The Opposite of Spoiled

by Ron Lieber

But when Keely read The Power of Half, something clicked for both her and Mick. “We were spending lots of time in a country where the citizens and twin sister of our daughter were living in circumstances nothing like what we’re living in,” Mick said. He was tiring of his long commute to downtown Chicago and the long drives back and forth to the nearest airport for business trips. Keely ached to do even more good for the world. And so they chose to move from the land of horse stables to Arlington Heights, a suburb with smaller lots and sidewalks. Mick’s Porsche went back to the dealer around the same time, a car that both parents now refer to as “that car that began with P.”

  The family gives generously to the United Nations Foundation. And while the kids were not involved with the initial decision to downsize, most of the siblings are intimately involved with a venture that the family has funded with the money that the move helped free up. It’s called Bella Ha, named for Isabella, the twin in Arlington Heights, and her sister, Ha, in Vietnam. Starting in 2015, the business will sell sandals and use the proceeds to pay for solar power installations at maternity clinics around the world that are off the electrical grid.

  The move confused many neighbors and old friends, and some of them seemed to take offense. Keely said they shouldn’t have. “What we did was really quite personal,” she said. “We didn’t want to offend anyone. I don’t believe that money or affluence is the enemy at all. Everyone is on his or her own personal journey, and I don’t want to be that family that ditched all those people who were a negative influence on their kids. Ultimately, we believe that we are the influence on our kids.”

  When the family moved, it took two trucks to transport their belongings. Only one made it to Arlington Heights. The second was for things they gave away. 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.”

  The School Where Giving Replaces Getting

  At the Brandeis Hillel Day School, in San Francisco, the proposal to make the bar and bat mitzvah process more about giving drew a lot of positive response. As one parent put it, pooling the money in a fund for the kids to give away relieved them of spending a bunch of time and money on buying gifts that didn’t really make a difference, even to the recipients. The lessons in generosity sounded pretty nice too, which is what Michael Kesselman—the philanthropy expert who, with his wife, first thought of the fund—and the other parents emphasized in a note they sent to their fellow seventh-grade parents. “We believe that we should take advantage of our being a community to underline and emphasize the less materialistic aspects of this very significant marker in the life of a Jewish person,” they wrote.

  A few parents, though, took the mention of materialism personally. “We had one parent—of a large, wealthy family—whose first son was becoming a bar mitzvah, and they were looking forward to its being a really big deal,” Kesselman recalled. “The father was in tears. He said our underlying message is that if you’re going to do a big blowout, then you’re going to be embarrassed.” This is not at all surprising. Anyone trying to change or create a standard in a community that has something to do with how families spend money will probably run into some resistance, even if the shift is as virtuous as this one seemed to be.

  Still, nearly all of the families ultimately agreed to participate. Those without a lot of spare money simply paid what they could. A few families opted for a more traditional gift-giving approach, though families were welcome to give an individual gift to a special friend on top of contributing to the fund. “It wasn’t like the Soviet Union or something, where we said that you couldn’t give a gift,” Kesselman said.

  All the students participated in managing the fund, even if their families had chosen not to contribute. They created a letterhead with all of their names on it, and they all signed every bit of correspondence with an organization that was asking them for money. The letters from the fund’s early days look like the sign-in poster boards that many families put up on easels at the entrance to their parties, with 33 bits of loopy seventh-grade cursive on each note. The fund had typed agendas for its meetings and treasurer reports too, just like a normal foundation.

  From the start, the students agreed on a majority-rules vote for each funding request. And while Michael Kesselman, himself an experienced foundation staffer, hung around to help, he tried not to intervene. “I sat down with the kids and told them that I worked for them and that they were going to make the decisions about whom to fund,” he said.

  The seventh graders met at lunch, and one of their first visitors was Justin Grosso, who worked as bagger in a grocery store and was enrolled in trade school. He was looking for an additional sponsor for his participation in the California AIDS bicycle ride. At that point, Kesselman reached into his bag of fund-raising tricks and explained the idea of a challenge grant to the kids. Not long after, they promised Grosso $500 if he could raise an additional $1,000 on his own. He met the goal and then some.

  Almost immediately, according to Kesselman, the students were asking questions as good as those of any adult. The mere act of evaluating proposals from older people, with something of consequence at stake, is something that kids do not get to do much in any context. The students took to it quickly.

  They also loved the big reveal, according to Batshir Torchio, who spent years teaching at the school and recently became a rabbi. “When my class allotted $3,000 to the local Boys and Girls club, the woman who took our call wanted to know if it was a joke,” she said. “She got the director of the program on the phone to speak to our students. The director burst into tears.”

  The school eventually made the fund permanent, incorporating it into the seventh-grade curriculum, with the goal of helping students understand the systemic causes of poverty, what it means to be poor, who the poor are, and how to improve the world by addressing the root causes of poverty (and not merely by giving money to organizations that help people who need it). In addition to making budgets and grilling executives from local nonprofits, the children also dove into an eclectic collection of texts four times each week. Their readings included selections from Barbara Ehrenreich’s Nickel and Dimed, various parts of the Bible and the Talmud, and the full text of municipal ballot measures on the minimum wage and panhandling.

  The teachers also started dividing the class into pretend families. Each would have a different income and series of events they had to deal with. If an adult in the household lost a job, they had to figure out how the grocery budget would change. Students created a shopping list for a family of four living at the poverty level and trying to purchase a month’s worth of groceries. They walked to the nearest grocery store to make the purchases (and eventually to donate the food to the local food bank). Most of them had no idea how much food a family needs each month, but they soon learned.

  Today, nearly 20 years after Michael Kesselman first suggested the idea to his fellow parents, the Seventh-Grade Fund remains at the core of the middle school experience at Brandeis Hillel. “It’s part of the culture of the school now,” said Neal Biskar, a veteran teacher and administrator there. It’s part of the culture elsewhere, too, as schools, synagogues, and other Jewish organizations across the country have copied it in various ways. And there’s no reason any school, religious or not, couldn’t adapt it for its own use as well.

  The beauty of the fund is that it does not require outsize sacrifice from most families. They made a decision, as a community, that their kids had plenty of gifts and could give some of what they had to others. Kevin and Joan King Salwen had more than enough house, and their daughter, Hannah, inspired them to give some of it away in effect. But Kevin takes pains to make sure that nobody walks away from a conversation with him thinking that he wants every family to make the same gift or one of similar financial size. “We’ve never been about people selling their houses,” he said. “We know that’s goofy.”

  Maybe your kids have too much time on their h
ands, or too many clothes, or something else. Perhaps you could take half of your dining-out budget and use it to make a family gift to an organization that helps people who don’t have enough to eat. Or you could do something similar with your vacation budget. And maybe, if you pull the right strings or press the right buttons, your own school can help turn a similar idea into a movement.

  “This has been one of the most meaningful things I’ve ever participated in as a teacher,” Batshir Torchio said of her time helping the seventh graders with their giving. “I’m doing the Snoopy dance all day long.”

  7

  Why Kids Should Work

  Lessons from farm work, mandatory tuition payments, and a unified theory of tin can redemption

  As I traveled the country meeting parents and kids and talking about money the last few years, I was surprised at the number of parents who told me stories, unprompted, about boys and girls redeeming cans and bottles. Children get the idea from watching strangers on the street collecting recyclables and ask their parents how it works, or they watch family members redeem cans at the grocery store. Others read the refund notices on drink containers and want in on the 5-cent-per-unit action, and beg their parents for a ride to the recycling center or ask to drag a wagon on their own.

  What is it about the recycling-for-money routine that so appeals to children? To find out, I spent an afternoon with the Clarke family in San Jose, California. They live on the side of a hill with a backyard where Julie, who does marketing for a technology company, and her husband, Gary, a teacher and football coach, regularly entertain. Their two daughters, Katherine, age 11, and Lauren, 7, earn spending money from the work they do around the house, like many other kids their age.

  But not long ago, they picked up a side gig. The idea was born from their church’s campaign to raise money for the homeless, which encouraged parishioners to bring cans and bottles to church for recycling. The church campaign eventually ended, but by then the two Clarke daughters were hooked on collecting and sorting, and the cash reward it provided. Could they keep doing it, they asked, and keep the money for themselves? Their parents wanted them to continue giving some recycling proceeds to the church, but they were also keenly aware of the number of things the girls wanted to buy. So they found a scrapyard a freeway ride away that would accept the contents of their bins. Now, every time the girls have collected enough to fill the back of their minivan, they set off with a parent to redeem what they have collected.

  After a 20-minute drive from their home, the Clarke family minivan pulls into the driveway of Ranch Town Recycling Center, in San Jose, and Katherine and Lauren jump from their seats and lift out bags of glass bottles, aluminum cans, and assorted plastic. It’s September, warm enough that the center is especially ripe with the odor of everything that used to be inside the recycled materials. People walk every which way as forklifts beep, employees toss the bags of cans and bottles around, and a man with a cigarette dangling from his mouth runs a machine that crunches glass, shooting a few shards within striking distance of customers who get too close. The patriarch of the family who runs the center weighs the bags on a scale, the matriarch runs the cash register, and the employees yell at anyone and everyone who doesn’t quite know the drill. On the way home the family usually stops at Merriwest Credit Union so the girls can deposit the money they receive for their recyclables.

  The response from other grown-ups when kids go to redeem cans and bottles tends to be mixed. The Clarkes contend with logistics, including keeping the cans and bottles clean so they won’t attract vermin, making space to store them all, and then taking the lot away to exchange it for money. Julie Clarke’s friend Aleksandra Gradinarova has a can collector in her house too, though her feelings about it are mixed, due to personal history.

  Gradinarova and her husband grew up in Communist Bulgaria, but left there as young adults and now work in the technology industry. There wasn’t much to buy when they were children, but their 4-year-old son, Nikola, is growing up in an American world filled with toys. Like many boys his age, he asks to buy more, frequently. “Every day,” Aleksandra said. His father finally explained to him that if they bought all the toys he wanted, there wouldn’t be any money left for him to go to college. This was a problem, since he was already aware that big kids in college get to have laptop computers. He wanted to be one of them, so he quickly changed tactics and sought money he could save to go to college. Presented with this opening, his father told him stories from the old country about turning beer bottles in for money. Nikola loved this idea. Soon the pair were hauling bags to the grocery store and exchanging them for piles of quarters.

  This wasn’t the most comfortable thing for Aleksandra, however, who told me that she was worried that people would wonder about her. “What is the first thing that pops into your head when you hear about people collecting cans and bottles?” she asked. “Homeless people with shopping carts and bags.” But it also reminded her of what she was trying to accomplish with her son: If there are a lot of things that he wants, he’s going to have to work in order to buy most of them.

  Kids Like to Work (and Why We Don’t Let Them)

  Many parents echo Aleksandra Gradinarova’s questions about their children turning can collecting into a hobby or a part-time job: Isn’t redeeming recyclables for money something only poor people do? Shouldn’t we leave the cans for them? And if it isn’t something we need to do to pay the bills, then why is my child so obsessed with the idea?

  Stephanie Preston runs the ecological neuroscience laboratory at the University of Michigan, where they specialize in figuring out how people make decisions about allocating resources. I thought she’d have a developmental or evolutionary answer to these questions about can collection and would tell me all about her work with squirrels and how they store nuts to use later. Instead, she had her own tales of exchanging bottles for dollars. While on a bicycling trip after college, she collected them herself. The $10 she received in return made an appreciable difference in what and how much she could eat each day. Now, she lets her kids buy a little something at the grocery store with the money they get by bringing their own cans and bottles in to reclaim the prepaid deposit.

  The explanation for all this can collecting, it turns out, is just basic economic behavior. 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. The cans and bottles are part of the proof: Children gravitate to the task because it requires no skill or experience. Anyone of any age who can somehow get to a redemption center can do a little work and make a little money from the refuse immediately at hand. The more kids collect, the more they can earn. Making money makes children feel more grown-up and proves to the adults in their lives that they can do adultlike things at much younger ages than many modern parents realize.

  Our job, then, is to stoke that instinct to work and to earn and see just how far their natural-born industriousness takes them. We can give them bigger and better jobs around the house. We can draw lessons from families who live above the family business. We can shuttle them back and forth to their chosen paid pursuit the same way we might if they needed early-morning rides to swim practice five days a week. We can even ask them to take a much bigger role in paying for college than we might have thought possible.

  Or we can do none of these things, which is what many of us do reflexively nowadays. Our reluctance to recognize and cultivate the work ethic in children is rooted in a transformation that occurred relatively recently. We’ve gone, as Princeton sociologist Viviana A. Zelizer wrote, from celebrating the birth of a child as the “arrival of a future laborer” to a society where “a child is simply not expected to be useful.” As kids stopped dying of childhood diseases, and as families moved off the farm and stopped living together and relying on one another quite so much, kids became worth much less from a purely economic standpoint. As their adolescence has lengthened, we’ve invested so much more time an
d money in helping them meet their potential. The title of Zelizer’s book—Pricing the Priceless Child—both captures the feelings we have about our children and hints at the lengths we’ll go to in order to protect them.

  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.

  Why are so few teenagers working these days, when even the youngest kids show such clear signs of industriousness and capability? There are plenty of partial explanations. Many jobs aren’t as easy to get as they used to be. Particularly in the late 2000s and early 2010s, lots of adults became willing to take the kinds of jobs that teenagers had typically held, such as those in fast-food restaurants and retail shops. Competing against teens, they usually get the work since they generally have more experience and flexible schedules. Also, as states became stricter about who could drive and at what times of day, it became harder for teens to get to and from many jobs.

  But another factor here is a persistent conviction in more affluent and achievement-oriented communities that jobs do damage to kids’ college admission prospects. When I ask people whether their high school–aged kids work during the school year, many of them look at me quizzically. The first thing they usually do is express concern about how a job would affect their children’s grades.

  They needn’t be worried. Part-time jobs are correlated with high college expectations and good grade point averages so long as a teenager doesn’t work for more than 15 hours or so each week. One of the more thorough studies on the topic noted that parents often forget that there isn’t a zero-sum trade-off between working and studying. Teenagers spend plenty of time watching television and hanging out with their friends, so working may not reduce studying time one bit. This is not to say that a part-time job will boost your child’s grades, but it does suggest that the right job may not hurt them.