The Opposite of Spoiled

by Ron Lieber

  On the night I visited them in South Burlington, Vermont, where they now live, they served salad and homemade pizza and oversize chocolate chip cookies. But before we got to eat any of that, we all clasped hands, closed our eyes, bowed our heads and uttered one word: gracias. Then Lisa, who is a psychologist, and Antonio, who is dean of the College of Arts and Sciences at the University of Vermont, explained why they keep the ritual going:

  LISA: If we don’t do it now, it feels unsettled.

  ANTONIO: It’s a reminder that we are a family and that we are together.

  LISA: Though we’re not always holding hands.

  ANTONIO: It does many good things. If we have an argument . . .

  LISA: If we’re upset, we just do a fist bump, and all the kids know . . .

  ANTONIO: But it gets you closer to making up! If feelings got hurt, it reduces the sharpness through human contact.

  Part of the beauty of the gesture is that it is an empty vessel, one that all the people around the table fill with their own meaning on that day, in that single moment of silence. Gracias.

  Another regularly scheduled bit of gratitude that might interest older kids comes from a documentary called 365 Grateful, which you can show your children online. In an effort to beat back depression, the filmmaker took one picture each day of something she felt grateful for. Something like this could be a requirement for middle school kids who are begging for their first smartphone. Christine Carter, a sociologist who directs the Greater Good Science Center’s parenting program, suggests another possibility for families with older children: Let them invent a new gratitude ritual for the family to adopt. If the kids oversee it, it may feel less like some kind of daily chore.

  Gaining Perspective: Teammates, Playdates, and Field Trips

  Once we’ve done what we can to create an environment in our homes that nurtures gratitude and perspective, we can turn to the world outside. Some of us live in socioeconomically diverse neighborhoods, where it’s normal to encounter people with a variety of incomes and backgrounds. But many people pick their communities for the quality of the public schools, and often these “not-so-public” schools, as sociologist Allison Pugh describes them, aren’t so economically diverse. If the schools are great, home prices spiral ever higher and the communities become filled with people who have enough money to pay the entry fee.

  So if we want our children to be more sensitive to the fact that not everyone has what they have, it helps to seek out cross-class friendships, both for our kids and for ourselves. Any effort to forge those relationships, however, creates uncomfortable questions. Why try at all? The point can’t be simply to teach children what it would be like if their own family had less money. No family wants to be the source of a child’s edification. Nor should families with less be objects of pity.

  Heather Johnson, a mother of three in Bethlehem, Pennsylvania, has spent many years coming up with a better answer. Johnson, her husband, and their daughter are white; their twin sons, whom they adopted from Haiti, are black. The boys play on a Little League team where they are the only players who are not from working-class or poor Dominican or Puerto Rican families. The Johnsons try to blend in as best they can, leaving their Nikon camera at home and attending the $7 all-you-can-eat pancake fund-raiser at Applebee’s without suggesting that the campaign aim higher. At both practices and games, which every member of every family is expected to attend, Johnson is the only mother who speaks English as a first language. “It is awkward,” she said. “There is a lot of sitting on my hands with the other moms. There was a day when my daughter brought blueberries, and they wanted to let their kids try them because they had never had them before.”

  When she’s not at the baseball field, Johnson is a sociology professor at Lehigh University who focuses her research on social class and the perpetuation of wealth and poverty. She believes that many kids have settled into an understanding of social class as something you earn through merit and hard work—and that you don’t deserve to be in the highest socioeconomic classes if you don’t work hard enough. Plenty of parents and teachers are fine with that, since it dovetails nicely with the desire to get children to buckle down in school and is conveniently compatible with the persistent idea that all kids in America have an equal opportunity to make something of themselves.

  But Johnson doesn’t quite buy the idea of a pure meritocracy, and it can make people nervous when she explains it out loud. “There is often more to the story than just hard work,” she explained during a talk to teachers at the Gordon School in Providence, Rhode Island. “It’s not but. It’s and. There is luck and circumstance and the family you were born to. All sorts of things factor in. That would be extremely radical if parents just started saying that at the dinner table. If we were honest about our own privilege when we have it. And not all of us have it or have had it, though most of us in this room have had it in some form or another.”

  And so it is with her family, having adopted Haitian sons and being able to send them to private school while many of their baseball teammates were born into immigrant families where no one has gone to college. They may play together now, but it will be harder for many of them to find their way to college teams than it may be for Johnson’s sons. This is not because they are better players, and it’s important to her that her boys come to understand this and why it’s not very fair.

  The lessons need not always be quite as heavy as this. One good reason for kids to hang out with people who are different from them is to realize that nobody has a monopoly on happiness and that it’s often great fun to slip into a world that is not like your own. Team sports are just one way to bridge this gap. Citywide choruses and countywide orchestras often include children from across the class spectrum. For older kids who have forged cross-class relationships on their own, offer to have the friend’s whole family over for a meal. Having less or more than everyone else in a classroom or a community can be confusing for a kid and complicated for a parent. But as long as a gesture is genuine, other families will probably see it in that light.

  The daughter of Sotha Saing, the San Francisco mother who came to the United States as a Cambodian refugee and is adamant about her kids’ working for their allowance, once received an invitation to sleep over at a friend’s home in an affluent neighborhood. “It was a family I didn’t know, and she gave me the address, and I knew it was going to be a whole bunch of questions,” she said. “But I want her to grow and see everything, and not shelter my child.”

  Her daughter was quiet when she first returned the next day, but soon enough the observations and inquiries poured forth. The enormous room that the friend had all to herself. All the latest video games. The questions about what her parents did for a living to afford all of that. Saing explained to her daughter that she did not know the answers. “But I explained that there were a couple of ways they could have gotten that house,” she said. “Her parents may have worked hard to get it. But they could have inherited it or the money to buy it.” That opened the door for Saing to remind her daughter that she had a mother who wasn’t born in the United States, and that she was trying to lay down a path for her daughter to succeed. Saing was even trying to buy some life insurance so her daughter could inherit money too someday. “There was a little bit of sadness,” Saing said. “But she had fun. And I told her that if she liked all those things, maybe she could sleep over there more often so we didn’t have to buy them! Her friend can’t play with them all by herself.”

  At Manhattan Country School in New York City, the prekindergarten teachers believe that teaching students how their classmates live is important enough that they take field trips to one another’s homes. The kindergarten-through-eighth-grade school sets tuition on an income-based sliding scale; the truly wealthy pay a bit more than they would at comparable schools but about 70 percent of the families pay less than the maximum. The home visits began a couple of decades ago, when an Indian-American boy approached one of the teachers expressing frust
ration that his peers thought he used tomahawks and wore feathers. A teacher asked if he wanted to invite them over for a visit, and he was thrilled. His mother wore her sari, the kids ate Indian snacks, and they listened to traditional Indian music. It worked so well that the school decided that every one of the 4-and 5-year-olds ought to host a field trip to their homes each year.

  Today, the keeper of the tradition is a teacher named Sarah Leibowits. She’s been leading the trips for a decade and is also a parent at the school, paying a reduced tuition herself. Students set out in packs of five, armed with worksheets for them to draw pictures of the things they see that excite them. Over the years, the kids have been to housing projects in the Bronx and town houses in some of the most expensive neighborhoods in Manhattan. They travel as their classmates travel each day, tracing whatever the normal bus or subway or walking itinerary is. A parent of the host family is always present, and they serve a snack of the host child’s choosing. The food is often a highlight of the trip, along with a full inventorying of the child’s toys and other special objects. The host also gives a tour of the neighborhood, pointing out places where the family shops and plays. On the first trip that I tagged along for, one boy took his classmates to visit the African market across the street from his apartment building in Harlem. On the next, the children visited the fountain at Columbia University.

  The school’s founder, Gus Trowbridge, always thought that the home visit lesson plan was among the most radical pieces of curriculum that he had ever encountered. But as Leibowits has watched it all play out over her years of teaching, she’s concluded that the impact on these 4-and 5-year-old kids is fairly subtle. “Children are just really excited to be learning about their friends and finding commonalities,” she said. There was no confusion about why so many family members seemed to be living in a one-bedroom apartment in a housing project several years back, and an enormous Central Park South apartment was notable mostly because the children were able to look down at the street and count the horse-drawn carriages.

  The visits are mandatory, and every so often a parent causes trouble. It’s not the less affluent parents, however, who protest out of shame or a desire for privacy. Several years ago, a parent who was also an alumna of the school wanted a list of every apartment her child was visiting along with its address. When the mother found out that her child was going to a neighborhood that was right on the border of Manhattan and the Bronx, she called the host mother to ask if the neighborhood was safe. A different teacher, herself an alumna of the school, called the inquiring parent and “gave it to her,” as Leibowits recalled, saying “How dare you, as an alumna of the school, do something like this?” The visit went off as planned, and no one suffered any harm on the mean streets of upper Manhattan.

  As far as Leibowits knows, no other school has ever copied the home visit curriculum. She wonders whether it might be related to the fact that so many communities and schools are so socioeconomically homogeneous that the kids wouldn’t learn anything. Still, most communities have at least some of this diversity, so almost everyone should eventually have an opportunity to host or go on a similar playdate. If not, we can seek out friends or family members out of town who may live differently than we do.

  Gaining Perspective: Helping Others Nearby

  Many parents believe that their kids will learn how lucky they are by doing volunteer work, and community service is indeed worth doing for plenty of reasons. Volunteers enable all sorts of service organizations to help larger numbers of people than they could otherwise. But while tutoring, working in a soup kitchen, or participating in neighborhood cleanups are all fine ways to help others, they usually don’t help kids develop meaningful and lasting relationships with other kids their age whom they might not otherwise meet.

  Lucy Gilchrist, a mother of two in Cleveland, found a different way to include her two daughters in volunteer work that forged a deeper connection. Through her church, she became a volunteer driver for fellow parishioners. While that may not sound like much of a way to help, not having a car makes life extraordinarily complicated in plenty of parts of the country. Many neighborhoods in Cleveland have no decent grocery store, and if you have a new baby, it’s hard to take the bus back and forth to a good one.

  Gilchrist helped a family that was trying to move out of government-subsidized housing but didn’t have any way to travel around the city to see the available rentals. She and her two kids spent many hours driving the other family around in their minivan over two or three days. The two families bonded over their joint attempt to sleuth out various flaws in the rental houses and all the defects that the landlords were trying to hide. “In one of them, the back door was boarded shut, so there was no way you could get out of the kitchen,” Gilchrist said. “My kids know what it looks like to have a basement leak, and they were able to point out water when it was down there and when things were broken.” Only one of the houses they toured was habitable, and by the end, Gilchrist’s kids were helping point out when the landlords were flat-out lying.

  Other families in their church have driven a family of Eritrean refugees around the city until they were settled and had their own transportation. “You take them grocery shopping and clothes shopping, and your own kids get a sense of the world that the other families are living in and the decisions they’re having to make without its being ‘Oh, look at those poor people,’” Gilchrist said. The family that she and her kids helped has since moved again, but the kids still worship in church together and their mothers are now good friends.

  The Case Against Volunteer Trips to Developing Countries

  I first heard from Gilchrist because her family’s experience in Cleveland made her think there was no reason for kids to take expensive service trips abroad. She contacted me in response to a post I’d written for The New York Times’ Motherlode blog about a 21-year-old woman named Pippa Biddle, a veteran of many such journeys. Not only had she traveled with her boarding school classmates to volunteer at an orphanage in Africa, she and her family had taken numerous trips to the Dominican Republic to help start a camp for children who are HIV positive. But Biddle was done with what’s come to be known as voluntourism, and I featured her on the blog because a post that she had written to explain her point of view had gone viral, reaching millions of people.

  Her essay had hit hardest with parents, many of whom don’t think carefully enough about the purpose of such trips. Some mothers and fathers pay thousands of dollars to send their kids on volunteer trips because they think it will infuse them with gratitude for all that they have back at home. Others do it because they mistakenly think that this sort of service work is meaningful to college admissions officers at selective schools. (In fact, admissions officers often roll their eyes at the hundreds of application essays that arrive each year from students who have written about these trips.)

  Biddle wanted parents to think about what their children were actually qualified to do—the actual work on the ground. Here’s what she wrote about her trip to Africa with her classmates: “Turns out that we, a group of highly educated private boarding school students, were so bad at the most basic construction work that each night, the men had to take down the structurally unsound bricks we had laid and rebuild the structure so that, when we woke up in the morning, we would be unaware of our failure. It is likely that this was a daily ritual.” She concluded that the group could have done a lot more good by taking the money they spent on the trip and hiring qualified local people to build the structure.

  She also turns the lens on her own family’s work in the Dominican Republic. Volunteers who don’t speak fluent Spanish can be more of a burden than a help, given the need to communicate with and care for sick children. This became doubly so when she became sick herself, and the health workers needed to worry about her in addition to the children. Now, she raises money for the project but doesn’t visit herself. “I have stopped attending,” she wrote, “having finally accepted that my presence there is not the
godsend that I was coached by nonprofits, documentaries and service programs to believe it would be.”

  I asked Pippa’s father, Ed Biddle, for his take, and he isn’t ready to write off all such trips for all teens. He encourages parents to consider four things. First, who are the leaders? If they are real grown-ups with expertise in the region, then there might be some educational value to the program. Second, does the work to be done leverage the skills of the participants? And if they don’t have any skills, how exactly will they be helping? Third, he suggests taking a careful look at how the program is being sold, and by whom. Is it a for-profit operation marketing the beauty of the region or an organization that focuses mostly on the needs of a community and how to help? Finally, he would never send a child on a trip like this with a friend, since preformed cliques can prevent kids from learning from one another.

  Pippa thinks her father’s list is pretty good, but she would add similar questions to the one that Lucy Gilchrist raised when she first wrote to me: What are your goals, and can you meet them in some other way than by spending a lot of money doing work far away?

  How Overnight Camp Can Help

  Parents who send older children away for part of the summer may have an additional goal in mind, though we may not always have a name for it. Volunteer trips often begin with the goal of pushing teenagers toward something—empathy for others, perspective on their own lives, or a better understanding of the world. But others among us want our kids to get away from some of what surrounds them during the school year. We live in the safest communities we can and send our kids to the best possible schools, but these places often come with social pressure to buy and to have things. That environment can give children a warped sense of what they really need in order to thrive and be happy.