This story from today’s Chicago Tribune seemed to belong here.
I’m ready to take my kids & move out into the middle of nowhere - “modern culture” has become waaaaay too muchf or me!
I saw a documentary uber-lottery winners…this one guy won the Powerball and had something like $194 million. He had a mansion in Palm Beach, and his daughter was complaining that the maid hadn’t cleaned her room.
Her daddy looked at her and said, “Honey, I won the lottery, so the maid cleans my room. When you win the lottery then you can hire a maid to clean your room.”
That’s a daddy with his head screwed on right. His daughter may have a room bigger than my whole house, but she still has to clean it. 
Wanna know what happens to spoiled kids when they grow up?
Hi, I’m Obsidian.
I was raised wealthy. Not Paris Hilton wealthy, but I’ve got a 7 figure inheritence I’ll get some day. When I was growing up, I got anything I wanted. (Such as a $2500 laptop for my 13th birthday). I was a adult before I ever flew in anything other than first class. I brought friends on vacation with us, because I was bored. I was SPOILED. Shoes, clothes, books, my parents spend on me like they did on themselves. I had two credit cards, and when I wanted something I went out and purchased it myself.
When I graduated from college, I came out to California, rented an appartment I could really afford because I had no idea how to manage money, and looked for a job. My parent called and said “okay, you’re an adult now, so we’re changing the billing adress on your credit cards. You need to support yourself now.” The least they could have done, in my opinion, was cancel the cards.
A year later I had 15K in debt. My credit is a train wreck because I just didn’t pay bills because I didn’t have the cash at the time. But yeah, I charged an iPod because I wanted it. Because credit didn’t feel like real money.
The disservice these people are doing their children is heartbreaking. I used to blame my parents for cutting me off, but now I’m only angry about the way that they raised me. Kids don’t learn responsibility and money management from TV, or from osmosis. If you don’t teach them delayed gratification, saving, and budgeting, you can’t expect them to just know it. I didn’t, and I almost went bankrupt. You can look at me and call me stupid and irresponsible, but where was I supposed to learn this stuff? I didn’t get it from my parents, or from school, or from anywhere in our culture. I remember calling home in tears because i was in over my head, and my mother snapped, “You need to stop wasting your money on crap. You can’t have everything you want you, know.” Gee, thanks, Mom. That would have been handy a decade ago.
Have you ever TRIED to get a shiny object away from a three-year-old who wanted to hold it? With kids that age, possession is often nine-tenths of the law. (or tantrum, as the case may be)
Heck, I can remember when I was 7 or 8 giving a few toys to my 4-yr-old cousin because I got annoyed that he was screaming about not wanting to give them back when his parents were leaving after visiting–I find it amusing to think that even at that age I was relatively unattached to possessions.
Thanks for sharing that, Obsidian.
My own theory is that a person has the best chance for happiness, not when they have a lot of money and material goods, but when the amount of money and stuff they have slowly but steadily increases over the course of their lifetime (and I suspect that the rule applies to other things besides wealth, too.) In other words, it’s not how your circumstances are right now, but whether they’re improving. And if you have everything when you’re a kid, there’s nowhere to go but down.
Yes, thanks, Obsidian. I think your example proves my point pretty well. I can’t speak from my own experience with too much as a kid because I was raised by a working poor family, but it does seem to me that I have a much better handle on the value of a dollar, budgeting, waiting, making do, getting creative, and just doing without. To me, that’s just life.
As a proponent of Voluntary Simplicity, I must respectfully disagree with this. I don’t think your best chance for happiness is slowly accumulating things; I think your best chance for happiness is evaluating your life and making choices that make sense for you, and learning to be happy with what you’ve got. Our whole North American culture is based on MORE, and I think that’s a recipe for unhappiness and discontent.
Fair enough; there’s nothing here I disagree with. I believe in learning to be happy with what you’ve got. It’s just that, once you’ve learned to be happy with what you’ve got, if “what you’ve got” increases, you can gratefully say, “Oh, a bonus! How nice!”; but if it decreases, you have to re-learn how to be happy at that new, lower level. I guess. Or something like that. (The computer I’m typing this on is one that I’ve had for a few years, and plan on keeping for a few more, but when I do eventually replace it, I hope it will be replaced with something better, not something crappier. And I’m content with my dial-up connection for now, but it might be hard to go back to dial-up after living with something faster.)
I think it is possible to raise well adjusted kids in the upper middle class. It’s just all about what you teach them. One of my best friends came from a comfortable background, including attending an expensive private school. However, he was taught financial responsibilty, and I owe him a lot for sitting down with me teaching me how to make a budget I could live with. He made me a spreadsheet callendar that showed the progressive reduction of my debt, and then the growth of my savings account after that if I kept to it. It went out for 3 years and ended with me having a nice savings amount. It was so utterly kindergarden in it’s level, but NO ONE had ever taught me the simple concept of saving for something.
Together, we figured out how to put half my income towards debt payments. Not long after we set this up, the start-up I was working for folded, and I was out of a job. I can’t even tell you how much it reduced my stress level to know that my budget was already in place to live off of unemployment, so I could job hunt without panic and fear.
I think parents want to do the best for thier kids-- my Dad’s money is all self made. No one had to choose to teach him to budget-- it was a daily fact of his parents’ lives just to keep them all fed. I think he just wanted to provide for his kids the lifestyle he’d never had, to make sure we didn’t go without. The consequences were unintended.
(Though last year when my 19 year old sister called me and giddily declared, “Mom and Dad got me a credit card,” I called and read them the riot act like you wouldn’t believe.)
Btw, Thudlow, having to go back is incredibly hard and is the ugly underside to being a former spoiled brat. If your parents teach you that generic is bad (from shampoo to medicine to cereal), say, learning to have a tight food budget is that much harder. Realizing you’re going to have to work very hard for many years not to improve, but simply to get back to the standard of living you were raised to, is demoralizing and demotivating.
I always assumed that wealthy people DO teach their children how to manage money successfully, assuming that they themselves have that knowledge. Wouldn’t that be among the habits learned in the home? The wealthy people I’ve known have been tightwads.
But the tendency to spoil children isn’t really tied to money anyway - it’s more a mentality of keeping them from growing into full adults by interceding between them and the Real World. It’s parents who create an illusory reality which serves their own needs and doesn’t facilitate the child engaging in reality themselves. My Hubby was quite spoiled by his mom in that manner, and she had no money at all.
This thing with giving kids expensive parties, in a lot of cases it isn’t FOR the kid - it’s to alleviate the parents’ guilt at never being home, or to let the parents show off their money, or enable them to compete with whoever they’re trying to impress.
I know kids are stubborn, but they’re also malleable - if a parent makes the effort to sell them on a party or gifts that are appropriate to their lifestyle, most kids WILL adapt.