by Ron Lieber
We might all have more success conducting these sorts of experiments in our own immediate families around year-end holidays. Then, at least, we can control our own buying. Good luck, however, getting the grandparents to go along. They can be a menace in this regard, feeling as if it’s their duty to eyeball whatever limits we try to set and obliterate them, especially come December. I say let them, as long as they’re not undermining us on a regular basis. In fact, their generosity around the holidays can give us cover for making our own gifts more about charity, or taking a trip in lieu of token presents, or giving coupons like the Kassers, or doing something else that is entirely unique to each of us.
Travel Teams: The More We Spend, the More Pressure Kids Feel
One of the fastest-growing line items in family budgets is youth sports. Coaches encourage kids to train year-round and specialize at younger and younger ages. They succeed in part by holding out the possibility of a college scholarship or a boost in admissions odds to parents as an incentive for spending ever more money on one-on-one training and weekend travel for competitions. Some families love the road trips and togetherness, and the parents make enough money to foot the hotel bills comfortably. But an increasing number are wondering whether they’re being bamboozled into underwriting an entirely new form of overindulgence, particularly if the kids aren’t having as much fun playing as they once did.
Travis Dorsch grew up to be a National Football League punter without any such pressure. He even played a second sport, baseball, in college at Purdue, and he had several more sports on his schedule throughout high school in Montana. He has fond memories of his parents coming to every single one of his college football games, and they seemed to know just what to do to make their presence feel supportive rather than burdensome. As a college senior, he discovered sports psychology and returned to Purdue when his football days were over to earn a PhD in the subject. He received his doctorate in 2013 and is now a rising star in his field due to his focus on the impact of youth sports on family life.
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. “I think parents find themselves out front pulling their kids in a certain direction,” he said. “I try to teach parents what it means to be a supportive pusher and to stand behind their kids when they meet resistance.”
Dorsch, who became a father himself in 2014, doesn’t want parents to stop spending money on their children’s athletic pursuits. Nor is he trying to convince them that their participation is somehow bad. But he does want all of us to have many more conversations with our kids about their goals and how much they want us looking over their shoulders. “Parents, especially of elite athletes, need to focus on how their kids are perceiving their involvement,” he said. This can be as simple as asking them about it and having a frank conversation. It’s fine to talk about the financial investment here as long as it’s couched in supportive terms. “We’re happy to spend this money on something you love as long as you’re having fun and it makes you feel good about yourself,” you might say. “But we also want you to know that you shouldn’t do this to try to please us or because you think we expect you to win scholarship money, and we won’t consider what we spent so far a waste if you decide that it’s just not for you anymore.” This could provide a strong sense of relief, just so long as it’s true.
One School’s Turn Toward More Modesty
When Mark Stanek, head of school at Shady Hill School, a pre-kindergarten-through-eighth-grade school in Cambridge, Massachusetts, took the job he decided to be honest with himself and the school community about its shifting demographics. Tuition had grown faster than inflation. Middle-class incomes had been stagnating for many years. Upper-middle-class families who lost jobs or saw their net worth fall or were simply scared out of their minds by the economic downturn stopped applying. Private schools like his had increasingly come to be populated by larger numbers of families who occupied a new stratosphere of wealth—ones who could pay the bills easily—and a smaller group of families who split a few million dollars of financial aid each year.
As a result, the differences between what some students could do and have outside the classroom and others could not became progressively more pronounced. Stanek was determined not just to acknowledge this reality but to confront it and force parents to think about it, too. “I felt it was necessary to take the bull by the horns and dive into this discussion,” he said. “Everyone was saying that I was crazy, that no one should take this on in your second year as head of school.” He did it anyway, leading a systematic, yearlong review of every instance throughout the school term when financial flexibility (or lack thereof) highlighted differences among students.
The middle school kids liked throwing bake sales. The intent was great, as it fostered building community and creating awareness of whatever cause they were raising money for. “But we’d also see that kids were comparing the money [they had] and buying for others, and would have big bills and use that as capital, showing off to friends and losing sight of what they had the money for,” Stanek said. “There was one child who brought in a $100 bill.” The school placed a $10 limit on what kids could spend.
The school’s 5-times-per-year pizza lunch also began with the best of intentions. Usually all the kids bring their own lunch, so this, too, was a coming-together event that everyone looked forward to. But at $5 per lunch, it was $25 per year. That was a lot for some families, and other kids forgot to bring money. Then the faculty was left to sort out who had money and why or why not and who wasn’t going to get to eat the pizza. “That raised issues around social class and access and exclusivity,” Stanek said. Now, everyone eats and you just pay what you can. “There’s no question about whether you are on the list,” he added.
School logo gear is another domain where people with less money can feel uncomfortable. Every team understandably wants to do its own thing. “But how many times do parents need to be asked for another $25 or $40 to pay for the latest shirt in the latest season,” Stanek wondered. The school decided to streamline and standardize, so that there was just one Shady Hill Athletics shirt each year, and every child got one for free since they’re all required to play on at least one team. There is a website for parents who want to buy sweats and other gear. “But it’s not in your face, where kids are put in a position where they and their parents have to make choices,” Stanek said.
Sometime that year, he became aware of an eighth grader whose family had hired an expensive private counselor to help with high school applications. Others were hiring tutors to help with preparation for standardized tests that could help them get into the most competitive schools. Shady Hill didn’t offer any test prep itself. “We don’t believe in it,” he said. “But not to acknowledge that it is going on is kind of naive. Did we need to get involved? What about the kids who can’t afford test prep? Should we be doing more to help them?” The school ultimately decided not to help; staff there just couldn’t get past their opposition to the tests altogether.
Now, Stanek hopes that the accumulation of changes and parental discussion about them has created a tilt toward more modesty that has become part of the school’s brand. If it works, future applicant families will be self-selecting, doing a thorough values audit of all the schools they’re considering before deciding to send kids to Shady Hill if they get in. “Parents have signed on because there isn’t that emphasis on extravagance here,” Stanek said.
His efforts are admirable, especially because they leave the school open to easy mockery. Isn’t a $30,000 annual price tag itself an indulgence? And the head of school is worried about pizza and lettermen’s jackets?! But to ignore the everyday reality of all his students would be to leave himself vulnerable to the adoption of the sort of casual voca
bulary that has become standard at other schools. In affluent communities in California, both public and private school parents often refer to the February vacation as “ski week,” even though plenty of families can’t afford to gas up the car and head to Tahoe. The founder of one private school went so far as to change the dates of one of the winter breaks altogether so that the lines at his favorite ski lifts would be shorter. Teachers often pick up on this and do what they can to keep kids from feeling bad. In some schools, they no longer ask about anyone’s vacation, because they realize that many kids’ families can’t afford to go on one.
Still, we don’t want to pretend that differences don’t exist. Social class is just another part of the diversity discussion, after all. Even Allison Pugh, the sociologist who wrote Longing and Belonging and coined the phrase “dignity gauntlet,” understands that. “That moment of deprivation and indignity scares parents up and down the class ladder,” she said. “They may remember their own experience of how often it happened to them and how much it hurt, and they want to protect their child from that moment. But they should relax. Kids manage that deprivation well. It’s not bad for them to experience it. That’s how I felt after three years of watching them.”
The Materialism Intervention
Let’s say you already have a couple of materialistic teenagers on your hands. It’s not the end of the world. Tim Kasser, the materialism professor in Illinois, and a gang of other curious scholars decided to find out if it was possible to perform an intervention of sorts on older, upper-middle-class children—to actually manipulate materialism in a controlled experimental setting. And if they could, would any changes stick?
The group started by asking volunteer families in Minnesota to fill out questionnaires to determine who the truly materialistic children were. Then it randomly assigned the kids, ages 10 to 17, to two groups—one that would receive the intervention and one that would not. The idea was to measure their well-being over time to see if the reprogramming worked, and if so, for how long.
The intervention used a curriculum and a set of materials from a company called Share Save Spend. The kids met for three sessions, along with their parents. Session one included the distribution of a three-chamber bank (one each for sharing, saving, and spending) and discussion cards to inspire family conversations about money and values. There were also conversations about the difference between needs and wants, and the role advertising plays in confusing the two. The kids tracked their spending behavior and discussed it in session two. Then they kept a diary of the advertising messages they saw and their impact, and also interviewed people whom they thought modeled good sharing and saving. In session three, there was a discussion about allowance and how to keep the money conversation going among family members well into the future.
The researchers used surveys to measure the well-being of the participants six weeks after the last session. Then, they did it again 10 months later to see if any changes had actually stuck. Both times they found that the kids who had received the interventions showed better self-esteem than they had before the sessions started. The control group of materialistic kids who had not gone to the sessions showed decreased self-esteem. What is noteworthy here is not simply that the impact was lasting; it’s that a program based on values and the emotions around money resonated with the older children especially. Detailed conversations and reflection seemed to make a real difference. Now, imagine all of us using this approach on an ongoing basis at home, and starting earlier.
Our own efforts could include stories about the times when we regretted a big purchase and others about objects with high prices that we cherish to this day. Our own tales, with real examples, can reduce some of the confusion our kids may feel about how our spending reflects our values.
The Dewey Rule: How Long to Make Kids Wait
Often, people who grow up in an environment that makes them feel insecure tend to default toward materialistic values. Twelve years after inheriting part of his father’s secret real estate fortune, however, that’s not how Bramson Dewey has turned out. His and his wife’s cars do not raise any eyebrows in the upper-middle-class suburb where they live. He still has his $70 watch that he bought from Macy’s many years ago and wears clothes that he buys at Kohl’s.
He and his wife did treat the family to one expensive item: a house that’s among the larger ones in the suburb where they live. They had been living in a smaller house but it got tight, so they moved to a larger one a few blocks away. Dewey admits to wondering what his girls, ages 6 and 10, will have to say as they begin to realize that their home is somewhat bigger than average homes in the area. His older daughter doesn’t seem to notice so far. She came back from a trick-or-treating expedition agog at the fact that she got a full-size Hershey bar at one residence. “That’s a rich person’s house,” she told her father.
Kids often operate under a completely different set of evaluative standards when it comes to relative wealth. Dewey’s older daughter has a no-name fleece, while many kids at school wear North Face jackets. A classmate recently asked her if she was poor, given that her coat had no fancy logo.
Still, Dewey is certain that his older daughter knows that her parents will spring for things that are really worth owning or doing. “I, unlike my father, will happily open my wallet for reasonably priced necessities as well as some fun stuff,” he said. “But I think it’s important that they see that other kids have certain toys and games and that they themselves don’t have everything. And that other families have fancy cars and take fancy trips to exotic islands.”
When Dewey first put it this way to me, I got to wondering about something: Would it help some parents to have a rule based on whatever context they happen to find themselves in? I call it Dewey’s rule, and it stands for the idea that parents should try to arrange things so that, on average, their children end up in the 30th percentile of stuff. If 10 kids in a community are eventually going to get a car, then your child should have the 7th nicest out of 10. Or if your children are in the 50th percentile on cars, then perhaps they should be 9th out of every 10 to get a smartphone. It’s just a rough average to shoot for, not a hard-and-fast every-time law. And different parents may find themselves in special circumstances or may not have enough willpower to wait beyond, say, the 50th percentile. But kids should learn to wait for at least some things, to consider carefully the things they crave, and savor them once they arrive. Maybe it’s fine to be a little jealous, while not feeling utterly deprived. Also, quite often, the thing that everyone thinks everyone else is going to want ends up being useless, or the kids who are the first-movers move on to something else by the time the 4th child out of 10 gets ready to mimic that first one. The child who is 5th or 7th, then, doesn’t waste any money.
I’ve tested versions of the Dewey rule on many parents, and some of them blanch. Why not just have the courage of your convictions? they ask. Falling in line in such a regimented way is spineless. Perhaps there’s some truth to that, and there are practical challenges to inventorying what other kids have and are doing once they’re teenagers. Still, kids keep score in precisely this way. It’s helpful to know where your family is on this continuum and whether your child has come to expect to be there consistently.
As for Dewey’s feelings on the Dewey rule, he sees the wisdom of keeping something like it in mind. His house is always the 800-pound gorilla in the room. “I see myself as having to be a little more conscious about bringing everything else down so as to better average out to what you would call the 30th or 50th percent range,” he said.
There is one final area where Bramson is dramatically different from his father. Mike wouldn’t pay for most athletic activities, and he rarely came to any of Bramson’s hockey games. But Bramson is different. He took his oldest daughter to the rink when she was 5. When she seemed to like it, he bought her skates without thinking too hard about the cost. Then the hockey gear. There were three helmets, because the first two weren’t comfortable. And now he help
s coach her team.
“For several nights a week during the season, it’s me and my daughter and the other girls from her team on the ice,” he said. “We pay for the whole season. We’re together, having a great time. That’s the spoiling. I like to think that she’s thinking she’s spoiled by how much time she gets with her family.”
6
How to Talk About Giving
Narrating your way through gifts of $1, $1,000, and $1 million
When Jewish teenagers turn 13, their congregations traditionally call them forward as a bar or bat mitzvah to mark their entry into adulthood. They help lead a service in temple on the Jewish Sabbath, they read in Hebrew from the Torah, and they give a short speech about what they’ve learned and what it all means to them. A photographer takes pictures, grandparents cry, and the pubescent female guests tower over boys whose voices have not yet begun to change.
But then the party starts, and the celebrations can get rather elaborate. Sometimes, the kids themselves put on a show. Sam Horowitz, a cherub-faced bar mitzvah boy from Dallas with career aspirations in the entertainment industry, hit a makeshift stage at the Omni Hotel there in 2012. With his name in lights, each letter at least 15 feet high upstage, he descended from the ceiling hidden inside what looked like a giant lampshade. As the Jennifer Lopez song “Dance Again” blared from the sound system, he did just that, dressed entirely in white while surrounded by a bevy of professional female dancers in low-cut, gold-fringed dresses. A video of their well-rehearsed routine went viral, posted on YouTube by an entity called Elixir Entertainment, and many responses were stinging, including some from prominent rabbis. But Sam owned the moment and the many moments that followed, proudly appearing on Ellen Degeneres’s television show not long after his big day to perform all over again. Ellen even gave him a gift—a sky-blue Jewish skullcap with her logo on it.