by Ron Lieber
So if spoiled children is one of the main parenting outcomes that we are trying to avoid or solve, then what is the opposite of spoiled? Most of us know an unspoiled child when we encounter one, and we can call up an example or two in our heads. But I wanted a clinical definition, and I wrote one based on the assembled writings of James A. Fogarty. He spent years traveling the country doing continuing education workshops about overindulged children for his fellow clinical psychologists and other mental health professionals.
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. A 1998 academic journal article using survey data from adults who had been overindulged as children went so far as to refer to parental overindulgence of this sort as child neglect, given that it can hinder normal development.
It doesn’t have to cost all that much to spoil a child, and three of the four factors in my definition of spoiled don’t cost a thing. Even that last one—the lavishing of possessions—can still be in play for kids who are far from rich, depending on how many relatives dote on a child. Parents of middle-and working-class kids have many of the same worries about materialism and entitlement, given that all kids are exposed to the same acquisitive culture.
Creating an action plan and 15-year schedule of counterprogramming begins with a deeper understanding of what the opposite of spoiled actually is. The word spoiled has no useful antonym, as it was used to refer to meat long before it was used to tag children. Meat that is not spoiled is fresh, which is not the first word that comes to mind when describing an ideal young adult.
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. Moreover, my ever-growing list of questions kids ask about money that render their parents speechless—Will we have to move if you don’t get a job soon? Why do Uncle Joe and Aunt Linda have such a big house?—all had answers that ultimately lead back to those qualities.
Rather than assuming that money talk subverts values or is impolite or impolitic, we ought to do the reverse and embrace those conversations in service of raising virtuous kids. So that’s what I went to talk to those two sets of parents about, and those conversations led to this book.
Talking About Money—and Values
The Opposite of Spoiled is a generational manifesto first and foremost—a promise to our kids that we will make them better at managing money than we are and give them the tools they need to avoid the financial traps that still ensnare so many adults. The book will serve as a framework for child-rearing that produces grounded young adults with financial habits that reflect maturity beyond their years. 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 belong to any one religion, region, or race. 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.
The list of values and virtues and character traits I compiled is a diverse one. Kids are ready to wrestle with them at different times, and children of different ages may begin to engage with them at entirely different ages. Plus, every child is different, so they’ll respond to your tactics and strategies in a variety of unique ways. Still, we all need to know when and how to begin to introduce the topics, so I sought out a number of social scientists—people who have devoted their lives to studying kids’ curiosity, patience, and character education and have run study after study about allowance and materialism and affluence. In each of the chapters, I’ll introduce you to some of their best work and explain how money can play a role in instilling each trait.
All that aside, everyday families and their stories form the heart of this book. In the course of my research, I visited Mormon families on dairy farms in Utah, shadowed ace recyclers who are children in a California junkyard, drank iced tea with wealthy families poolside in the Hamptons, met with immigrants on their coffee breaks who talk about money with their children every day, and hung out in the kitchens of private school parents who have trouble talking about money at all. I’ve been on field trips to pawn shops and payday lenders with working-class students in Ohio and sat in on workshops with New England teachers whose annual salaries are less than what some parents in their schools earn in a month. In Michigan, I even tracked down the young woman known locally as the Bloomfield Hillbilly, a kid whose family has much less than her neighbors in their wealthy suburb and is working furiously to make enough money to buy her own horse.
The foundation of the book is a detailed blueprint for the most successful ways to handle the basics: the tooth fairy, allowance, chores, charity, saving, birthdays, holidays, cell phones, checking accounts, clothing, cars, part-time jobs, and college. Running throughout each of these discussions are frequent nods to the underlying questions that parents have about money, from the toddler years until their kids go away to college: When should I start what? Where’s the line between a want and a need? How much is too much? And how much is enough?
At every turn, I’ll be reminding you that it’s children and their curiosity that often drive the process. Their questions are penetrating, and the most thorough possible answers may not always be age appropriate. So the book explains in detail how not to lie while also satisfying the insatiable desire for information that may be at the root of questions about what parents earn or why some kids have more than others.
Finally, I want to help all of you recognize that 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 running through all these conversations is a desire for kids to have perspective—to know why they may have more than most people in the world but will probably never have more than every one of their peers. 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.
2
How to Start the Money Conversations
Curiosity, lies, and the single best reply to every hard question about money (and sex and drugs)
The kids in the Kessel house in Topanga, California, get only a couple of hours of screen time per day, only on weekends. Kaden, at 13 the older of two boys, could while away that time on any given Saturday with a music tutorial on YouTube or an online game. But one day he set himself down and paid a visit to salary.com. There, he typed in financial planner, his father’s profession. A few clicks later, he had figured out what his father, Brent, earned each year: $700,000. Or so he thought. The number was not exactly accurate, and Kessel’s earnings vary from year to year anyway. Nevertheless, Kaden presented this finding to his father as if it were fact. He had wanted the information so badly that he sacrificed precious Internet time to seek it out.
Brent makes his living asking relative strangers for their tax returns and retirement statements. Then he tries to coax them into disclosing their hopes and dreams and anxieties about money. Often, tears flow in the very first conversation. But when his son wanted to have an honest money conversation, Brent couldn’t quite bring himself to present an
accurate income figure. “I’ve been avoiding it,” he said.
Here’s what this tale tells us: First, kids are intensely curious. Lest we forget, it’s their job to figure out how the world works. Money is a part of everyday life, and it’s one of the things that many humans value most. So of course children are going to seek out information about it any way they can. They’ll ask Google and present their findings to us. Or they’ll make their approach with their heads full of overheard numbers that are correct but incomprehensible at younger ages, or speak with great teenage conviction about inaccurate figures they’ve picked up someplace else. And they’ll inquire about any number of sensitive topics. What do you make? Are we rich? Can we buy that homeless man an apartment?
In this chapter, I’m going take a look at the things that may be holding us back from talking about money openly with our kids and offer some tips for rethinking them. I’ll also share the single best tactic I know for answering virtually every money question that kids are likely to ask. Then we’ll walk through some of the tougher ones and consider how best to answer them.
Why the Silence
Changing the subject to avoid answering any of the big money questions is totally understandable, and it happens for any number of reasons. We don’t know where to start. We’re intimidated by the enormity of the topic. We’re sheepish about not earning as much as the parents of our children’s friends, and we don’t want our own kids calling us out on it. We’re keenly aware of our own undersaving or overspending or other financial challenges, so talking about money at all, let alone to inquisitive children for whom we are supposed to be setting an example, is just too uncomfortable.
Many parents also believe that talking about money with children isn’t age-appropriate. Their kids don’t know enough math to add up bigger numbers, the argument goes, so it’s best to just brush the questions off rather than trying to meet kids on their level. “None of your business” is a typical reply, which isn’t particularly nice, nor is it particularly true. It is, after all, their business to be curious. And as members of the family, they certainly have an interest in its revenues and profits.
The appropriateness dodge may also mask a set of old-fashioned beliefs. Money is private, this line of thinking goes, and it’s certainly unwise to trust children with any financial information. In Tad Friend’s affluent family, which he describes in his memoir Cheerful Money, it was perfectly fine to engage in genial small talk about the cost of everyday items. But going any further simply was not done. “It is acceptable for WASPs to discuss necessary expenses ($18,000 for a new roof, the shocking price of heating oil) but not elective expenses, and never income,” he wrote.
Silence also happens to be very convenient. It makes it easy for those of us who have a mortal fear of the money topic, or shame about our misuse of it, to justify not talking about it with our children, either. This reticence can be so strong that it sometimes manifests itself physically; I’ve had people break out in hives and burst into tears after just 60 seconds of listening to me make my case for talking about money more often.
Finally, there’s the pleading defense of silence that so many parents have posed to me: Can’t we protect them from all this money stuff just a little bit longer?
This instinct is loving, but it’s also naive, and I’m not the only one who feels that way. Juliet B. Schor, the author of a book about children and consumerism called Born to Buy, described childhood innocence as “less a description of reality than a way for adults to project their own fantasies onto children.” To Joline Godfrey, a consultant who works with many wealthy families, “protect” might as well be synonymous with “pretend” in this context. “Those children are out in the world, seeing things on television and on the iPad,” she said. “So the fantasy that there is any way to protect children from anything . . . I mean, you have to arm them. This is human self-defense!”
Silence around money also happens to be a strategy that many of us learned from our elders. Old-fashioned parents who shut us up when we asked about money did this for any number of reasons. They may have been only one or two generations removed from an age when many American men didn’t even tell their wives how much money they made or had. Or perhaps they’d grown up hearing stories about the Depression and didn’t want their own kids even wondering about money, because wonder is just one or two short steps from worry. Their well-meaning clergy might also have convinced them that money was the root of all evil, and kids should come into contact with it only while putting money in the collection plate on Sundays.
So take yourself back to those moments when a parent could have enlightened you about money but didn’t. Or when they were whispering so you couldn’t hear. How did it make you feel? And do you want your kids feeling the same way, to know innately that money is important but also utterly off limits as a topic of conversation?
Instinctive silence around money may also be a response to its opposite—the loud fights our parents may have had over family finances. Those arguments can imprint specific lessons: Money is bad. Money is scary. There isn’t enough money. Talking about money leads inevitably to strong feelings and conflict. These conclusions may be true in certain contexts but they don’t have to be if we talk about the topic with care. So we should try not to pass these beliefs on to our children.
No Lying
Because money is so fraught, it may feel right to lie sometimes, particularly when children persist with unreasonable demands or ask the wrong questions at the wrong time. Perhaps the most common fib is “We can’t afford it.” Another untruth is “I don’t have any money,” though it’s becoming slightly less common as kids get wise to the purchasing power of the debit and credit cards in our wallets. “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. “There’s no need to worry” often isn’t true and merely amplifies the anxiety for a child who may have good reason to worry about the family finances in the first place.
At that point, many kids won’t actually believe the lies, and the untruths can create new problems. James A. Fogarty, a clinical psychologist who has spent years traveling the country giving seminars to other mental health professionals who work with children, described the potential predicament this way: “The 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.”
Turn them away, however, and they’re likely to go straight to their equally confused friends or engage in furtive Google searches. It becomes like a family secret, a vacuum that they will fill with whatever noise they hear out in the world. And they may stop coming to you with questions about many of the other important things they’re curious about too.
When I speak to parents of teenagers and college students, they often grow a little weepy describing the moment that their children stopped coming to them daily or even weekly for advice or to ask big, cosmic questions. I get sad talking to them about it too. Like many of you, I imagine, I love nothing more than the look in my child’s eyes when she’s puzzling through an everyday mystery that’s just out of her grasp and comes to me because she knows I’ll stop everything to answer her question. Providing an explanation seems not just an act of teaching but one of protection. I don’t ever want it to end.
Did You Ask a Good Question Today?
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. While celebrating the Jewish holiday of Passover a few years ago, we were reading from the Haggadah, a book of prayers and stories that Jews use to guide the Seder meals that take place on the first two nights of the eight-night holiday. The Haggadah was new; our daughter had put it together in Hebrew school. Inside, there was a short anecdote preceding
the traditional moment in the Seder when the youngest child in attendance asks four famous questions of the adults in the room.
Here’s the story that was in this particular Haggadah that struck me: “The Nobel Prize–winning physicist Isidor Rabi once explained, ‘My mother made me a scientist without ever intending to. 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.’”
All of this suggested an obvious new ritual: asking that very same question of our daughter at family dinners. Not only would it remind her to assert herself in the classroom, but it would reinforce the idea that questions were welcome—about money or anything else. Parents should try to bring the best question they asked that day to the dinner table too. When Katherine Simon, the author of Moral Questions in the Classroom, was evaluating a school for her own child, she tried to figure out if it would be a “place of intrigue.” I love that word, because it suggests a sort of provocation. We should want our homes to be places of intrigue too.
Isidor Rabi died in 1988, but I figured his daughters might have some advice about how to promote curiosity in our own homes. It turns out, however, that Rabi never asked his daughters the very question that his mother deployed to inspire him. “He told the story about his mother all the time,” said Margaret Rabi Beels, who was born in 1934. But because Rabi’s scientific expertise was useful to the war effort, Beels and her sister learned early on not to ask too many questions about what he was doing all day. And while there were frequently guests at the dinner table, the girls weren’t supposed to quiz them, either. “I remember Sir Robert Alexander Watson-Watt coming for dinner,” Beels recalled. “He had helped develop radar, and they had smuggled him out of Britain or something. And we were told never to mention it to anyone.”