The Opposite of Spoiled

by Ron Lieber

  Parents like Michael Kesselman, who has worked in and around philanthropy for much of his career, have long wondered whether the coming-of-age tradition needed a radical reinvention. His children attended Brandeis Hillel Day School, a Jewish kindergarten-through-eighth-grade school in San Francisco. When I met him and some of the teachers in the school’s conference room one sunny summer day, they were quick to note that the truly ostentatious parties hadn’t happened in their community all that often. That sort of thing mostly happened in Los Angeles, they explained, sounding very Northern Californian.

  Kesselman was moved to act not after an outsize celebration but after he asked his eldest daughter, several years out from her bat mitzvah, whether she remembered any of the gifts her friends had purchased for her. She managed to recall just one or two. When another daughter’s 13th birthday approached, he rounded up some like-minded parents for a little “thinking and figuring,” as they put it in a letter to their fellow seventh-grade moms and dads. There were 33 seventh graders. Each family spent at least $20 for a gift for each of those students on their big day, given that every student would invite all the others to their individual celebrations. Collectively, parents were spending $21,780 on gifts throughout the year, at a minimum.

  In their letter to fellow parents, they proposed an alternative. They could pool all that money and divide it up, with each child getting a small sum and a gift, and the rest going into a single pile of money for the kids to give away to any charity they chose. The grown-ups would have nothing to do with the selection. Instead, it would be the teenagers who would run a foundation and listen to pitches from nonprofit executives who wanted a grant from their fund.

  Explaining Why and How We Give

  It’s not surprising that someone like Kesselman, who had worked for foundations himself, dreamed up something like this. Parents have an essential role to play in modeling generosity, and researchers have shown that if parents give, kids tend to as well. Most important, it helps if parents talk to their offspring about giving too. And the more parents give, the greater the likelihood that they talk to their kids about that giving. (The same thing is true for volunteering, by the way.)

  If you haven’t primed this pump of generosity with your kids by talking to them about your own charitable giving, you’re not alone. In 2010 the financial education arm of a large insurance company ran a poll and asked kids 17 and under how their parents support organizations and causes. Some of them knew a little bit, with 18 percent saying their parents volunteer, 10 percent saying they donate money, and 6 percent reporting that their folks gave food, clothing, and supplies. But 64 percent of the kids said they had no idea what their parents were giving, if anything. “Clueless,” the company called the kids in its headline on the press release.

  So why the silence? It may be that parents fail to initiate any memorable conversations about why giving is a good idea in the first place. Our giving may become rote, and once it does, we may not bother explaining our own generosity to our kids.

  But because we’re in the business of cultivating grown-ups here, giving, like everything else that we do with money, shouldn’t simply happen without comment. Correcting this is easy enough, and there are at least three ways to explain why giving money to help other people is a good thing to do. One way to describe it is as a sort of duty; families who have more than they need ought to give something so that families who have very little can have more of the things that they need but can’t afford. This has the added benefit of reinforcing the Wants/Needs framework with younger children by bringing it into another area of a family’s financial life.

  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. Finally, there’s this point to make: Communities are stronger when people know they can rely on one another. We would all feel better knowing that we live in a neighborhood, city, country, and world where we will help others when they’re having a hard time and they will help us if we need it. Perhaps we live in such places already and have given and gotten in a way that has proven it. Still, giving generously when we can helps reinforce our common bonds.

  Like many conversations with kids about money, we don’t need to have this one all that often. But we could probably start talking about giving earlier, as children are hardwired for the happiness-making part of generosity from a very early age. 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. The team of experimenters recruited parents from libraries, hospitals, and community events in Vancouver, Canada. When the toddlers were the right age, their parents brought them to a lab where they got to play with puppets. Why puppets? Because they delight kids. Unfamiliar humans can make them feel inhibited or cause them to act in a particular way because they think the grown-ups expect a certain kind of behavior.

  The puppets and the kids each got a bowl with a Teddy Graham or a Goldfish cracker in it. The kids were told they could eat their treat if they wanted and that the puppets liked treats too. To reinforce this point, the puppets pretended that they were eating by pushing their treats through a false bottom in their bowls while making happy “yum” sounds.

  Then, a new puppet arrived on the scene named Monkey. The experimenter pointed out that neither Monkey nor the child subject had any treats. The experimenter presented 8 new treats and deposited them in the child’s bowl. Next, the experimenter found another treat and gave it to Monkey. After that, yet another treat appeared, but this time the experimenter asked the toddler to give that new treat to Monkey. Finally, the experimenter asked the toddler to hand over treats from his or her own bowl, where the original 8 treats still sat. This experiment was repeated over and over with different children. All along, observers were keeping a close eye on the toddlers’ faces to score their precise reactions.

  So what did they discover? The toddlers were happier when giving a treat to the puppets than they were when the experimenters dumped a pile of them into their own bowls. But that wasn’t all; the kids were actually happier giving away their own treats from the original stash of 8 than they were giving away the new one that they had gotten later. In other words, they were actually more excited about giving away things that were costly—the treats that were their own, in theory—than they were about giving away the windfall treat that only “belonged” to them for a brief moment in time.

  But do toddlers simply learn this behavior along the way and mimic it? When I called up one of the study’s coauthors, Kiley Hamlin, a psychology professor at the University of British Columbia, she pointed out a couple of things. Yes, toddlers see plenty of people being nice to them, but if they have older siblings, they may see plenty of the opposite behavior as well. “What tells me that the generosity isn’t basic mimicry is how early they start giving stuff to people,” she said. “Most 12-month-olds will sit with you and insist that you take their gross Cheerios, over and over. And insist that you eat them, and like them. It’s not just that they want to give them to you; they want to watch and make sure you enjoy it.” She believes simple evolution is the explanation here: We live in groups for protection and companionship, and doing so requires cooperation and generosity.

  The Homeless Question and How to Handle It

  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.

  One autumn afternoon in 1991, a playwright named Teddy Gross was walking in Manhattan when his 4-year-old daughter Nora spotted a homeless man. He had newspapers wadded in his shoes to protect his feet from the elements, and he was sitting on a busy sidewalk leaning up against a newsstand. Gross wasn’t i
n the habit of giving money to panhandlers and didn’t even see the man at first. But his daughter spotted him and sized him up, and the man smiled at her. And while the family had never had a conversation about homeless people before, Nora knew just what the man’s problem was and how best to solve it. So she turned to her father and asked him a question.

  “Can we take him home?”

  Most of us who live near homeless people or regularly pass through or visit places where they ask for money have been in this spot, even if our own children’s questions were a little different. A child might ask why we give money to strangers who ask for it. Or, alternatively, they demand to know why we don’t. They may also want to know why homeless people have no place to live or whether it’s their fault or their choice. For parents, these moments tend to be ones of hyperconsciousness and wildly mixed feelings. There is pride in the fact that a child recognizes the humanity of others and is moved to act. Shame if we don’t give ourselves or if we turn away. Anger or fear if a panhandler is aggressive or scares our children. Frustration with a society where people live on the streets. And, perhaps most of all, there’s confusion about the best way to explain the complicated answers and all our feelings about them to kids of varying ages.

  It would have been easy enough for Teddy to brush off his daughter’s question or treat it as a rhetorical one. He could have lied and said no, even though it was certainly possible to take the man back to their apartment for a meal or a shower or a few nights on their sofa. He could have told the truth and said yes—but then explained that it was risky because homeless people are sometimes mentally ill and can behave unpredictably. He could have ducked the question, telling her that her idea was a really nice one and that they could talk about it later.

  But none of those answers would have been very satisfying. “Children’s early years are characterized by a compulsion to find out, a strong urge to both map out and transform reality,” according to Susan Engel, a senior lecturer in psychology at Williams College and an expert on curiosity. So what was Nora trying to map out? Well, embedded in her question was probably a fair bit of confusion about a lot of things. Why didn’t the man have a home? What did people on the sidewalks do with the money they asked for? Why didn’t her parents simply take in every stranger in need? How much could her family reasonably do and be expected to do to alleviate the suffering of others? As for her desire to transform reality, to her the solution was obvious: They could take in that man and make his life better.

  Nora’s question cut to her father’s core. He remembers being shocked that she recognized the sadness of the situation and frustrated with his inability to respond well in the moment. “These questions are momentous occasions,” he said. “But I couldn’t answer in any way that was satisfying. There was a feeling that if I didn’t listen to her, the day might come when I would regret it, where she’d want to know where I was when all those homeless people were crowding the streets.” So his response was to collect money to help the homeless return to homes of their own. First, they walked around their apartment building to collect people’s loose change. Then they solicited further, eventually starting an organization called the Common Cents Penny Harvest that has collected $10 million from schoolchildren and others in the years since.

  This is not to say that we all need to run out and start organizations every time our children ask a stunning question. But it’s a reminder that they are capable of deep, penetrating inquiries about how money touches so much of life. Teddy Gross was right about the lack of a perfect answer here, though some responses are unwise. A younger child’s question about homeless people shouldn’t cause you to criticize the people who are asking for help, assuming they’re not threatening you or your child. Whatever you may think of people who live on the streets and ask others for help, a child who isn’t in grade school yet isn’t ready to wrestle with the roots of homelessness and urban housing policy.

  As always, do your best not to lie, either. Why did you give that man money? Because he needed help. Why does he need help? He doesn’t seem to have a place to live right now or enough money for food. Why not? It’s hard to know, but we try to help people who are having a hard time, both when we see them and by sending money to other people and groups who can help them even more.

  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.

  An Easy Family Project: The Giving Bag

  One reason many of us dislike giving money directly to homeless people is that we can’t be sure how they will spend it. Olivia Higgins, who lives in Oakland, California, and is the mother of two, knows this especially well. Before she moved there to work as a teacher and administrator, she worked at a women’s shelter in Philadelphia. Given her experience as an educator and case manager, it’s hard to imagine someone better suited to talk to children about helping the homeless. But even she was flummoxed by her two children, ages 7 and 9, and their constant requests to give money to the homeless people they frequently encountered.

  After hearing about a friend who asked her first-grade students to assemble small bags for a local food bank, she hit on an idea. First, the family held a yard sale. To convince the children to contribute old toys, she told them they could keep half the proceeds and that the family would give the rest away. This was an important point for Higgins, since she wanted her children to use money they’d earned themselves so that they could get a more visceral sense of what it meant to give. At first, the kids wanted to simply hand out the money to homeless people, but Higgins told them more about her old job and why cash might not be helpful. They were able to grasp the basic idea of addiction and listened to her stories about how addicts at the shelter who had money were often tempted to buy drugs and alcohol.

  The family settled on the idea of using the money to give away bags of supplies to anyone they encountered who might need one. When it came time to assemble them from the proceeds of the garage sale, the two kids had strong feelings about the contents. The conversations that ensued made Higgins realize just how deeply they had been thinking about the homeless. “My daughter was determined to include one permanent marker, so they could write their signs,” she said. “My son wanted to include a little notebook because he thought they always looked bored. He really wanted to include playing cards, but they ultimately decided against that because it would be too sad if they were alone and didn’t have anyone to play with.” The bags also had some food inside, including a bit of leftover Halloween candy.

  One unexpected result of Higgins’s addiction explanation was her daughter’s desire to include notes in the bags urging people to stay off drugs. “Katherine challenged me on this point quite a bit,” Higgins said. “Her argument was that a good message is a good message, and who cares where it comes from? I’m not sure I did an adequate job of explaining why a grown person experiencing a difficult situation probably doesn’t want to hear an antidrug message from a kid in a minivan with leather seats.”

  So the family distributed the bags with markers but no antidrug notes. One of the first went to a man who saw the paper bag when the family approached him and thought he was about to receive a peanut butter sandwich. He explained that he didn’t like peanut butter, but he told the children that it reminded him of his mother, whom he hadn’t seen for some time. They had a nice conversation, and as they drove away, Higgins’s son, Dylan, said that he thought it had been a lovely way to make a new frie
nd.

  For those of us who don’t have a car to lug bags around in or commute by public transportation with our children, there are other things we can keep in our bags to give out. Protein bars or other compact, hardy, and nutrient-dense edibles are items that a child could hand to a person who is asking for help. Gift cards to discount stores or fast-food restaurants would work as well. The point is to have something we can always reach for that will make it easy to say yes to someone in need and will make most recipients feel good about the help we’re offering. Some people may turn down food or gift cards, so be ready to explain to a child why that might be and whether they want to give money instead, either to those individuals or to organizations that can help them.

  Small Children, Solicitations, and the Importance of Showing Up in Person

  There are many other ways to encourage regular conversations around giving. Storing allowance money in a Give jar along with the Spend and Save ones will help. Its presence reminds younger children to think about causes they might want to support, particularly if you empty it out on a regular basis, say every six months, and ask your kids to pick an organization to support right then.