SAHM No More: Teaching My Kids The Value Of Money Is Hard With All Their Rich Friends

rich kidsSAHM No More explores the the ups-and-downs of navigating a new world of parenting, transitioning from married stay-at-home motherhood to a full-time working, divorced motherhood. And there are a lot of adjustments being made””a lot of adjustments and not a lot of sleep.

I remember when my son first saw a television commercial. He was about four years old and, for the first time, I was letting him watch a TV show with advertisements. He sat completely transfixed during the commercials and then, when they finished, looked over at me and said, ”Mommy, how would you ever know what to buy without commercials? They’re amazing!”

And thus began my ongoing war with materialism and kid-focused marketing and the sort of crass consumerism that I not only dislike on principle, but also just can’t afford. I felt like it all began while I was still pregnant, this onslaught of media outlets telling me what to buy, telling me what my soon-to-be-born baby absolutely needed and couldn’t live without. You know, essential stuff. Stuff like baby-wipe warmers, which are, of course, totally essential. And I’ve felt like I’ve maintained a pretty healthy attitude about the whole thing, even as my kids have been raised in a relatively affluent neighborhood in one of the most ridiculously expensive cities in the world.

The thing is about raising my kids in New York is that although some wealth can be really overt””it’s impossible not to know that your friend’s parents do pretty well for themselves when they live in an airplane hangar-sized loft in Tribeca””most of the time financial signifiers are much more implicit. In their own way, they’re just as insidious as all those commercials that I wouldn’t let my kids watch when they were younger.

When I say the problem is insidious, I mean that everywhere I look, I see toddlers in 1,000-dollar strollers playing on several 100-dollar iPads or iPhones as if this should be the norm, and as if the combined cost of these playthings doesn’t equal or surpass many peoples’ rent. It’s much easier to be sanctimonious, though, when your child is too young to really want things. Oh, I know that no one can throw a tantrum like a 2-year-old in a toy store, a 2-year-old who really, really wants a Spiderman toy, but it’s relatively easy to just pick up 30-pounds of squirming muscle and take all that squirminess out of the store.

There you go! Problem solved.

It’s a totally different thing when that child is no longer two, but is instead 10 years old and wants an iPhone for his first cell phone and wants 10 dollars a day to get snacks after school and wants the sneakers that his best friend has and wonders, Why don’t we have a summer house on Fire Island, too?

I have answers for all of these questions””namely that he’s getting the free-with-the-plan starter phone, and he can have a weekly allowance based on his chores for snacks, and he’ll get new sneakers when he outgrows his old ones, and I wish we had a house on Fire Island too but luckily houses get built with guest rooms. But I do wonder if or when my answers won’t be enough for him. He does have friends who have seemingly bottomless wallets and I’ve had conversations with other parents where we talk about things like donating supplies to our public school and they say things like, ”I don’t feel like going shopping and I don’t have time to donate, but I’ll write however big of a check is needed.”

I can’t even conceive of saying something like that, or, at least, I certainly can’t at this point in my life.

But it was my son who pointed out to me the other day that I have been working at a new job these past few months where I’m gone for up to 10 hours a day. What he was saying, he patiently explained to me, was that I should have more money, right? Well, sure. I am making more money than I was when I worked part-time doing freelance work. But I’m a writer. And, barring anomalous $3.5 million dollar book deals, I won’t be flinging money around haphazardly.

What I also tried to explain to my son was that, even if we did have a ton of money to spare, I still wouldn’t be flinging it around. He would still be getting the chore-based allowance that I have started to institute. And he still wouldn’t get an iPhone at this age because he lost the battery to his cell phone just one week after getting it. I don’t even want to think about how many iPhones he would go through in a month. And I’m confident that both of my sons will grow up with a better respect of money because of these rules. They’ll learn not to run through the money I give them at the beginning of the week, lest they risk having none left by Wednesday. And they’ll learn that they can still have a happy summer without a beach house.

Although, to be honest, if I ever do get that multi-million dollar book deal, I might start checking out Fire Island real estate.

(photo: Cheryl Casey/ Shutterstock)

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