The Opposite of Spoiled

by Ron Lieber

  We want to deploy whatever tactics we can to keep kids from becoming materialistic, so let’s call out one obvious bogeyman: Children who watch lots of television commercials are clearly vulnerable. Yes, they take in all sorts of commercial messages each day whether we want them to or not. But given how easy it is to keep them away from many direct pitches when they’re still too young to decode (and mock) the salesmanship, why wouldn’t we? One of the most eye-opening studies in this realm involved a bunch of 4-and 5-year-olds who watched a commercial for something called the Ruckus Rangers, while the control group did not. Of those who didn’t see the commercial, 70 percent wanted to play in a sandbox with friends instead of playing with the toy, while only 36 percent of the kids who saw the commercial chose friends over the Rangers.

  Then came the follow-up: Given the choice between playing with a nice boy who didn’t have any Ruckus Rangers and a not-so-nice boy who did, just 35 percent of the kids who had seen the commercial chose to hang out with the nice boy with no toy. When researchers asked the same question the next day, it had gone up but only to 49 percent. The commercials actually seem to have caused the kids to value getting their hands on the toy over the virtues of their playmate. As for the kids who hadn’t seen the commercial, 70 percent chose the nice boy to play with.

  So set the DVR or download entertainment that comes free of commercials. That’s the easy part. The rest involves reckoning with our own impact on our kids. It begins with the example we set when we spend on ourselves. After I spoke at a school several years ago, a mother came up to me afterward and asked me a question very quietly. What should she tell her daughter who wanted to know why she can’t show horses given that her father drives a luxury car?

  I laughed at the time, and so did the mother; it’s easy to dismiss this as a bad case of teenage entitlement. But remember, it’s their job to ask questions, even presumptuous ones rooted in outsize expectations. Most of us will eventually be in the position where they’ll ask us to explain our own large purchases or extravagances. What will we say? Is every car or handbag or vacation defensible? And what does it mean if we feel defensive about it? 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.

  Bold questions like this also result from pent-up frustration. We control so much, and they know it. Kids run the dignity gauntlet in outfits and arenas that are mostly of our choosing, not theirs. We decide what they can wear, what they can have, where they live and go to school, and what they can do when they’re not in class. Setting strict limits on all of this seems like the right default, even if we do drive nice cars ourselves. When we see them appearing literally to ache for things that other kids have or do, however, it often calls to mind our own feelings of childhood longing. And satisfying our kids’ desire for dignity and a sense of inclusion in the present can make us feel like good parents, and signal to ourselves and the world that we are doing just fine. Dignity, it turns out, involves intense feelings for both parents and kids. So in practice, the quest for dignity usually involves kids nagging parents, offering questionable data about who has or does what, and in what quantity.

  But sometimes, the desire to do what everyone else does—and to provide what everyone else provides—is a parental affliction alone. Consider the scenes that unfold at some overnight camps during visiting day each summer. Frantic families queue up well before the appointed hour. So desperate are they to get to their kids and deliver all manner of goodies unto them that at least one camp sets up a rope line to hold the grown-ups back, as if it were a presidential visit where strict security is necessary. After a chanted countdown, with families shouting “10, 9, 8 . . .” at the top of their lungs, counselors drop the rope and the parents take off running, shouting instructions to drop the blankets on a prime patch of grass or to secure the best spot on the tiny beach fronting the lake.

  Parents bring towers of candy so large that they need shopping carts and wagons to transport them. Comments on a clip from a visiting-day video that went viral tell of one family that brought a generator to power the microwave to pop a child’s favorite popcorn. Another copped to having turned up with a full spread from Chipotle, complete with portable buffet tables, chafing dishes, and Sterno cans. They set it all up under a large covered tent that they had toted along, just in case it rained. Moms and dads worried about food allergies bring custom sweatshirts or custom socks for the whole cabin in lieu of treats. Others set out a spread for their own kid and buy “bunk gifts” for everyone in their child’s cabin as well.

  This orgy of immodesty goes far beyond the mere maintenance of any one camper’s dignity. But parents who send their kids to camps like this without having realized how high the visiting-day stakes are insist that you make the mistake of coming late or empty-handed only once. Besides, it’s about love, they say, not materialism. To which I say: If these are the kinds of things we talk ourselves into doing for our kids, there’s no telling what our children’s powers of persuasion can accomplish.

  Our temptation to indulge or loosen the rules is also an opportunity to rethink the role of peer pressure, a phrase that many of us use without realizing it usually doesn’t begin with children. If kids lose face because others have toys or experiences that they do not, it’s only because their friends’ parents let them have that stuff and do those things in the first place. The same is true with late curfews or the freedom to go anywhere after school. Or being allowed to forgo chores or avoid other contributions to the family.

  Sure, we can always say no. Many of us wish we could (or is it would?) a bit more often. No to the running on visiting day, no to the double piercing or tattoos, no to the newest phone and the latest inappropriate pop singer. But to take such a stand isn’t just disappointing to our children. Other parents inevitably hear about it, and some of them surely interpret our own lines in the sand as a kind of silent (yet still somehow quite loud) judgment on the rules and choices they make for their own children. Unless, that is, we just go along to get along, which is easy to do when our kids want us to do that in the first place.

  Antimaterialist Ideas from the Professor of Materialism

  When I began my quest to create a cradle-to-18 guide to keeping materialism at bay, it didn’t take long to find the work of Tim Kasser. A psychology professor at Knox College in rural, west-central Illinois, he’s the author of a book called The High Price of Materialism. He’s also the father of two sons, so I asked him what parenting tactics he’d deployed to discourage materialism in his family.

  His conclusions about materialism’s high cost was not one he came to after a miserable upbringing. His childhood in Florida was perfectly pleasant and included plenty of video games and television. His father, who jokes that he’s the model for his son’s research, moved the family to a bigger house in a better neighborhood when Kasser was a teen.

  He used his college years to question everything but not because he aimed to reject anything his family stood for. Instead, he was curious about how different people construct their lives and set goals. In graduate school, he noticed that there wasn’t much research on the content of people’s goals and one day wondered, almost on a lark, whether people who said that money was an important part of their goals were less happy. Back then, you had to wait a few minutes for a computer to analyze a data set, but after a bit of time ticked by, he got the result: There was indeed a correlation. He found this fascinating, kept replicating the results, and decided to make the study of materialism part of his life’s work.

  And then, like Bramson Dewey, he became a certain kind of parent—one with especially unusual experience and knowledge that was more or less destined to be part of his child-rearing philosophy. Today, his boys are teenagers and, unsurprisingly, neither of them is particularly materialistic. They live 8 miles south of Galesburg, Illinois, i
n a small, economically diverse town called Knoxville. The Kassers may have more money than many others in town, but their neighbors don’t necessarily know it. The family prioritizes spending on travel and other experiences over the kinds of possessions that people might notice.

  Until the boys were about 10, they could watch half an hour of television each day, as long as it was commercial-free, but the parents didn’t keep a stopwatch running and movie-viewing didn’t necessarily count against the next days’ allotment of screen time. The rules went out the window when the family was staying at a hotel, however, and the boys’ grandparents blew the rules off entirely, as grandparents often do. The boys eventually lobbied successfully for an increase to 45 minutes when they started playing video games, albeit ones prescreened by their parents.

  Two years ago, their parents tried an experiment that many of us might want to emulate if we have the guts: They removed all of those time limits. The idea was that it was probably best for the boys to learn to regulate themselves while still under their parents’ watchful eyes and that these self-regulatory skills would help them with budgeting of all sorts, including money. “You should have seen the looks on their faces when we decided this,” Kasser recalled. Still, the boys knew the experiment would end if things got out of hand, so they set a timer themselves. Today, they no longer use it but still limit their game playing to that same 45 minutes give or take. “One of the best moments of my life as a parent was when my older son and I were sitting in the living room, and he thanked me for putting limits on his playing because so many of his friends were addicted to video games,” he said.

  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. When the family was traveling together, they would mute the hotel television during commercials and play what became a favorite game. Kasser would make up absurd fake dialogue that made fun of whatever the ad was trying to sell, and eventually the kids started doing it too. “My kids are going to be exposed to this stuff,” he said. “So they need to know how to interact with it, and I tried to give them a different attitude about it.”

  The family is also big on giving custom coupons in lieu of gifts. When the boys were younger, there were ones for extra screen time or skipping the vegetable and still getting dessert. One favorite was the drop-everything-and-play-a-game-with-me-now coupon. The boys soon began returning the favor, offering a make-a-dessert coupon or one for mowing the lawn. Kasser remembers his father occasionally cutting out of work for an adventure with his kids, and now that his sons are older he offers special-day coupons to them. Early on, this might have involved going to the donut shop and playing chess. More recently, it’s included Blue Man Group tickets and a trip to Peoria for one son’s first meal in a fancy restaurant. “Plenty of times it would be a lot easier and cheaper to give them something,” Kasser said. But his own memories of doing this with his dad are strong enough that he believes it’s worth doing something unique with each boy when he can.

  This doesn’t mean that Kasser and his wife are hammering away on their boys about the evils of commercialism. There are no dinner-table lectures warning them away from caring too much about buying things or wanting to earn more than their father and mother, who is a counseling psychologist. “I don’t want to make them into me,” he said. “If my kids want to choose a career that is relatively ambitious in terms of the amount of work it will take and money they will make, well, it’s not my life. You’re there to love them and help pick up the pieces afterward if you need to.”

  Lost Teeth and Birthdays: More Modest (but More Special)

  Children love special events, and we love to celebrate with them. So how do we make these times unique and memorable without making them incredibly extravagant? The occasion of the first lost tooth is one great place to start, since kids often anticipate it for even longer than they look forward to each birthday or the arrival of Santa Claus. It’s also one of the first occasions that specifically involves plain old cash.

  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. Very little else in the world gets more expensive at that pace, and if you need any proof of our default toward the full provisioning that Allison Pugh described, now you have it; in what is often our very first cash transaction with our children, we simply cannot keep the spending in check. Visa created an app to help parents see what the going rate was in their area (so they could exceed it, presumably). Dan Kadlec, who writes about personal finance for Time, declared the rising handout a bubble, akin to housing prices in 2005.

  My wife and I had not prepared for this moment in our financial lives, so we turned to Facebook for advice when our daughter went to bed one night with a new gap in her smile. Within a couple of hours, several dozen responses poured onto my page. A former neighbor noted with some alarm that the going rate in the tonier parts of New York’s Westchester County was $50 for the first tooth and $10 for subsequent teeth. An old basketball teammate of mine suggested $10 but added that he was from the North Shore, the Westchester County of Chicago. Plenty of others demanded that we give out the same $1 bill that we all got as kids. Fellow third-floor residents of our building noted that all the kids talk, and word was out about the neighborhood boy who got $20. They had told their son that there are different fairies on different blocks and suggested we give $5 just as they did so we could keep the ruse going.

  My wife and I were most taken with the creative solutions: messages from the tooth fairy demanding improved dental hygiene; money obscured by a wrapping of minty dental floss; a fairy dust trail leading to the window; gold-colored dollar coins. We settled on the dust and the coins; the vending machine in our subway station gives change in $1 coins, and our daughter had never seen them before so they felt like treasure to her.

  Later on, we heard two ideas that were even better. Bruce Feiler in The New York Times wrote about his disgust over the monetary imperative. Why should kids be rewarded for matters of biology? Still, he appreciated the fact that this was an opportunity to inject some magic into his twin daughters’ lives just as they were growing out of the fairy stage. So when the first kid lost her first tooth, she was given a book called Throw Your Tooth on the Roof, which is about lost tooth traditions in other countries. Feiler and his wife also vowed to hand over coins in other currencies for each tooth, just to reinforce the idea of imagining life in other places.

  Meanwhile, our friends Pam Briskman and Randy Weiner, lifelong educators and entrepreneurs, give out teeth from different animals when their daughters lose their own. So far, the lineup has included shark, coyote, lion, sheep, alligator, and rattlesnake—usually in glass jars filled with pink-colored water and glitter. The prize is accompanied by a note written backward so they have to hold it up to a mirror to read it, and it gives clues as to which animal the tooth once belonged to. They buy the teeth from a store in Albany, California, called the Bone Room. (It takes phone orders, in case you want to swipe the idea.)

  This is a template for parental modesty—and parental awesomeness—that you can call on for birthday parties and vacations and any number of other situations where spending more money seems like the easiest way to keep your kids from feeling excluded from the conversation. 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. This all seemed great in theory, as our daughter would be giving up half her presents, in effect, to a cause she cared about. On the surface, it seemed like a neat 50 percent reduction in materialism, and we’d be sparing guests having to shop for a gift.

  Like many experiments, however, this one had a number of surprise outcomes. I hadn’t counted on being able to see how much money the other parents were giving, but this information ended up being unavoidably apparent on the website. I genuinely didn’t care or want to know. Once I saw that a few people had given $40 or $50, however, my mind filled with questions. Had people been generous because there were just a handful of girls coming who were our daughter’s closest friends, so they wanted to spend a bit more on her? Or had they figured out that we would see what they gave and didn’t want to appear cheap? Sure, they may have been moved by the concept and more generous for that reason alone. But perhaps they figured they should spend twice what they normally do so that neither the charity nor our daughter’s gift got slighted somehow. The net result of our attempt to reduce birthday materialism a bit was that some people spent more money, not less. That felt odd, but my daughter was thrilled with the more expensive item she was able to buy and didn’t miss the wrapping paper or small doodads she might have gotten otherwise.