The Opposite of Spoiled

by Ron Lieber

  This rule is thick with values and virtues. It instills the habit of seeking out novelty and adventure as a family. It teaches the importance of neighborhood shops and the people who work in them, reverence for the artists who enrich our lives, and the value of fair play and honest dealings. And when grown-ups find the perfect recording of a favorite record from long ago for far less money than they might have imagined, the lasting joy and power of that discovery and the possibility of finding more like it calls to mind the Fun Ratio.

  There are so many other ritualistic experiences that inspire similar passion and deliver cheap thrills. Visiting garage sales? Riding all the best roller coasters? My family makes a point of seeking out local ice cream shops as much as possible while traveling. We also dutifully sample every new flavor that manages to get into our local grocer’s freezer and subscribe to a monthly ice cream delivery service where the mad scientist chefs whip up flavors such as smoked hay or candy corn or frozen essence of mango sticky rice. In the summer, we also stop at any stand where kids are selling lemonade or crafts or other things. We always ask what they are going to do with the money, and there’s often a great story that they’re eager to share.

  The rituals need not all be around spending. Every so often, it’s useful to introduce the idea of organized restraint. Joshua Yates picked some of this idea up as a middle schooler, when he worked in his family’s cherry orchard in Bigfork, Montana. His mother, Cynthia Yates, wrote personal finance books, including 1,001 Bright Ideas to Stretch Your Dollars and The Complete Guide to Creative Gift-Giving. When he was in eighth grade, she gave him a keychain for his birthday with a quote on it that said, “God first, others second, you last.” This sort of sacrifice is a lot to ask of a child, but the memory stuck with him, as it reinforced his family’s generous, principled nature.

  Yates grew up to be a sociology professor, and he and a colleague eventually assembled a book-length collection of essays from other academics about the history and idea of thrift. Part of what he discovered is that any vision for thrift in a particular era almost inevitably became something that grown-up authority figures lectured about to kids. But as the father of four in Charlottesville, Virginia, he and his wife now realize that they shouldn’t count on anyone else to define thrift and thriving for them. Politicians don’t talk much about individual thrift anymore, even if they do complain about governmental bloat. Schools no longer teach the concept much either, except as a quirky footnote to American history. “Ultimately, it has to be part of the narrative of our own family identity, that this is what living well will mean,” he said. “Our kids are going to have to navigate this on their own at some point. And the point isn’t to become a simple lifer and check out and try to buy a farm and go off the grid. I grew up in Montana so I know people who have done that!”

  So they watch The Christmas Carol as a family and talk about the lessons of the film. They recently pulled over while on a road trip to purchase lottery tickets for everyone and talked about how the game works and the long odds but also fantasized at length about how they’d all choose to spend the winnings. At home, Yates finds himself repeating something his father used to say, which is that their house is not a resort but a homestead. They all pitch in, and no one gets an allowance for doing regular chores. Yates got his first Sony Walkman as a sort of wage in exchange for work on the family cherry orchard; his kids pay for iPods by doing additional one-off jobs in return for money.

  And once in a while, often during Lent or Advent, they’ll give up something for a bit as a family. It’s not because the parents disapprove of material objects or don’t want their kids craving things and saving up for them; it’s just to reinforce the idea that it’s also possible to take a break from them and acknowledge that so many of these things are merely wants and not needs. “It teaches the kids, as it does me, that these goods are here to serve us, and it’s not us who serve them,” he said. “There are so few opportunities to rest. You have to have some ways of building them in.”

  To Yates, this is part of an ongoing effort to give his children the power to say no to things in the precious few years that they are watching what their parents do and absorbing what they say. It’s a noble goal that we all should share, but it’s also wise to be realistic about how much impact our example and our words can have on our kids. Even if it’s easier to keep them away from television commercials than it used to be, their peers and strangers they encounter have spending habits that broadcast messages of their own.

  Creating Your Own Counterprogramming

  As Annie Leonard contemplated her own relationship with stuff and how she wanted to try to shape her daughter Dewi’s attitude about what to spend and why, she kept returning to Boston University psychologist Juliet Schor’s explanation of outside influence and its effect on the way we spend money. Schor refers to these influences as our vertically expanded reference groups. In the old days, we’d compare our furniture or clothes or car horizontally with our neighbors’, who were often a lot like us. Today, our point of reference has grown vertically—mostly up—since we’re now able to see the inside of celebrities’ closets on reality shows and track their day-to-day outfits on a thousand different websites and apps. “For years, every time I went to New York City, I bought a pair of shoes,” Leonard said. “Once I learned about this phenomenon, I could go to New York, see all the amazing shoes and resist the urge to buy by saying, ‘oh, it’s the vertical expansion of my reference group. In three days I’ll be back home in Berkeley where everyone is wearing clogs.’”

  Older children’s reference groups have gone vertical as well, on all forms of social media. One of the purest expressions of this is the phenomenon of the “haul” video. In these online clips, teens empty the contents of their enormous shopping bags from fast fashion stores like Zara and Forever 21 and then offer up commentary on what they bought and why. Some of the most popular haulers, like Blair Fowler, who started shooting the selfie videos when she was a teenager in Tennessee, draw more than one million views per clip—enough so that they’ve heard from haters who accuse them of boasting. Fowler makes a point in one video of saying that she works two part-time jobs to save money for beauty products and clothes. It’s but a short moment, however, in a 10-minute explanation of six-dollar denim day (when jeans are marked down to that price) and other retail phenomena. She can’t even determine the color of one of the skirts she just bought but remembers that a friend who shopped with her told her it would look great with a fun pair of tights.

  It’s against this backdrop, which normalizes the idea of teens buying loads of clothes by literally making a show of it, that Annie Leonard offers her own counterprogramming. She doesn’t set the DVR to avoid commercials on her television. Instead, she turns the reading of commercial messages into a game with her daughter. “We have a race to see who can say first what subliminal messages they’re trying to send us,” she said.

  When I showed my own daughter a haul video for the first time she quickly said, “That’s bragging.” I hope she continues to feel that way when she gets more access to online media, but it will probably be challenging. Still, talking regularly to our kids about how others talk about the things they’ve bought allows us to remind them why our own families spend money the way we do.

  When Annie Leonard became executive director of Greenpeace USA not so long ago, she did not immediately sell her car or drain the pool that she shares with the neighbors. The pool is one of those solo operations where you swim against an artificial current to simulate laps, and it embarrasses her a little. “When we were getting it, I said, ‘We can just go over to the YMCA to swim,’” she recalled. “But the truth is, it’s great. Everyone swims so much more.”

  Still, the sharing itself is a symbol of one of her own family’s rules for thrift and thriving: the idea that there are things we can borrow instead of buy, which frees up money for purchasing the things and experiences that deliver the most joy and the strongest memories. Leonard loves
Granny Smith apples, and some of her other neighbors have trees. In the autumn, she often comes home to a bag of apples by her front door. An e-mail she sent to a wider circle of neighbors when her daughter was interested in learning to ski didn’t yield scolding replies about the environmental hazards of snowmaking equipment or the gas necessary to drive to the mountain. Instead, people dropped off bags of outgrown boots and clothing within 24 hours. “My daughter has learned that when we have a need, we first turn to the community,” she said. “This is liberating financially. It’s made us able to do more things than we could have otherwise.”

  Sometimes, however, the effort can go too far. For the first 10 years of her life, Leonard’s daughter was fine with the hand-me-downs that they picked up at a cousin’s house and stored in their garage. Then, when she was in fourth grade, Dewi approached her mother with a request. “I have to tell you something that might disappoint you,” she told her mother. “I’d like to go clothes shopping.” Her mother, who laughs about the story now, reminded her how many clothes she already had, but her daughter would not be swayed. “I know, but the only place we ever go shopping is the garage,” she said, laughing at her own joke.

  She wanted skinny jeans. From Old Navy—where the clothes don’t last long and come from the kinds of factories that her mother criticized in The Story of Stuff and that she worries about at Greenpeace. But Leonard bit her tongue and took her shopping there. No brands are banned in Leonard’s home. Dewi is not expressly forbidden to spend money on clothes made in Bangladesh or other countries where factory owners have mistreated workers. Leonard merely asks her to consider these issues, respect her body, be smart and safe, and then make up her own mind.

  “She has to learn and develop her own sense of values herself,” she said.

  5

  Are We Raising Materialistic Kids?

  The tooth fairy, the travel-team dilemma, and the making of a more modest school

  The father of Bramson Dewey worked 80 to 90 hours a week for his entire adult life at his tiny wholesale company. It was one of those anonymous businesses you never hear much about, distributing goods from manufacturers to stores. The Dewey business had been around long enough that it once used horses and buggies, and it had operated out of two different storefronts in Chicago.

  On Sunday Bramson’s father, Mike, rested but he didn’t let up. If his wife had spent $1.29 instead of $1.09 for two liters of soda, it could send him into a rage that lasted for days. Bramson spent years waiting to join the local youth sports leagues because Mike didn’t see the point of letting his son play and paying the fees it would require. Another family took Bramson to buy used hockey equipment with money he’d earned working, since Mike wasn’t about to pay for any gear.

  Bramson and his brother were the kids who didn’t go to restaurants, have Atari, or go away on family vacations. They never asked why and didn’t stop to wonder whether their family was struggling financially or whether their father was just trying to teach them something. “He never spoke to any of us any more than to maybe tell us something he wanted done,” Bramson explained. “There were no life lessons or guidance of any kind.”

  Bramson did pick up a pretty good work ethic, though. He delivered newspapers as a kid, cleared dirty dishes at a country club while in high school, and loaded trucks for a moving company when he was in college. As a young adult, he became an accountant, a white-collar job with a series of increasingly prestigious titles with each promotion.

  His skill with numbers ended up being quite useful to his family in a way he could never have expected. In 2001 his father was diagnosed with cancer, and somebody had to help him keep the business running while he received treatment. Bramson’s mother, who had never so much as written a check, played courier and ferried brown paper bags filled with cash and paperwork to the hospital so Bramson could help run his father’s company from there. “It was like a forensic audit for me to figure out which way was up and everything that was going on,” he recalled.

  Bramson’s heavily medicated father slipped in and out of consciousness, but when he was lucid, Mike realized he had no choice but to answer at least some of his son’s questions. And slowly, as Mike revealed as little as he needed to and Bramson opened his mail, it dawned on Bramson that the state of his father’s business was not quite what he had thought. There was the $500,000, for instance, that had been sitting in a checking account for who knows how long, earning nothing.

  When Bramson found no mortgage bills, things began to click into place. His father owned the side-by-side buildings where his business was headquartered, including all the apartments up above. And when he’d moved the business into these buildings in 1968, he’d held on to the previous building, which had its own set of apartments. When he started doing the math, he realized that his father was worth millions of dollars and that the apartment rents alone brought in six figures each year.

  Mike died within a year, and Bramson, his brother, and his mother inherited the buildings. They shut down the wholesale business, spruced up the properties, and hired a management company to handle day-to-day building matters. The rents they were collecting grew so high that Bramson himself was eventually able to quit working as an accountant. At the age of 36, he became a stay-at-home parent.

  Given his family history, he could easily have made any number of mistakes with his two daughters. Often, people whose own mother and father refused to spend much money have trouble ever saying no to their children when they become parents. Their own memories of constantly hearing no and doing without are painful, especially if their own parents could have provided so much more but simply chose not to.

  But the question of what kind of parent Bramson was going to be is just an outsize version of the one that many parents face: How do we strike the right balance between modesty, which in this context is all about restraint, and materialism?

  Full Provisioning: A New Normal for Kids and Consumerism

  Every new generation of parents is astounded and somewhat alarmed when confronting the goods and experiences available to their children. But there’s something about the always-on, instant-access, no-waiting nature of so much of life in recent years that really does seem fundamentally different.

  Everyday luxury has become the new normal during our own adult lives. The Drybar blow-out salons for women, the handbag maker Coach (once fancy and now mainstream), and even Starbucks are part of this phenomenon, one that barely existed when many of us were children. The Stanford expert on adolescence, William Damon, writes matter-of-factly of the many children “who have privileges that were once reserved for royalty.” And Tim Kasser, one of the leading experts on materialism among the nation’s academic psychologists, reminds his readers how easy it is to forget that much of the world has never had a hot shower.

  Like many of you, I imagine, I remember what a big deal it was for anyone to get a television in their bedroom as a teenager and the aching my friends and I all had for a private phone line. And who can forget the first family in the neighborhood to have a Betamax video tape player or a personal computer with a modem? Given how special these acquisitions were at the time, it seems somehow insane to hand every sixth grader a go-anywhere private line that’s also a Handycam, Walkman, Swatch, VCR, Kodak Instamatic, pager, and book. Sure, it’s miraculous and wonderful that a device that does all these things costs much less than the combined price of all of those other items 20 or 30 years ago. But it also goes to show just how much our baselines have changed.

  So how do parents begin to define what constitutes an appropriate number of possessions and experiences? We all want to make up our own minds and do what feels right, but everything we do happens against a backdrop of whatever is going on in our particular communities. Allison J. Pugh, now a sociology professor at the University of Virginia, spent a couple of years following both affluent and struggling families around Oakland, California, and described them in a book called Longing and Belonging. What she determined is that o
ur children are constantly navigating something she refers to as an “economy of dignity.” In doing so, their feelings of self-worth often rise or fall depending on constantly shifting standards around the possessions and experiences that matter in their own little worlds.

  Pugh, who saw these economies playing out in both poor and affluent communities, starkly describes the feelings that many children experience when they don’t have a Game Boy or haven’t been to the vacation destinations that most of the other kids are talking about. For kids with nothing to contribute and no bragging rights, it’s akin to “a sort of unwelcome invisibility.” Pugh describes the “matching” that goes on when they make meek attempts to interject with information about a different (cheaper) game or other (closer) destination that’s barely relevant. Kids want to belong, so this is one way of saving face. Perhaps unsurprisingly, the privileged among them engage in what Pugh refers to as “patrolling,” sniffing around the dignity claims of others in order to pass judgment. They run, she concludes, a “dignity gauntlet.” In this sort of environment, many parents attempt to shield their kids from any psychic blows by providing a “full provisioning” that leaves them wanting for practically nothing.

  How Materialistic Kids Are Made

  That full kit of toys and clothes and gear and enrichment does not make every kid into an overindulged problem child. So how do you know one when you see one—or are in danger of accidentally raising one? Social scientists have spent decades weighing in on this: Materialistic people focus more on stuff than they do on people and relationships. (On a playdate, this looks like a persistent inability to share the object of greatest desire in the room.) They genuinely believe that more stuff will make them happy. (Whining and begging unrelentingly even after they’re out of preschool and ought to be able to accept no for an answer.) They care less about the utility of their stuff and more about what sort of reaction people will have to it. (Bragging after parents capitulate in the face of their begging.) They want too much of the wrong things, or they want their things in the wrong way. (More things than they need without having to pay for them with allowance money or to wait for them.) And the fallout is unpleasant in countries all over the world; multiple studies have shown that materialism is correlated with higher levels of depression and anxiety and a range of ills from backaches to drug use.