by Ron Lieber
Why Do You Ask?
Having sworn off silence and embraced tough questions, we can all but guarantee that our kids are going to ask a lot about money. We’re going to try to answer honestly. But what’s the best way to begin, once we get over the joy and delight in being asked?
In my years of research on the topic, I’ve determined that there is one answer that works best for any and every money question. The response is itself a question: Why do you ask?
This response is useful for many reasons. The first is a practical one. By training myself to respond this way, I’ve guaranteed one thing for certain: that I will have at least 10 seconds to think through potential responses, depending on the reason for the question. Yes, it’s a stalling tactic. But be careful. There is a right way and a wrong way to question the question, given how vulnerable kids are to the belief that certain topics are off-limits. So I always try to say “why do you ask?” in the most encouraging tone possible. If your tone sounds suspicious, like an accusation or an expression of disapproval, it may shut down the whole conversation.
A child’s response to “why do you ask?” often falls into one of two categories. The question may result from idle playground or lunch table talk. One kid says that his parents are rich or that the girl on the other side of the room has a parent who has a million dollars. So it’s only natural that children will come home wanting to know how their parents stack up to some crazy number that originated with a fourth grader or a freshman trying desperately to get attention. But since the information that they’re bringing home is usually wrong (or at least unprovable), it’s often easy to redirect the conversation. We may know where people live and some of the things that they have, but we usually don’t know how much money they make or what’s in their bank account or what they had to borrow to buy their homes or their cars. That often ends the conversation there, since kids’ curiosity may well be about exaggerated differences between their peers and themselves.
The second category of money questions springs from fear of some sort. Younger kids may overhear parents fighting about money or arguing about it with someone on the phone. Or they may take in fragments of an innocent conversation and blow it all out of proportion. Maybe something in a newspaper about layoffs or the economy catches an older child’s eye. The “why do you ask?” strategy gives you a shot at finding the source of the anxiety. Once it’s known, it often becomes clear that most kids, the younger ones especially, have no interest in the net worth number they may have been inquiring about. They probably don’t have much sense of what it means to be poor either, even if they voiced concern that your family is about to be. They just want reassurance that things are going to be OK—that they won’t have to move or leave their school or give up a pet.
Asking “why do you ask?” helps with nonmoney questions too, by the way. I have a friend who was innocently sitting with her father one day when her six-year-old son walked into the room, fixed them with a gaze, and asked them this: “When are we going to start having some sex around here?” At this, many parents would stutter about, delivering a highly abbreviated version of the birds and the bees conversation. But the boy didn’t want sex, not with his mother or anyone else. He didn’t even know what it was. He eventually revealed that he had somehow managed to steal a few minutes in front of a television while the show Family Guy was on. It was there that he got the idea that throwing the word sex around might get him some attention.
Girls, Too
As we move from why they’re asking to how we’re going to answer, there’s one other overarching issue to keep in mind: gender. A number of polls and studies lay out disturbing parental tendencies. Parents are much more likely to talk to boys than girls about investing, protecting their personal information online, how credit card interest and fees work, whether it’s wise to use check-cashing services and what a 401(k) is. Teen boys in one Charles Schwab survey earned an average of $1,880 from chores and jobs, while the girls earned $1,372. This seems to affect expectations, too, since the boys believed that they would earn a starting salary of $79,700, versus $66,200 for the girls.
And what do girls get more of? Parents tend to talk to them more often about giving money away.
Grown women who recognize their own childhoods in this scenario tend to resent this treatment deeply. Women who learned as much as or more than their brothers did are grateful that their parents took this part of their upbringing seriously. So if your daughters don’t ask the same impossible questions that your sons do, don’t breathe a sigh of relief; all it means is that the girls are probably not learning as much as they need to know. These statistics are disgraceful, and our daughters shouldn’t end up on the wrong side of them.
The Big Questions
So now we’re ready. No silence. No lying. No gender preferences. A home as a place of intrigue. And asking why they’re asking, every time.
Here’s a list of the questions that many parents will hear at least once.
Are we poor?
There’s a pretty good chance that this will be one of the first money questions your kids will ask. Parents who are in decent financial shape are often taken aback when it comes up. But starting in preschool, kids notice that other kids have things that they want to have too. This tends to weigh more heavily on their minds than the fact that they probably have some things that other friends don’t. So the younger ones who don’t know any better may wonder if being poor is the reason they don’t have all the things they want. This is doubly true if their parents have recently turned down a request for a new toy or gadget, especially if that response included a fib about whether the family could afford it or not. If you ask why they’re asking, that may be the reason. Still, this is a relatively easy question to answer for families who are not actually poor: People who are poor don’t have everything they need, like food and clothing and medicine. We have those things, so we’re not poor.
This gets trickier if you’ve just lost a job or have been without one for some time. Then, the inquiry may be more about what might happen next. Older kids may have figured out that sometimes families have to move to save money or because of foreclosure or so a parent can take a new job. Because the future is unknowable, it’s probably best not to make any guarantees. But you can promise that no matter what happens, you have friends and family who are going to try to help and that you will do everything you can to avoid changing everyone’s lives too much.
Are we going to have to move?
When an unexpected financial setback hits, kids tend to think about the most basic things first. So children who are old enough to understand that their parents pay a lot of money each month for the place that they live naturally wonder if a job loss will lead to having to leave it. It’s best for parents to address this fear directly.
Anne Hickling and her husband both have degrees in developmental psychology, and they tend to tackle difficult topics head-on with their 13-year-old son and 9-year-old daughter. The death of her father led to many family conversations about the precise physiology of the end of human life, for instance. So when she lost her job of 11 years in May 2014, there was no false cheer and no lying when the kids asked whether they would have to move from their home in Phoenix. “We said we don’t know,” she said, “but that we were planning to stay here in the city and that they could keep going to the same school.” The lingering question, which the family discusses, is whether they might have to sell their house and move to a smaller or less costly one, though it would probably be in a neighborhood closer to the public school they now attend. Staying where they are means much higher gas expenses, in addition to their current housing costs.
Right after Anne lost her job, the Hicklings also told the kids that they had some money saved up and that the company she used to work for was giving her some money to help. But they also warned the kids that the family would need to be much more careful about how they spent their money because they did not know how long it would take Anne to find a new jo
b. In these sorts of circumstances, we forget how little children know about how the world actually works. “My daughter would ask me if I had gotten a job that day,” Anne recalled. “She thought I would apply and just get one, not that it was competitive. The questions were ongoing at first, because she was thinking that there was this infinite pool of jobs, and it was just a question of my snagging one.”
As Anne’s unemployment extended into its fourth month, her children were growing accustomed to the fact that reducing expenses would make it easier for the family to avoid having to move. At times, they were disappointed, like when the family canceled a cruise with relatives. Sometimes, they pined for a first-run movie. But Anne’s daughter also volunteered to sit out summer camp to save money. She and her father are big fans of Halloween, often dressing in coordinated outfits. They had grand plans for 2014 and had hoped to dress as Tinker Bell and Captain Hook, but she devised a backup plan to recycle her Little Red Riding Hood and her father’s Big Bad Wolf costumes from an earlier holiday. Even as they willingly sacrifice on Halloween, however, it’s clear that the kids are hoping things will change soon. “They recognize my job interview clothes now,” Anne said. “And they get excited.”
Any questions about living with less have the potential to sound more like accusations when parents have gotten divorced. After all, reasonable kids might observe that their parents have chosen to create the financial difficulty by living apart and creating another set of housing expenses. This can be hard for a parent to take but also hard to avoid, especially if both parents end up moving immediately to cheaper homes, forcing kids to shuttle between two new living spaces that both compare unfavorably to where they lived before.
Andrea Dutton, the mother of a 7-year-old daughter and 4-year-old son in Gainesville, Florida, addressed this issue simply and directly during her divorce. “I’m not apologizing to them about it,” she said. “I want them to realize that the right decision is not always the easy one. I’d rather have them see that you can do the right thing and get out of a bad situation even if it means taking a hit financially. We’re all so much happier now.”
The three of them live in a rental home that is 1,000 square feet smaller than the home they once owned. Sometimes, Dutton’s son will ask about the big house and say that he hasn’t seen it in such a long time. “I want to go see it,” he’ll say. But Dutton doesn’t have to explain why they can’t go inside anymore. Now, her daughter takes on the role of the comforting grown-up and pipes up to respond. “She’ll say to him ‘I like this new house so much better, don’t you?’” Dutton explained. “I’m trying to make sure that she doesn’t feel like she has to take care of us too much at this age.” (The week I finished the copyedits on this manuscript, the landlord agreed to sell them the house.)
Are we rich?
Why are they asking? With younger children, the question may not be about their own families at all. Instead, it’s probably about their friend or classmate. While huddled over lunch, a gaggle of friends may have made a collective decision that a particular kid is rich, usually because of some article of clothing or the size of the child’s bedroom or playroom or basement or toy collection. Having determined that someone they know is rich, they naturally want to know if they are too.
Once we know why they’re asking, it’s probably worth actually trying to define the term. This is challenging, since adults themselves don’t agree about what it means to be rich. Ask some open-ended questions to steer the conversation. Does it just mean someone has a lot of stuff and a big house? (That’s the usual definition for younger kids.) How much stuff? And what kind? Do we know how much the stuff costs? Try to make the end point of this line of questioning the fact that we can’t really know very much about other people’s money. We don’t usually know how much they make at their job or whether a relative bought them the house and lots of the things in it. It’s also worth questioning whether being rich matters much anyway. The most important attributes for friends and classmates are things like kindness, loyalty, creativity, and generosity anyhow. Kids who lack those qualities are no fun otherwise, no matter how much stuff they have.
Some children, older ones especially, will turn their sights on their own family. Maybe it’s the new and bigger house that’s gotten them thinking, or the last vacation. Or it’s the comments their friends make when a parent drops them off at school in a new car.
One way to respond is by putting things in a larger context. They may already know from school or books that the vast majority of Americans earn more money and have more possessions than the majority of people on Earth. So we can start by noting that the United States probably qualifies as rich, and most of the children who live here without having to worry about food and shelter are well off. This may be too abstract for some children. In our immediate communities, after all, we often spend most of our time with people who are roughly like us. Some of our friends have a bit more and some have a bit less, but trying to place ourselves on a more-or-less-rich scale locally may be impossible or too subtle for younger children.
But money and stuff aren’t the only ways to define rich. Ask kids if they have any other ideas for what the word means to them, or try some prompts if they’re not sure. Perfect health? Living grandparents? Tons of cousins? Friends within walking distance? An amazing park nearby? Teachers and administrators who care deeply about helping the kids in their school? A god that they believe in? This is also your cue to tell them some stories about how far your family has come. A hardscrabble immigrant saga? A move from the farm to the city? Slavery to freedom? This is an especially enlightening conversation to have when grandparents are around to share some history.
This more personal context should help kids answer the question themselves. But that doesn’t make it any easier for parents to spit out the answer that is probably true for many of us once we take all the data into account. While speaking to teachers and administrators at the Gordon School in Providence, Rhode Island, in the fall of 2013, Heather Johnson, a sociology professor at Lehigh University who is an expert on race and class issues among children, told her own tale of what happened when her third-grade son asked if the family was rich.
“My knee-jerk reaction was to be like ‘No-o-o-o, we’re not rich. Where did you hear that?!’” she said, describing how tempting it was to say those words out loud and how hard it is to acknowledge that she is wealthy by almost any conceivable definition. “I had to stop and remind myself that I’m out here giving lectures and that I can’t do that. It was one of the hardest things I’ve had to do as a parent, but I looked him in the eye and said yes. And that was the end of it. You’re supposed to wait for them to follow up and get into it, but that was it. He wanted to know, and I told him the truth.”
Why can’t I have it if I’m going to pay for it with my own money?
Insert the item that pushes you over the edge. Leather pants? Violent video games? Tattoos? Shiny automobile accessories that cost more than the vehicle? Even one more Lego? No judgments here. Your house, your rules.
Still, it’s possible to wield authority in a way that doesn’t make you an authoritarian parent. Such parents make demands but aren’t particularly responsive, and kids may find their reign to be a bit arbitrary, given how hard it can be to get an explanation for various rulings. Authoritative parents are different. They, too, have high standards and plenty of rules, but they’re also highly responsive. It’s OK for kids to ask them for explanations and engage in debate. Decades of research have shown that children of authoritative parents tend to have better outcomes in all sorts of areas.
The tricky thing here is that even you may not be sure how to articulate why another American Girl doll is excessive or a belly button tattoo (and the clothing to show it off) doesn’t feel right. Don’t put pressure on yourself to explain it in the moment. But promise an answer eventually, sooner rather than later. Your child may not agree with whatever you have to say, but your well-chosen words may resonate much later, wh
en your children are making much bigger financial decisions when they’re no longer living under your roof.
Why couldn’t you be an entrepreneur or doctor or lawyer or investment banker like my friend’s parents instead of a teacher or social worker or psychologist, so I could have a horse or we could sit behind the dugout or we could have a weekend house near a mountain or ocean or lake?
Reading this question in a book may sound funny, but the only laughs are probably coming from those of us who have never had it asked of us. Hear this sort of question from your kid, and it sounds like an accusation. Our children have sat in judgment, and we’ve come up wanting in the provider department. If we have doubts about our career choice or trajectory, this will dig even deeper. Even if the idea of having failed them seems ridiculous, it’s easy to blame ourselves for having inserted them into the types of environments where the luxuries they lack seem so important to them in the first place. And seriously, whose kids are these who care so much about things that cost so much? Ours? Really? How did that even happen?!
This type of curiosity is genuine, but it feels awfully aggressive. While we owe our kids answers to even the most obnoxious-sounding questions, it’s perfectly fine to gather some thoughts first and wait until we feel calmer.
Joline Godfrey, who helps wealthy families talk more constructively about money, suggests one approach. It’s born of her own nonlinear career path: She worked in a family dairy, married into a wealthy family in the timber business, got divorced, became a social worker, moved into human resources at Polaroid, taught at-risk girls, and then became a counselor to families at the opposite end of the income spectrum.
The default is owning your own choices, as opposed to talking about somebody else’s choices: “I could have made a different life choice, but I’d really be a grump as a parent because I wouldn’t be doing something that is important to me. I’m a much more loving person because I have integrity and am true to myself, which doesn’t mean that somebody else who makes different choices is not.”
