The Opposite of Spoiled: Raising Kids Who Are Grounded, Generous, and Smart About Money

by Ron Lieber

Spoiled children tend to have four primary things in common, though they don’t all have to be present at once: They have few chores or other responsibilities, there aren’t many rules that govern their behavior or schedules, parents and others lavish them with time and assistance, and they have a lot of material possessions.

Money is central, but it is also a teaching tool that uses the value of a dollar to instill in our children the values we want them to embrace. These traits—curiosity, patience, thrift, modesty, generosity, perseverance, and perspective—don’t

Their financial status is fluid but their financial values should not be.

every conversation about money is also about values. Allowance is also about patience. Giving is about generosity. Work is about perseverance. Negotiating their wants and needs and the difference between the two has a lot to do with thrift and prudence.

there’s no shame in having more or having less, as long as you’re grateful for what you have, share it generously with others, and spend it wisely on the things that make you happiest. It’s true for our kids, but it’s true for us, too.

hidden message of offering the truth to children is that you and your children can work together to manage difficult issues. Children also learn that if they ever need a straight story, they can count on you.”

One way to make sure children know that questions are welcome is to praise their asking them so routinely that posing good ones becomes a habit.

Every other Jewish mother in Brooklyn would ask her child after school: “So did you learn anything today?” But not my mother. “Izzy,” she would say, “did you ask a good question today?” That difference—asking good questions—made me become a scientist.’”

I’ve determined that there is one answer that works best for any and every money question. The response is itself a question: Why do you ask?

always try to say “why do you ask?” in the most encouraging tone possible.

“family home evening,” when the eight of them would gather to engage in prayer, study, and other activities.

When parents tie allowance to the completion of chores, they make work the primary focus, not money.

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.

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’re aiming to do three things: set some spending guidelines to lean on; model a few sensible tactics for our children; and adopt family rituals that make spending fun—but only on things that have real value and meaning.

she asked her kids to estimate the hours of fun per dollar that any particular Want of theirs might provide.

Materialistic people focus more on stuff than they do on people and relationships.

I didn’t used to give money to people who asked for it on the street, but a commenter on a blog post I wrote for The New York Times’ website caused me to reconsider. “I really don’t care what they spend it on, and I don’t care if they’re conning me or whatever,” the commenter said. “I really do care about teaching my son compassion and empathy for others. That’s worth the spare change.” Now, if I’m with my daughter and someone asks us for help, I look the person in the eye, say “good luck,” and hand over a bit of money. “To ignore the homeless guy is to teach [kids] to ignore other people who are hurting,” as Eileen and Jon Gallo put it in their book Silver Spoon Kids.

We’ve gone, as Princeton sociologist Viviana A. Zelizer wrote, from celebrating the birth of a child as the “arrival of a future laborer” to a society where “a child is simply not expected to be useful.”

in many urban and suburban families, the chores that we assign them don’t add up to much. It’s all too easy to default to the assumption that it’s more trouble to teach kids how to perform more complicated household tasks than it is to just do them ourselves, indefinitely. In doing so, however, we send a clear, strong message, according to Damon: We expect little of you, and you’re living mostly for yourself.

Older kids might tackle the planning, for instance: tracking the swim practice and meet schedule, sending weekly memos to the parent who does the driving, booking the hotel rooms, and creating family itineraries for when the soccer travel team goes on the road. “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.”

As long as there are people who have more, everyone else talks as if they’re middle class and claims not to be among the truly privileged.

What we don’t want, however, are children who have no curiosity about people who are different from them and no understanding of what it might be like to have less. We’re trying to imprint sensitivity and a lack of presumption that everyone is alike in their resources and the choices available to them.

I’m beginning to sound like we’re winging it here! But when you’re a young couple raising your family, it’s a new process and experience for everyone. Nobody who is raising children has done it before. It’s a blank slate, and we’re also growing and changing as we raise our children.”