by Dave Ramsey
At the same time, don’t confuse a war for contentment with a war on success. When someone in your life gets it right and is able to enjoy a purchase, celebrate that success and point it out to your child.
Don’t just look for teachable moments in other people’s failures; you can also find them in the normal, day-to-day activities of your kids. When my girls were in middle school, they were always asking to go to the mall to hang out with their friends. They were thirteen-year-old mall rats, because possibly the most social animal on the planet is a thirteen-year-old girl. Occasionally, I was recruited to play taxi driver and take them and their friends to the mall. The ride over was anything but lacking in conversation. Wow, could they talk! But we had a ritual as I pulled up to drop them off at the mall entrance. I gave them all the dad safety warnings, then ended with my “happiness talk.” I would ask them to pick me up something while they were in the mall. This thrilled them, because being sent on a mission actually gave them a real reason to be there. My request was always the same. I’d say, “Pick me up a box of happiness while you are in there. I know happiness must be in there, because you are always in there looking for it. There must be a store somewhere between Gap and the food court called The Happiness Store that boxes this stuff up and sells it because people of all ages, including thirteen-year-olds, are in the mall every day looking for it. So my only requirement for taxiing you is that you bring me a box of happiness.” Of course, this embarrassed my daughters. They’d roll their eyes, and as they all walked off, one of their friends would say, “Your dad is so weird.”
This made me happy because I was able to accomplish two goals. First, I was able to teach a lesson on what is real and what can’t be purchased. And second, I got to embarrass a teenager—every parent’s dream.
Change Their Perspective
RACHEL: The fourth way to fight back against discontentment is to show your child how blessed she is no matter how much she does or doesn’t have. That’s a perspective I gained while volunteering in Peru. One of the best gifts Mom and Dad gave us Ramsey kids was the chance to go on foreign mission trips. I took my first trip to Peru when I was twelve, and the experience was definitely an eye opener. It was the first time in my life I came face to face with complete poverty, meeting boys and girls my age who had practically nothing. That first trip made a huge impact on how I viewed my life and especially my stuff.
It was my second trip to Peru, though, that really changed me. I was seventeen at the time, and I noticed something about the people I met there: They were happy. No, not just happy; they were filled with joy and contentment, even though they probably couldn’t even comprehend all the comforts I took for granted every day. I struggled with that for the first few days of the trip. I thought, How can they be so joyful with nothing while I struggle with discontentment with so much? During that trip, my whole mindset changed. I began to wonder how my attitude and even my daily routine might change if I took a lesson from these new friends. I started to see what my life could be like if I weren’t so concerned with getting the latest phone or a new jacket—if I kept my stuff and the pursuit of more stuff from being the center of my world.
Later in the trip, we served breakfast and lunch to a group of people living in a remote village. Between meals, we played games with the kids and led a Bible study for the adults. There was one precious girl who stuck to me like glue the entire day. She had tattered clothes, tangled hair, and dirt all over her face. What really stood out to me, though, was her smile. She had an amazing, bright, beautiful smile. Everywhere I went, she was right there at my side, chatting away. Of course, I couldn’t understand most of what she was saying—my two high school Spanish classes didn’t stand a chance of keeping up with her steady stream of girlish excitement. That excitement hit its peak when I pulled out a pack of stickers from my purse and handed it to her. It was simply a pack of purple stickers you’d find for a few bucks on the rack at any Target store, but to this girl, it was a sacred treasure. She tore into the pack and immediately covered her face and arms with them. Soon, we were surrounded by a group of children, all laughing and playing as they passed the stickers around. Watching all of this unfold and seeing how happy these kids were with something so simple is something I’ll never forget.
That afternoon, as our group was packing up to leave, my new little friend ran up and handed me the tiny, dirty keychain doll she’d been carrying around all day. At first I didn’t understand, and she was talking too fast for me to keep up. It finally dawned on me that she was giving me her toy. I said, “No, no! That’s yours. You keep it.” But she kept pressing it into my hand.
I turned to our translator, who said, “She wants you to have it. She says she doesn’t need it anymore because she has you for a friend.” That is the moment I realized how priceless contentment is—how meaningful it is to truly let go of all the stuff I thought mattered and focus on the things that really do.
I know that’s a hard lesson to teach kids, so I encourage you to give your children opportunities to experience it for themselves. You don’t have to send them off to Peru (although it’s not a bad idea, if you can), but you should look for ways to get them out of their normal, everyday lives and show them what life looks like through someone else’s eyes. For me, it made all the difference.
IDENTIFY THE STAGES
DAVE: The enemy of contentment is not that smart, and he certainly isn’t subtle. Discontentment will tear through your child’s life like a bull in a china shop. The bad news is that a lot of stuff can end up broken. The good news, though, is that discontentment leaves a trail that you, as the parent, can follow. There are specific things to look for to see if you have discontentment breaking through your lines of defense. We call these the three stages of discontentment.
Stage One: Jealousy and Envy
The first stage you need to watch for is jealousy or envy. Watch how your child reacts when one of his friends receives a gift or makes a fun purchase. The perfect response would be to celebrate the friend’s good fortune. If your child does that, you know he has a healthy view of contentment, and he can set goals for how he might work toward the same blessing. However, if toxic jealousy spills out, you know the enemy has broken through your lines. And worse yet is Jealousy’s evil aunt, Envy. Jealousy says, “I want what you have.” Envy is worse, because she says, “I want what you have, but I can’t have it, so I don’t want you to have it either.” Envy typically occurs when jealousy is allowed to incubate and grow. Teach your child to celebrate the blessings of others and develop goals to achieve similar blessings. Jealousy and envy are the first signs you are losing the battle.
Stage Two: Anxiety
Once jealousy and envy set in, we often see the next stage of discontentment’s heart infection: anxiety. When the heart begins filling with discontentment, children and adults start to fret over what they don’t have. They live in a comparison game of life, always measuring their purchases and the quality of their lives against someone else’s—and always coming up short. People at this level of discontentment are perpetually anxious, feeling like they never measure up, and they often suffer from a real lack of joy. Overall, they are very unhappy people.
Keep in mind that some outside messages caused this infection. So the cure is to cut off or, at the very least, cut back on the messages. If the message is coming from a little friend who never hears the word no, who defines himself by his stuff, and who is constantly bragging to your child about his latest purchase, you will have to take action to protect your child. Deny that little friend access to your child until you are certain those messages have stopped. This may sound harsh, but if you do not deal with the source of the infection, it will never heal, your child will be unhealthy, and you may lose the war entirely. Translation: I don’t want my kids hanging out with shallow, spoiled brats who brag incessantly.
If the source of the infection of discontentment is marketing or advertising, pull the plug. Less TV will likely cure the patient. Fin
d where your kids are getting the messages that cause the meltdowns and cut off the messenger—whether it’s TV, the internet, video games, friends, or carpool buddies. If your child were hanging out with the wrong kind of friends, watching inappropriate shows, or visiting sites encouraging him to do drugs, you would cut it off if you were any kind of decent parent. Discontentment is a socially accepted drug problem in this culture, but not for you or your family. As a parent, you need to regard it as dangerous as drug addiction; act like it can destroy your child—because it can.
Stop It at the Source
RACHEL: This is something I’ve seen a million times: People flirt with whatever it is that drives them into a crazy fit of discontentment. For some people, it’s hanging out at the mall. For others, it’s spending hours on the internet researching new gadgets or cars they can’t afford to buy. For me, it was Facebook.
One night during my senior year of college, I was sitting in my apartment scrolling through Facebook, catching up on everything my friends were doing. I saw a status update from a friend who had recently taken a trip to Paris with her mom. She had posted a ton of pictures, so of course I started flipping through them. I saw shots of her eating at incredible restaurants, visiting all the art museums and tourist attractions, and enjoying the city with her mother. But the pictures that really got my attention were the ones with shopping bags in the background. I’m talking bags and bags of new clothes. And not just any clothes; these were high-end designer clothes with the logos big and bright on the front of the shopping bags. Before I realized it, thirty minutes had passed, and I had studied every picture not once but twice. By then, I was absolutely burning with jealousy.
I wish I could say I was a mature young woman who was happy for my friend who had a great trip to Paris. But that’s not who I was at that moment. Sitting there on my sofa that night, I was a five-year-old little girl whining and saying things like, “It’s not fair. I want to go to Paris like she did. Why can’t I go?” I’m embarrassed to admit it, but it’s the truth. Then, after about two minutes of wallowing in those thoughts, it was as though all the conversations my parents had ever had with me about contentment woke me up from my selfish daze. I knew exactly what was going on: I had a jealousy problem brought on by comparing my life to other people’s lives through Facebook. Problem identified. Solution? I deactivated my Facebook account right then and there.
Later, when I finally came back down to earth from my mile-high pity party, I couldn’t believe I had allowed Facebook pictures to get me so worked up. I knew I had an incredible life, so why was I trying to compare it to other people’s status updates and travel pictures? I realized Facebook was not good for me—at least not at that point in my life. At the time, I figured I’d just back away for a few days, but after going a little while without comparing my life to anyone else’s life, it was actually extremely liberating. I didn’t go back and reactivate my account for several years, and even now, I don’t spend time endlessly scrolling through what other people are doing. Cutting off the source of the discontentment infection was the cure.
This is the world your kids are living in. Thanks to “reality” TV and social media, your children are growing up in a culture that feeds discontentment by giving your kids a steady stream of what everyone else has, what kind of vacations they take, how nice their houses are, what kind of cars they drive, and on and on. It’s an endless comparison game, and it feeds discontentment. I’m not saying your teens shouldn’t watch reality TV or have social media accounts (under your supervision), but I am saying you should be on the lookout. Talk to them about how easy it is to fall into the discontentment trap just by “innocently” looking through their friends’ photos on Facebook. I’ve been there, and it’s not a fun place to be.
Stage Three: Defining Themselves by Their Stuff
DAVE: Remember in the movie Jerry Maguire when Tom Cruise’s character says to his wife, “You complete me,” and women everywhere melted? The last stage of the discontentment infection is when your child says to stuff, “You define me.” If you are only what you own or what you purchase, you seriously aren’t much—except shallow. In Thomas J. Stanley’s wonderful book Stop Acting Rich, he describes a whole culture of “adults” who are unable to control their money and build wealth because they are always acting rich. They buy things they don’t need with money they don’t have to impress people they don’t even like or might not even know. They just want to look good. Their need to impress others is driving them into the poorhouse. Like I said before, Texans sometimes refer to this as “big hat, no cattle.” Who you really are doesn’t matter so much as who you appear to be. People this shallow define themselves by their stuff, and their need to look good ends up ruining their lives.
I’ll Be Happy When . . .
RACHEL: I’d like to be able to say that, growing up in the Ramsey house, I never struggled with “stuffitis”—the pursuit of stuff to make me happy. But sometimes, discontentment snuck up on me. I vividly remember standing in a store with a friend at fifteen years old and saying, “Look at that jacket! I love it! If I could only get that jacket for this winter, I will be happy.” So, on a whim, I bought it. And I did feel happy . . . for a little while. A few months later, I walked into another store and saw another jacket I wanted. I thought, Oh wow! I was wrong before. This is the jacket that will make me happy! So I bought that one too.
A year later, I was looking through my winter clothes and found both of those “perfect” jackets in my closet. Deep in the closet. Okay, stuffed all the way in the back of my closet with other clothes piled on top of them. When I saw those jackets laying there all crumpled up, the magic and excitement were suddenly gone. There were no lights shining down from heaven, no blinking neon signs flashing “Happiness Here” floating above them. They just looked like two old, forgotten, slightly out-of-style jackets. I didn’t think twice as I scooped them up and threw them in the pile of other clothes destined for the consignment shop.
Those two jackets were supposed to make me happy, but they ended up buried under an avalanche of other clothes I hardly remember buying in the first place. At that moment, at sixteen years old, it hit me like a ton of bricks: Stuff is not going to fulfill me! It was a powerful moment because it brought me face to face with what Mom and Dad had been telling me all my life. I suddenly had a shift in my mindset where it wasn’t just listening to what my parents were telling me; it was a principle that had played out in my own life. I think Mom and Dad could have told me that every day and I still wouldn’t have truly understood what they meant until I had that “Aha!” moment while looking in my closet. So as you work with your child, it’s important to continually reinforce this principle, but don’t be so strict and rules-based that she can’t make some discoveries (and mistakes) on her own. As frustrating as it is for a parent, that experience is what really drives the lesson deep into a child’s heart.
It’s Not a Destination
DAVE: As parents, of course we don’t want to intentionally raise children who are so shallow that they define themselves by a purchase or an item. So how do we prevent it in the midst of a culture where it is virtually the norm? By being careful to celebrate the accomplishments and character qualities that enabled them to make the purchase, you are reminding your children that they are not defined by the abundance of their possessions. Purchases are always the result of a goal, not the end goal. Never let a child utter the words, “I will be happy when . . .” Contentment isn’t a destination; it’s not somewhere you’re leaving from, and it isn’t somewhere you’re heading to. Contentment is a manner of traveling. It’s an attitude of peace and joy where you are, even while you are working to be somewhere else.
FIGHTING FOR THE CURE
So we’ve identified the war. We’ve talked about how to fight it. We’ve identified stages of discontentment to look for in your children. And now we have great news: We have the antidote to the discontentment infection of the heart. The antidote is so strong that if yo
u use it often enough, you can virtually ensure the heart will not become infected with discontentment. Drum roll . . . are you ready?
Gratitude.
A heart filled with gratitude leaves no room for discontentment.
Why is it that a two-year-old is often happier playing in the box a toy came in rather than playing with the actual toy? Why is it that children living in poverty in third-world countries seem happier and more content than kids in wealthy nations? Because neither is caught in the trap of comparisons. They don’t know what they are missing out on. They are simply grateful.
Don’t Raise Ugly Kids
Gratitude is really, really attractive. A child who is genuinely grateful makes you want to do anything for her, and that is true of adults as well. As parents, we’ve all experienced those wonderful, sweet, humbling moments when our children look at us with eyes filled with gratitude for something we’ve done for them. At that moment, they are the most beautiful, most precious children they could ever be. And sadly, most of us have had the opposite experience—seeing a child open a present and acting ungrateful. There are few things uglier than that. The child’s attitude was so ugly, you may have threatened to return all the birthday or Christmas gifts as a reaction to the lack of gratitude.
My friend Zig Ziglar used to say you have to develop an attitude of gratitude. You have to learn to count your blessings. Have you ever thought about what you would pay for an eye if yours were put out? Have you ever thought about what you would pay to replace one of those amazing things you have at the end of each arm—that miraculous machine called a hand? We all have things to count as blessings, but we also have a tendency to lose our sense of awe and our sense of gratitude. Make sure your heart is full of gratitude for the blessings in your own life. Let your children witness this in you, and they will want to respond with gratitude for the blessings in their own lives.
