by Dave Barry
Roughly a month after the child’s birth date, you remark: “Hey, doesn’t (name of child) have a birthday coming up?”
As this chart shows, we men do have standards for child care and housework. We would appreciate it if you women would make an honest effort to see things from our perspective for a change, and not get all snitty every time we make some teensy little mistake such as forgetting to feed the children for several days, or accidentally leaving a child behind at a turnpike service plaza. On behalf of all men everywhere, I ask you women to please cut us a little slack, OK? Also, would you mind fixing us a sandwich? We’re hungry! Thanks!
Now that we’ve dealt with child care and housework, let’s tackle the issue that really causes trouble in marriages: money. Married couples argue about money more than any other topic. In fact, they usually start arguing about it before they’re actually married, when they are planning their wedding.
When I say “they” in the previous sentence, I am of course referring to the bride-to-be and her mother, since they are the ones who plan the wedding. As a rule, the groom-to-be has nothing to do with it. Sometimes the groom-to-be doesn’t even know he’s getting married until the bride-to-be orders him to rent formal wear. At that point the bride-to-be and her mom have spent months poring over bridal magazines the size of meat lockers and talking to wedding planners, printers, florists, caterers, banquet managers, bandleaders, dressmakers, photographers, videographers, jewelers, cake makers, confectioners, and so on, making the thousands of critical decisions necessary to stage a modern American wedding, which involves the same amount of planning as the Normandy Invasion, although of course the wedding is far more expensive.
Eventually two facts penetrate the brain of the groom-to-be: (1) he really and truly is going to get married, and (2) the wedding is going to cost more money than either he or the bride-to-be has ever spent on anything. This strikes the groom-to-be as insane. If he truly believes that he is an equal partner in the relationship, and he is also a complete idiot, he voices this opinion to the bride-to-be.
This is when they have their first big money-related argument. The bride-to-be’s position is that their wedding is the culmination of all her girlhood dreams and the sacred public declaration of their love for, and eternal commitment to, each other. The groom-to-be’s position is that it is basically a big party requiring uncomfortable rented clothing. He will point out that if they took the wedding money and instead invested it in the stock market, it could pay for their children’s college educations. Of course, if the groom-to-be actually had the wedding money, he would not invest it in the stock market; he would invest it in a motorcycle. But that’s irrelevant, because the groom-to-be never wins this argument. The bride-to-be always wins, because she employs a powerful, persuasive, and logical argument: crying.* 23
So they have a lavish wedding, and it is a wonderful affair documented for posterity by a riveting, professionally produced three-hour video that nobody except the bride and her mother is able to watch for more than ninety seconds without lapsing into a coma. But the pattern has been set: Just as men and women have different standards for child care and housework, they have different priorities about how to spend money.
WOMEN’S TOP TEN FINANCIAL PRIORITIES
1.
Shoes
2.
Food
3.
Shoes
4.
Clothing
5.
Shoes that go with the clothing
6.
Shelter, defined as “a place to keep shoes”
7.
Jewelry
8.
Shoes that go with the jewelry
9.
Saving for the future
10.
Shoes that will look good in the future
MEN’S TOP TEN FINANCIAL PRIORITIES
1.
A motorcycle
Obviously, with these differing priorities, unless the couple has access to an unlimited amount of money and closet space, there will be conflicts over spending. And if these conflicts are not resolved, they can grow and fester, eventually forming lesions that develop into pustules with circular pores, through which masses of spores are released.
No! Wait! Those are the symptoms of Asian soybean rust, a disease that, according to the American Soybean Association, “has the potential to very negatively affect the U.S. soybean industry . . . with possible yield losses of up to 80 percent or more.”
But we cannot concern ourselves with that now. We have to figure out how you married couples out there can resolve your disputes about money. The key is being willing to compromise. Here’s an example of what I mean:
Let’s say a couple has been trying, with no success, to save money for a down payment on a house. One day the husband discovers that his wife has purchased a $137 pair of shoes that, as far as he can detect with his naked husband eye, are identical to a pair of shoes she bought the previous month. He confronts her about this. She points out that (1) the new shoes are not even remotely identical to the other shoes, which are a completely different shade of lime green; and (2) the husband just purchased a new cellular phone, despite the fact that the one he had was only four months old and worked fine. He replies that he needs the new phone because it has “Bluetooth,” as well as both “EDGE” and “GPRS.” She asks why he needs these features, and he becomes quite testy, because (1) he dislikes being second-guessed; and (2) he has no idea what these features actually are. He just thought they sounded cool.
So now the couple is having a full-blown money argument. If they allow the situation to deteriorate, their marriage could be in real trouble. This is why they need to compromise—to find a solution that allows both of them to feel that their needs are being met. In this case, the ideal compromise would be as follows:
• THE WIFE stomps out of the house in a blind rage and charges sixteen dozen pairs of designer shoes, running up an enormous credit card bill and thereby giving . . .
• THE HUSBAND the excuse he needs to take out a loan and buy a motorcycle.
Thus we see that, thanks to the power of compromise, what could have been an unproductive spat becomes a “win-win” situation, at least until large men come to take away all their possessions. But no matter what particular financial problems you’re having at the moment, you must always remember that marriage is a serious lifetime commitment, often lasting as long as eighteen months. You should also keep in mind that, according to the American Soybean Association, Asian soybean rust spores can remain viable for as long as fifty days.
9
TEACHING YOUR CHILDREN ABOUT MONEY
Let the Little Bastards Starve
IF YOU’RE A PARENT, one of your most important jobs is teaching your children about money. Of course, you also need to teach them about sex, but that’s easy: You just sit them down and say, “Children, sex is a very, very important topic. Ask your mother about it.”
Teaching kids about money is not so simple, and yet it is vital. As a boy, I learned about money from my dad, who was a Presbyterian minister. The most important lesson I learned from him was: If you want to have money, you should not be a Presbyterian minister.
I’m not saying we were dirt poor. We had plenty of dirt. We were more what I would call “really bad car” poor. We never had a new car, of course, but my dad couldn’t even afford a used car built by a normal car company such as Ford or Chevrolet. Our cars were built by companies that obviously had more experience making nonautomotive products—toaster ovens, maybe, or saltwater taffy. Apparently one day, the corporate executives, while sitting around a large conference table, decided to branch out from kitchen appliances or candy and take a stab at making—why not?—automobiles. Having no idea what they were doing, they produced these truly awful cars, these turdmobiles, which never achieved market success because nobody would buy them, except, of course, my dad.
For example, we were the only American family that I know of ever to
own a Hillman Minx. This was a British car that was engineered in accordance with the philosophy “For maximum passenger safety, the best car is the car that cannot, physically, be started.”
You know in movies, when they have a scene where a woman is trying to get away from a scary bad guy, and she jumps into her car and turns the key, and as the bad guy gets closer and closer the starter motor goes rrr-rrr-rrrr but the engine won’t start? In those scenes, the part of the car is usually played by a Hillman Minx wearing heavy makeup to appear to be some other brand of car. Hollywood professionals have learned that the Minx is the only car that can absolutely be relied upon, when the chips are down, to not start. My boyhood memories of family car trips involve all of us sitting in the car, ready to go somewhere, listening to the familiar sounds of the Minx going rrr-rrr-rrrr and my dad saying non-Presbyterian words.
This was actually a good thing, because the Minx also had a feature—at least ours did—whereby the steering wheel would spontaneously become disconnected from the wheels it was supposed to be steering. This happened several times to our Minx, leaving my dad spinning the wheel frantically around and around, like a pretend steering wheel on an amusement-park kiddy ride, while the Minx continued happily onward in whatever direction it had been going. This could have been very dangerous in a different car, but fortunately the Minx—this was another safety feature—had an engine that, on those rare occasions when it was running, produced approximately the same horsepower as a deceased gerbil, so we were rarely moving faster than 8 miles per hour when the Random-Steering-Disconnect Feature kicked in.
My dad finally got rid of the Minx. That was the good news. The bad news was that he replaced it—just when I got old enough to drive—with a used Nash Metropolitan. This was one of the silliest-looking cars ever made, as we can see from this advertisement for it:
Photography Credits
This is not a car designed for grown-ups. This is a car designed to be the lead character in a children’s cartoon book entitled Curtis the Car Goes to the Circus. In addition to looking silly, the Metropolitan was also ludicrously small, as we can see in these actual photographs of a Metropolitan side by side with actor Tom Cruise and a standard coffeemaker:
From left: Nash Metropolitan, Tom Cruise, coffeemaker (all images shown actual size).
Photography Credits
The first time I ever drove my own self to pick up an actual girl on an actual date, I was at the wheel of the Metropolitan. I was already insecure and self-conscious enough without having to show up at my date’s house driving a vehicle that could easily have been stolen by squirrels.
It did not help that my dad cut my hair. This was another way my family saved money. Dad got a cheap electric hair trimmer from the drugstore, and every two weeks he would give haircuts to me and my brothers. My dad went bald early—somewhere around age seventeen, to judge from the old photos of him—so he was not what you would call keenly sensitive to hairstyles. He put one of those depth guards on the clippers and styled us using the lawn-mower technique, the goal being to get all the hairs, regardless of their location on a person’s head, to be a uniform length of about three sixteenths of an inch. It’s a fine hairstyle for tennis balls, motel carpeting, certain varieties of coconut, and Eminem, but it doesn’t look good on humans. Here’s a photo of my dad cutting my hair:
SOURCE: Matthew Brady
There are a couple of things worth noting in this picture. One is that I am displaying the cheerful, upbeat body language of a prisoner about to be beheaded. The other is that I have a high forehead. Not as high as my dad’s forehead—which went all the way over the top of his head and down the back to his shirt collar—but still quite high. So, as you can imagine, I looked really terrific with the tennis-ball hairstyle. To get an idea of how terrific I looked, take a gander at this photograph of me in the early sixties, lounging on our living-room sofa in all my coolness with my cool “Hair by My Dad” hairstyle and my equally cool Soviet Union–style eyeglasses from the optical department at Macy’s in White Plains:
SOURCE: Annie Leibovitz
Note that, in addition to the excellent hairstyle and suave eyewear, I am wearing loafers without socks. How cool is THAT? You can imagine the impression I made on my date when I pulled up, looking like this, at the wheel of the Nash Metropolitan, ready to head out for a “night on the town” complete with oncoming cars crashing because their drivers were blinded by the glare of their headlights reflecting off my forehead.
I am not asking for your pity here. I had wonderful parents and a fine childhood. I’m just saying that we did not have much money in our household.
This was a good thing, because it taught me that, if I wanted something, I had to work for it. My primary source of income was mowing lawns. When springtime came and the grass started sprouting in our neighborhood, I’d go out to the shed and get out our lawn mower. I’d spend the next two hours yanking on the starter rope, which was a complete waste of time because we had (needless to say) a used lawn mower that was obviously designed by the same crack engineers responsible for the Hillman Minx. It was no more capable of internal combustion than a zucchini. Eventually I would give up, go inside, and beg my parents for money, and they’d give me some. Yes, it was hard work. But I learned the value of a dollar.
Now let’s fast-forward several decades to the current generation of young people, the generation that was produced by me and my fellow Baby Boomers. There has been a lot of criticism about us Boomers, but I think we can say in all modesty that, despite our flaws in other areas, when it comes to parenting, we have done a truly horrible job. In an effort to make life perfect for our children, we have ruined them. Instead of teaching them that they have to work for nice things, we’ve simply given them everything—money, clothes, computers, phones, TVs, travel, cars, college educations, and, most damaging of all, lawn mowers that start instantly. We have raised a generation of young people who believe they’re the center of the universe. This is sick and twisted. WE’RE the center of the universe!
No, wait, what I mean is, we Boomers have raised a generation of kids who expect their parents to provide everything for them, even after they become adults. This has led to the so-called “boomerang generation” phenomenon, wherein young people graduate from college and then—instead of going the traditional young-graduate route of getting a crappy job and living in a crappy apartment furnished largely with anti-roach devices—they move back in with their parents.
This is just WRONG. This is AGAINST NATURE. This is like a fully grown 200-pound adult kangaroo climbing back into its mother’s pouch. We Boomers engaged in some shameful activities—indiscriminate drug use, the attempted overthrow of the U.S. government, disco—but we did not move back in with our parents. In fact, this may be our single greatest achievement, as a generation.
Generational Comparison
Name of Generation
Major Accomplishments
The “Greatest Generation”
• Overcame the brutal hardships of the Great Depression
• Won World War II
• Made the U.S. the most prosperous and powerful nation in world history
The Baby Boomers
• Did not move back in with our parents
If you’re a parent with a child in college, you need to take steps to prevent the child from moving back in with you. One excellent way is for you and your spouse to start walking around the house naked. It’s also a good idea to convert the child’s bedroom to a space that is less than ideal for human habitation, such as a racquetball court, walk-in freezer, python cage, or plutonium-storage vault. Another good idea is to tell your child: “You’re welcome to move back in with us, under one condition: Dad will cut your hair.”
If, despite these measures, your child still intends to move back in with you, you must sell your house, move, and assume a new identity. Currently, 78 percent of the people in the federal Witness Protection Program are parents hiding out from children attempti
ng to boomerang on them.
But the best way to avoid this problem is to raise your child with the right attitude about money. Here’s how:
Start When the Child Is Young
When I say “young,” I mean, “while the child is still in the delivery room.” Be firm! Just because a newborn child is crying out to be fed, that does not mean you should automatically stick a breast into his mouth. This causes the child to get used to instant gratification, which means that when he grows up, he’ll think that whenever things don’t work out exactly the way he wants them to, the solution is to stick a breast into his mouth. This is probably what happened to me.
You should also encourage children to be self-reliant and do things for themselves. At the age of two months, Donald Trump was changing his own diapers.* 24
Give the Child a Fair Allowance
What is a fair allowance? The answer depends on many factors, by which I mean: three dollars a week. That’s plenty. This allowance will teach your children the importance of financial discipline and saving to buy things that he wants. Suppose, for example, that your child really wants a computer that costs $1,395. Explain to the child that if he can save just one dollar each week out of his allowance, he’ll be able to buy the computer in only 1,395 weeks, or just a little under twenty-seven years! At this point the child may want to stick a breast into his mouth, but don’t let him.
