be done, and not with the expectation of compensation. If they do them poorly, there are plenty of valuable privileges we can take away, aside from withholding money. So allowance ought to stand on its own, not as a wage but as a teaching tool that gets sharper and more potent over a decade or so of annual raises and increasing responsibility. This chapter is the user’s manual for that tool.
With children under 10, 50 cents to $1 a week per year of age is a good place to start, with a raise each year on their birthdays.
We may think we have some pull over our kids if chores are tied to an allowance. If they don’t do the chores, after all, they won’t get the money. But what happens if they decide they don’t want or need the money? Chances are, we’ll make them do the chores anyway. So why pay for them in the first place if these chores are ultimately mandatory in any event?
“Why would you give them allowance? Because they’re your child? That’s an entitlement issue there. Have they earned it? Shown respect for it? Well, where does your money come from? You and I both work for money, so why are my kids entitled to my money? If I have to work, then they should feel like they have to earn it too.”
“I see passion building in him as he looks at making money as a project that involves solving problems rather than as selling his time to hurry through tasks,”
In an effort to explain to students how she made her own consumer decisions, she told them that she asked herself a single question: Which one does the most good and the least harm?
Weil freely acknowledges that we don’t always have enough information to figure out what actually will help more and harm less.
seems somehow insane to hand every sixth grader a go-anywhere private line that’s also a Handycam, Walkman, Swatch, VCR, Kodak Instamatic, pager, and book.
Can we explain it all without scolding the child who is asking what is, at its root, a reasonable question, even if the tone of voice is a little bratty? After all, they just want to know what we stand for; our spending choices is one way that we articulate this.
Insurance provider Delta Dental puts out poll numbers each year on the going rate for a tooth. The most recent numbers put the price of a first tooth at $3.49 and the average price at $2.42. That’s up 15 percent from the previous year.
“Most 12-month-olds will sit with you and insist that you take their gross Cheerios, over and over. And insist that you eat them, and like them. It’s not just that they want to give them to you; they want to watch and make sure you enjoy it.”
They put the house on the market for just under $2 million, bought another for $962,000, and ended up giving nearly $1 million through a six-year pledge, even though the original house sold for only $1.4 million amid a real estate downturn. They would not tell me (and still haven’t told their kids) what percentage of their net worth that contribution represented, but they did not have to put Hannah’s or Joseph’s college tuition at risk. As for what they did with the money, figuring it out was a large enough project that Kevin and Hannah wrote a book about it called The Power of Half,
Pricing the Priceless Child—both
Why do some people accomplish more than others who are just as smart as they are?
It is not a coincidence, she believes, that all the psychology graduate students who have ended up working at her grit lab at Penn got their first jobs at or below the legal working age.
His daughters attended Japanese schools, and one of them told her classmates that in the United States, grown-ups are paid to serve the children meals and clean up after them. Nobody believed her.
And while none of the boys is a great scholar or star athlete, their parents operate under the assumption that the ability to perform basic labor is something within every child’s grasp. They know that not every boy will grow up to work in the family business, but they’re confident that none of them will be afraid of the effort it takes to succeed someplace else.
“If you’re withholding all that responsibility, kids get all the privileges with none of the opportunity to build capacity,” she said. “And that’s what we’re talking about here, building capacity for children.”
ROCK: I just do not like these people. I don’t understand them. My kids are rich, I have nothing in common with them.
We may not be in the same category of wealth, but many of us have enough to give our kids everything they need and much of what they want. And even if we have less than many people we know in our communities, we have more than most in our country and our world.
But even at highly diverse public schools with excellent test scores, plenty of self-segregation goes on among the students and parents. The perfect community is ever elusive, so almost all of us need to be doing more to help our children understand how much they have and where they fit in.
But many people pick their communities for the quality of the public schools, and often these “not-so-public” schools, as sociologist Allison Pugh describes them, aren’t so economically diverse. If the schools are great, home prices spiral ever higher and the communities become filled with people who have enough money to pay the entry fee.
poverty. She believes that many kids have settled into an understanding of social class as something you earn through merit and hard work—and that you don’t deserve to be in the highest socioeconomic classes if you don’t work hard enough.
“There is often more to the story than just hard work,” she explained during a talk to teachers at the Gordon School in Providence, Rhode Island. “It’s not but. It’s and. There is luck and circumstance and the family you were born to. All sorts of things factor in. That would be extremely radical if parents just started saying that at the dinner table. If we were honest about our own privilege when we have it. And not all of us have it or have had it, though most of us in this room have had it in some form or another.”
What are your goals, and can you meet them in some other way than by spending a lot of money doing work far away?
We live in the safest communities we can and send our kids to the best possible schools, but these places often come with social pressure to buy and to have things. That environment can give children a warped sense of what they really need in order to thrive and be happy.
“One of the things most valuable about this place, because there isn’t much here, is something that I think a vast number of elite colleges have lost,” Swan told me while overlooking the lake. “Everyone here is needed to make it work. And that’s a huge gift to these kids. There’s nothing here! The games are the games that they make up. When everything is all set up for you and your dorm room looks like the Ritz, you won’t have to decorate it or maybe they won’t even let you.”
So kids are used to limits. In our homes, we want to set them within reason and do so consistently. This can be enormously challenging when many of the limits we set are completely artificial. Lots of us can afford to buy our kids more toys, treats, clothes, and gear than we actually do. Plenty of children want much more than we are willing to give them. Those of us who grew up with less than we have now may not be able to suppress the desire that our kids should want for nothing.
Many of us will ultimately need to be able to figure out how much education is enough and explain it to children who have their hearts set on the most expensive one of all.
We can’t have or do everything we want, and it’s a lesson we need to remind our kids of often. Even if there is enough money, there’s not enough time.
When kids start earning, we want them to figure out how much they need and to what end. And when we reflect on what we have, we want our kids to grow into young adults with perspective—people with a healthy definition of enough that is unique to them and isn’t based on what everyone else has or does.
Bissonnette, Zac. How to Be Richer, Smarter, and Better-Looking Than Your Parents. New York: Portfolio, 2012.
Brosnan, Michael, editor. The Inclusive School: A Selection of Writing on Diversity Issues in Independent Schools. Washington, D.C.: The National Association of Independent Schools, 2012.
Eisner, Michael. Camp. New York: Warner Books, 2005.
Nagler, Tim. Pine Island Camp: The First One Hundred Years. Belgrade Lakes, Maine: Pine Island Camp, 2002.
Nucci, Larry. Nice Is Not Enough: Facilitating Moral Development. Upper Saddle River, New Jersey: Merrill, 2009.
Our family thinks we can have even more fun doing things together that help us make great memories than buying things that may not last very long.
