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by
Ron Lieber
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October 27 - November 4, 2018
It’s feelings, after all, that drive bad behavior and lousy decision making.
People are not dispassionate about money, and they’re certainly not calm and rational about their kids. This potent mix, then, often makes it incredibly hard for parents to talk openly and honestly with their children about the topic.
Here’s the problem though: The people making the final decision about whether to take on tens of thousands of dollars of student loan debt are mere teenagers. Figuring out how much to pay for a college education is one of the biggest financial decisions people make in their lifetime, and parents often leave the final call to a 17-year-old who has never purchased anything more expensive than a bicycle. There is really only one word for this state of affairs: lunacy.
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.
So in addition to the four criteria identified above, I assembled a list of values and virtues and character traits that come closest to defining the opposite of spoiled, ones that collectively add up to the kind of grounded, decent young adults that every parent hopes to send out into the world. And as I stared at the word cloud I’d created, I realized that every last one of those attributes—from generosity and curiosity to patience and perseverance—could be taught using money.
A few of our kids are already set for life financially, but most of them have no clue how much money they’ll have when they grow up. Their financial status is fluid but their financial values should not be.
Where’s the line between a want and a need? How much is too much? And how much is enough?
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.
And why 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.
First, kids are intensely curious. Lest we forget, it’s their job to figure out how the world works.
Perhaps the most common fib is “We can’t afford it.”
“Not now” is the most common brush-off from parents who don’t want to bother explaining why they prioritize some types of spending over others, especially when children ask about it in front of other relatives or grown-up family friends.
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.
“did you ask a good question today?” That difference—asking good questions—made me become a scientist.’”
Parents should try to bring the best question they asked that day to the dinner table too.
In my years of research on the topic, 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?
People who are poor don’t have everything they need, like food and clothing and medicine. We have those things, so we’re not poor.
It’s also worth questioning whether being rich matters much anyway. The most important attributes for friends and classmates are things like kindness, loyalty, creativity, and generosity anyhow. Kids who lack those qualities are no fun otherwise, no matter how much stuff they have.
Children of all ages generally don’t want their peers singling them out as having more or less than others, so they may try harder than you do to keep the information private. Few of them want to be the richest kid or the object of anyone’s pity.
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.
Lack of self-control was even more predictive of money problems than their social class as kids or their IQ.
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’ll also need a list of banned items, which will change over time as kids develop new interests and companies invent ever more inappropriate ways to satisfy them. These are things that we won’t let our children buy, even if they’re using Spend money from their allowance or funds they earn from a job. Parents who follow my Facebook conversations shared their own lists of banned items with me, in case you’re looking for ideas. They include, in alphabetical order: Airsoft guns, Barbie dolls, candy, the Claw machine at the arcade that fishes out stuffed toys (or tries to), dogs, hamsters, Heelys
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Everyone else, however, should consider the approach that Mary Kay Russell, the mother of four boys in Naperville, Illinois, has taken. The boys are welcome to have any smartphone they want whenever they have enough money to buy it. They also have to write a $360 check to their parents to cover the first year’s data charges and continue paying for the service after that advance money has run out.
What Johnson wanted for Liam, he wrote in an online essay that quickly went viral, was something different. He and his wife hope that their son will learn to think entrepreneurially and grow up to be someone who sells his ability to come up with creative ideas, not just his competence in performing tasks. They want him to know that there can be joy in a job well done. So while Liam earns no money for basic chores, he does get paid for recognizing problems and solving them. When he spotted all the fallen leaves in the backyard, he offered to rake them and negotiated a price.
“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,” Jake wrote in his essay. “Every kid loves a good project, and so do I. I see him slowly turning into an entrepreneurial thinker. And no matter what he does in life, that type of thinking will help him excel.”
What they need is a sense of balance and just the right amount of thrift. Thrift is an odd word, often synonymous with cheap. If it’s ever a compliment, it’s a begrudging one. What’s been lost over the years, however, is the recognition that the root word of thrift is thrive.
But Matthiesen hit on the concept of return on investment, though she didn’t call it that. Instead, 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. (On a playdate, this looks like a persistent inability to share the object of greatest desire in the room.) They genuinely believe that more stuff will make them happy.
They care less about the utility of their stuff and more about what sort of reaction people will have to it. (Bragging after parents capitulate in the face of their begging.)
The family does not avoid TV ads entirely, and sometimes they watch them for sport, as we all should once in a while. For many years, they would page through National Geographic, where all ads are at the front or the back, pointing them out. Kasser took great delight when one of his sons, at the age of 18 months, managed to parrot the phrase “They want my money!” back at his parents.
As Weiner explained when describing the tooth fairy approach in his family, it’s not the thing itself—the animal teeth—that’s important. Instead, it’s the values and intentions behind the thing. Their message is that they honor the rituals that their daughters hear about in school. But rather than doing it like everyone else, they’re going to come up with a unique approach that will still give them something special to talk about if they want to.
When my wife and I were planning a slumber party with our about-to-be-8-year-old daughter, I suggested we used a Web service called ECHOage to handle invitations and gifts. When parents RSVP, they simply give ECHOage whatever money they would otherwise have spent on a gift. The service takes a small cut and then splits the rest. One half goes to a charity of the child’s choosing, with the giver getting a tax deduction for that portion of the gift. The other half of the money goes straight to the child to buy one special gift instead of getting a bunch of smaller ones.
Dorsch’s best-known research found that the more families spend on their children’s participation in sports as a percentage of their income, the more likely children are to perceive pressure coming from their parents. And when they feel that pressure, they enjoy their sport less and are less likely to be motivated to continue.
Older children might also appreciate a second explanation, which is a self-interested one; research on happiness shows that the amount we give away is a great predictor of how happy we are. In fact, it’s as strong a predictor of happiness as our income is.
One delightful study that makes this point is “Giving Leads to Happiness in Young Children,” where the authors of the study ran their experiment on 20-month-old toddlers.
As with many of the most important money conversations, it can be hard to find the right moment to introduce the giving topic. Kids, however, will make up their own minds on timing, and it’s often when something right before their eyes is confusing or troubling.
For parents who are weary of the monosyllabic answers our kids give when we’re actually able to sit down for dinner as a family, the conversation starters from the Central Carolina Community Foundation may be helpful. Its “Talk About Giving” box comes with dozens of cards with a single provocative question on each: “What is our family’s history of helping?” “What do you appreciate most about our town?” “If we were to live on less money, what could we do without?” “What’s something you’re willing to do without right now?”
And this is the framed maxim that the Solimenes chose to hang on the kitchen wall: “If you want to feel rich, just count all the gifts you have that money can’t buy.”
Kids like to work and enjoy earning money; we just don’t do a good enough job of encouraging their industriousness and helping them find new ways to earn.
No one wants to return to the days when children worked full-time on the farm or in factories at the age of 12. But many parents have swung to the opposite extreme in the past decade or two, shielding even their oldest children at home from paid work altogether. In 1998 about 45 percent of American kids ages 16 to 19 had jobs of some sort, roughly where the number had been for half a century. But not long after, that number fell off a cliff and just kept falling. By 2013, just 20 percent of teens had jobs, an all-time low since the United States started keeping track in 1948.
What our kids can learn from paid employment is a work ethic, that loose phrase that captures the ability to listen, exert ourselves, cooperate with others, do our best, and stick to a task until we’ve done it, and done it right. Or we could just call it “grit,” a term that University of Pennsylvania professor Angela Duckworth has helped popularize in recent years. To her, grit is the answer to this question: Why do some people accomplish more than others who are just as smart as they are?
In Japan, schoolchildren Sarah’s age and younger serve and clean up lunch themselves each day.
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. In national surveys, 75 percent of Japanese children cite working hard as a top priority; 25 percent of American kids do.
One good reason for kids to hang out with people who are different from them is to realize that nobody has a monopoly on happiness and that it’s often great fun to slip into a world that is not like your own.
I asked Pippa’s father, Ed Biddle, for his take, and he isn’t ready to write off all such trips for all teens. He encourages parents to consider four things. First, who are the leaders? If they are real grown-ups with expertise in the region, then there might be some educational value to the program. Second, does the work to be done leverage the skills of the participants? And if they don’t have any skills, how exactly will they be helping? Third, he suggests taking a careful look at how the program is being sold, and by whom. Is it a for-profit operation marketing the beauty of the region or
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Such a feeling crept up on Stephanie Joss when she heard her two children, ages 8 and 10, comparing the merits of various Four Seasons resorts. Both she and her husband come from middle-class families. They’ve grown wealthy through long hours spent over two decades working in investment banking and the law. When they leave New York City during their limited time off, they want to treat themselves to hotel stays and experiences that are as relaxing and memorable as possible. Still, Joss can’t quite shake the nagging question of whether her children need a bit of a reality reset.
Should parents who can afford to vacation in whatever way they want practice symbolic deprivation on their trips as well?
On a recent trip to upstate New York, her son came back with stories about how much fun the motel was that they had stayed in with his aunt and grandmother. “It was great because it had a Coke machine,” Joss said, recalling her son’s excitement, “which the Four Seasons doesn’t. If you want a Coke, you have to call and then they bring you a $50 Coke.”
