The Opposite of Spoiled

by Ron Lieber

  Keenan had started working in ninth grade, giving tennis lessons to younger children. Winerip had began even earlier, at age 11. At 6 in the morning he sold newspapers at a factory, where the Boston Gear Works employees would give him a dime for an 8-cent paper and let him and his younger brother keep the change. But he was able to do the job only because his mother got him up at 5:30 in the morning so he could ride his bicycle to work. “She was a Depression-era kid who had lived in a tenement,” he said. “She had those values. I was 11 years old, and I wasn’t going to do it on my own.”

  He has tried to follow her example as a parent. When his oldest child was in sixth grade, he got the boy up at 5:30 a.m. so he could walk over to the local deli to put the Sunday newspapers together. His son hung on to that gig until he could get a better job. As year-round residents of a beach community on Long Island, the children had opportunities to meet the high demand for seasonal labor. As younger teens, they got jobs cleaning toilets at the beach in the morning, and their parents would drive them over in the early morning. Then the teens would sell ice cream in the afternoon and umpire games for younger kids. Eventually, all four of them worked as lifeguards, which allowed them to earn more than $8,000 during many summers.

  The kids, who all knew about the first-semester-tuition requirement years in advance, bellyached a little bit. “There were times when they’d come home and complain that their supervisor was a jerk,” Winerip recalled. “And we’d explain that that’s why you have to go to college.” He and his wife also hoped that the kids would remember the hundreds of hours in the lifeguard chair and the untold number of toilets they’d scrubbed to collect that $15,000 when they were tempted to blow off class during their freshman year. That worked with all but one of the kids. One son dropped out, came home, and rebooted in community college, where he eventually earned a partial scholarship to attend New York University.

  The pay-your-tuition gambit may seem like an extreme parenting move, but it’s really just a return to what we once saw as normal. A generation ago, many college students worked their way through school. While it’s almost impossible for college students to do that today, letting them attend without asking anything of them financially may actually be damaging. A 2013 study found that the higher the percentage that parents contribute to a child’s college costs, the worse their grades tend to be, though the correlations aren’t quite as strong at highly competitive schools. Still, having some financial skin in the game seems to matter.

  Winerip smirked when I asked him whether he thinks college admissions officers looked askance at his kids’ decision to work during the summer instead of doing something more intellectually or globally prestigious. “The kids who go to Costa Rica for the summer to do volunteer work are a dime a dozen,” he said. As the number of teens engaged in paid work continues to fall, it’s kids like his that may start to stand out more.

  Cans, Bottles, and the Big Payoff

  Plenty of children will never know what it means to truly need to work. Parents can’t explain what it feels like, even if they had to do it themselves. Still, these kids who must work or don’t have much money to spare are among us, if not at our community schools then at most of the colleges our kids will someday attend. And for these children, work can be transformative. Their stories about it can, all by themselves, help pull other kids out of their own lives and imagine what it might be like to come from very different circumstances.

  The story I tell my own daughter is about Lucerito Gutierrez, her two older sisters, and their mother. Fifteen years ago, they sold their mother’s tamales on the streets of San Diego to make ends meet. Lucerito’s single mother was a housekeeper by day, but her earnings weren’t enough to pay for the three girls’ expenses. After a few years of selling tamales in parks, her mother began to notice all the discarded cans and bottles there, and realized that, with her small team of collectors, they could make the same money or more in much less time by filling bags and carts and taking them to the recycling center. The Gutierrezes were not able to afford a car until a few years ago, so they usually pushed and pulled their haul 90 minutes each way.

  The family followed a fairly precise routine. They wore gloves to avoid cuts and close-fitting pants for getting into dumpsters, plus long-sleeve shirts for reaching into garbage cans, no matter the weather. An animal check preceded each pickup. “You try to kick the garbage can to make a sound or throw a rock,” Lucerito said, recalling the rats and raccoons she’d unexpectedly roused in the past. “You don’t put your hands in first. You use a stick to move stuff around.”

  Despite the hazards, the family made just enough money that, together with what they collected in public assistance, they could move from a one-room garage to an actual apartment, though in a dangerous neighborhood; they later moved to the small rental house on a quiet street where they live now. Some months are better than others. There have been weeks when the family ate mostly rice and beans and others where they have enough money from the cans and bottles to treat themselves to 49-cent burgers at Carl’s Jr.

  By the time Lucerito was in middle school, she was getting tired of earning money through her family’s collecting. “I knew I didn’t want to live like that for the rest of my life,” she said. Her middle school offered an engineering course, and while she had no idea what it was, she took the class and got hooked. Her teacher took an interest in her, and she entered a mentorship program where she met college professors.

  One day, while attending an after-school class, she learned about a San Diego nonprofit organization called Reality Changers. The program selects high-potential, low-income high school students who would be the first in their families to attend college. Then, it puts them through an intensive curriculum to get them ready for standardized tests and college applications. Among other requirements, parents of participating students must cook dinner for the other students at least once each term. Lucerito’s mother made the tamales they once sold in the park.

  During her senior year, with help from her tutors at Reality Changers, Lucerito was accepted into the engineering program at the University of California, San Diego. Then, she summoned her courage and shot for the moon: a scholarship from the Gates Foundation. “What most of my high-school classmates do not know is that, even though I am taking four Advanced Placement classes this year, I still go dumpster diving with my mother four days a week,” she wrote in her application essay. “I want to use my scholarship at UCSD to become an engineer who will revolutionize the way societal roadblocks are perceived.”

  In the spring of 2013, she heard back from the foundation, and it informed her that she had won a Gates Millennium scholarship. The foundation will cover up to $300,000 in tuition and other costs for her undergraduate and graduate education. That’s about five times more than Lucerito’s family collected in over a decade of gathering cans and bottles on the streets of San Diego.

  8

  The Luckiest

  Instilling gratitude, grace, and perspective in our sons and daughters

  In the summer of 2012, comedian Chris Rock was a guest on The Daily Show with Jon Stewart. Fathers both, they had gotten to talking about Rock’s various projects, and Stewart questioned whether Rock’s heavy workload was merely a convenient way to avoid spending time with his family. Rock admitted it, and the audience began to chuckle. But then he and Stewart launched into an extended riff on the uncomfortable truths about raising children, repeatedly slapping the table in front of them for emphasis while the crowd egged them on, laughing uproariously.

  ROCK: I just do not like these people. I don’t understand them. My kids are rich, I have nothing in common with them.

  STEWART: How do you explain this to them? I’m trying to figure this out. I had jobs since I was 14 . . . I don’t know how to explain it to them. . . . It’s a different world. Maybe there should be like an Outward Bound that we put them in where it’s like “you’ve got to live like shit for a week.”

  ROCK: Every summer I beg
my wife to put ’em in camp in Harlem, and she won’t do it. I think my whole richass neighborhood needs to go to camp in Harlem in the summer and get their lunch money taken and [get] beat up. . . . There’s gotta be a Camp Kick-Ass!

  STEWART: I think that’s an excellent idea. You should franchise that.

  This was a genius bit of comedy; we don’t need to be as well off as Rock and Stewart to identify with much of what they’re saying. They don’t come right out and call their children spoiled. That would be cruel, it may not be true, and it certainly wouldn’t be funny. Instead, it’s the word rich that comes up first, and Rock tags his kids with the adjective while explicitly refusing to place himself in this group. It quickly becomes clear that both these fathers are operating in unfamiliar territory, given one’s upbringing in Harlem and the other’s in a town where lots of teens had part-time jobs. They are so unnerved by their good fortune, in fact, that Stewart can’t figure out how to communicate his family’s privilege to his children and Rock can’t agree on a course of action with his spouse. The necessary solution, however, is crystal clear to both of them: Camp Kick-Ass. Not a literal butt kicking but a new perspective.

  And so it is with many of us. We may not be in the same category of wealth, but many of us have enough to give our kids everything they need and much of what they want. And even if we have less than many people we know in our communities, we have more than most in our country and our world. We know this, but our kids probably don’t quite yet. So how do we make them aware of just how good they have it, without preaching to them or making them pity others who have less? And how do we remove them from their life of relative ease every so often and expose them to people and places that are not like the ones in their everyday lives?

  I’ve heard two reflexive responses to these questions over the years. The first goes something like this: Do you know how privileged you sound even asking those questions? I do. Part of the point of the exercise here is to recognize whatever privileges we have and acknowledge that it’s a luxury to be the person asking the questions. The second response is that the solution is easy; families should simply move to a more diverse community and put their kids in schools with students from families with many different incomes. It’s a fine idea, but it’s unrealistic to expect that most people will do this. Plenty of parents do whatever they can to enroll their children in the most high-achieving schools, wherever they are. Treating that act of devotion like some kind of character flaw is unfair. Yes, it’s true that many of the communities that have those great schools lack much socioeconomic diversity, and plenty of private schools are less inclusive than they could be. But even at highly diverse public schools with excellent test scores, plenty of self-segregation goes on among the students and parents. The perfect community is ever elusive, so almost all of us need to be doing more to help our children understand how much they have and where they fit in.

  Why We’re Confused About Class

  When I bring up the topic of social class with parents, many of them visibly squirm. Beyond our general tendency to avoid conversations about money, it can be difficult to step back and recognize our own good fortune. Context explains some of it. It can be uncomfortable to have lots of friends who have much more or less money than we do, so we tend to hang around people who are more like ourselves. Once we make that choice, some of our peers will probably seem wealthier than we are, while others will appear to have somewhat less. That leaves us in the middle, where it becomes very easy to default into assuming that we’re middle class.

  In the United States, people in the middle have a household income of about $50,000. So anyone who has a household income that is two to four times that is not middle class, even if they’ve chosen to live in an area with a cost of living that is higher than average. People get confused about this in more affluent suburbs and most private school communities, where there are almost always people who have more or spend more. They must be the rich ones, right? In New York, it’s the bankers. In Los Angeles, it’s the A-list producers and directors and actors. In San Francisco, it’s the technology people. And everywhere, it’s the surgeons and the law firm partners and the people with family businesses or inherited money. As long as there are people who have more, everyone else talks as if they’re middle class and claims not to be among the truly privileged.

  Many people reading this book, however, are decidedly upper class. Above about $75,000 in household income, we graduate into the top third of income in the United States. Euphemisms abound in this category, since those who earn this much may not feel anywhere close to rich. So they are “upper middle class” or “upper income” or “affluent.” These terms don’t capture the basic facts though: Almost all of us who have landed in that upper third don’t truly need much more of the things that money can buy. Responding to our cravings for those additional wants on the margin is a lifelong task for adults, but we’ve got only 20 years or so to raise kids who know how good they have it.

  Many parents avoid talking to their kids about socioeconomic status because they believe that children don’t notice class differences until they’re teenagers. But very young children have a basic sense of what the words rich and poor mean. In a research study conducted by Patricia G. Ramsey, a psychology professor at Mount Holyoke College, she showed 3-year-olds a series of photographs and distinguished between the haves and have-nots. Only half of her subjects thought that the rich and poor people in the pictures would be friends with one another. Other research has shown that 6-year-olds keep score of which kids have what sorts of possessions and begin to make judgments accordingly. By 11 or so, they’re beginning to assume that social class is related to ambition. Around age 14, they begin to wonder whether there is a larger economic system at work that may constrain movement between classes. So even as we’re sorting out our own complicated feelings about the smaller differences between ourselves and many of the people we know, kids are jumping to even bigger conclusions about larger differences. They may not come to the right ones—or to more nuanced ones—if we’re not engaging them in conversation all along the way.

  This ongoing discussion is particularly important when it comes to social media. When kids first start interacting with one another online, it’s mostly jokes and innocent flirting. They’re among friends, after all—people they have chosen to communicate with and whose online invitations they have accepted. But what teenagers miss is that many of their peers use social media to sell the best version of themselves, whether they’re doing it consciously or not. They post the most attractive pictures. The nicest clothing they own. The parties and vacations and events that not everyone can go to. I have lost count of the number of disgusted parents who have complained to me about their kids following Michael Dell’s kids on Instagram or others who were posting photos of themselves on private jets. What began as a way to extend and maintain relationships has become, in part, a vast vista of jealousy and one-upmanship.

  Not every child will suffer from this exposure. But it still makes sense to supervise the viewing of social media the same way we do television commercials, at least at first. It’s fine to ask kids for their log-in information so we can see what they’re seeing. Parents who don’t want to go that far can at least sit down and view the feeds alongside their kids for a while, offering commentary on why their friends may be posting what they’re posting and whether their own posts may be making others feel left out or left behind.

  Gratitude and Grace: Reviving a Family Ritual

  Feeling fortunate is good for kids. A number of scholars who are part of a boom in happiness studies have measured gratitude levels in children and found strong correlations between gratitude and higher grades, levels of life satisfaction, and social integration. There’s also a link between gratitude and lower levels of envy and depression. In a series of experimental “gratitude interventions,” researchers have asked children to keep a gratitude journal or write a letter to someone who has had a lasting impact on them and then rea
d the letter aloud to that person. These activities made kids feel more optimistic.

  So how best to foster a culture of family gratitude without having it become a chore or feeling rote? One way is to establish a grace-saying ritual. Nearly 3,000 years ago, Homer wrote that no one would “dare to drink till he had made libation to the Zeus All-Mighty.” Deuteronomy 8:10 commands all who have finished eating to “praise the Lord your God for the good land he has given you.” An Egyptian inscription from about 150 BC offers up prayer to the table god for pharaohs to say before eating meat.

  Modern Americans appear to be less thankful for the intervention of any particular god. Just 44 percent of them report saying daily grace or a similar blessing before meals, while 46 percent claim rarely to say it at all. But if discomfort with the idea of a divine spirit is what’s keeping us from expressing gratitude, then we need to find ways to say a godless grace. It can be as simple as asking everyone at the table to talk about one thing that happened that day that made them feel grateful or lucky. Or if that feels too formal, ask everyone to make a toast to someone they encountered that day. Or take turns making just one each night.

  If we’re going to start a national grace-saying movement, it needs to be flexible. Even one word can go a long way. Lisa Cepeda and Antonio Cepeda-Benito are among the very few parents who always manage miraculously to gather their kids for breakfast and dinner each day, and they began a special tradition about 20 years ago. Their son Agustín was in kindergarten in Indiana, and he came home and told his parents that they had said a small prayer before eating lunch. The pair had never been much for attending formal worship services. Still, they decided that to honor Agustín’s wish to bless the family meal at home, they would simply say thank you. Since the family speaks Spanish at home, they decided to do it in that language.