MARCH 2001
|
IN A POST-BOOM ECONOMY THAT HAS PRODUCED A RECORD NUMBER OF WEALTHY FAMILIES, MANY PARENTS ARE TRYING HARD TO TEACH THEIR CHILDREN THAT MONEY ISN'T EVERYTHING. A SPECIAL REPORT ON BATTLING THE TREND TOWARD EXCESS. BY LEAH ROSCH Anna and Louis Gordon had lived in San Mateo, CA, for 16 years. It's where they got married, bought their first house, and had their three kids. At a time when some families seem to have National Van Lines on speed dial, the Gordons had happily planted their life in
Until about five years ago, that is. That's when the term "dot com" entered the lexicon and Silicon Valley started spewing out millionaires faster than coins from a Vegas slot machine hitting the daily double. "The first signs were the new, expensive cars on the streets," says Anna, who has worked for nonprofit organizations her whole career. A wild real-estate market followed, which Louis, an independent real-estate appraiser, witnessed firsthand. Buyers would actually tell their agents, 'Whatever the top bid, I'll beat it by 50 grand,' " he says. The houses would either undergo a significantly enlarging renovation or simply be razed and replaced with a McMansion. It was around this time that the Gordons (whose names have been changed at their request) made the difficult decision to transfer their two daughters, now ages 14 and 11, to private school. Once there, the girls' academics were greatly improved; their social environment was another story. "Suddenly our kids thought they were living on the wrong "side of the tracks-literally," Anna says. "We were comfortable financially and living in a lovely, 2,000-square-foot, 1940s house with a beautiful garden, but many of their friends were living in multimillion-dollar homes and had nannies. One of our daughters actually confessed one day that she was embarrassed to have her friends over. That really struck a nerve." For her son's fifth birthday party nearly two years ago, Anna invited his kindergarten class and set up the festivities in the backyard (terribly unchic, compared with some of the catered affairs he had already attended). When she went in to retrieve the cake, one of the mothers happened to be in the kitchen: "She took one look and said, 'Oh, you made your own cake. I didn't know anyone still did that.' Her tone was just dripping with condescension." That started Anna thinking: Her son wasn't being invited to the other kids' houses, yet he had made friends in his class. Maybe they really did live on the wrong side of the tracks. Welcome to America in the 2lst century, where the amount of money made in the last four years easily exceeds the country's $3.5 trillion national debt. Credit goes to a technological boom and a stock market that, until the past year, had the longest record-breaking run in history. Just consider the statistics. The number of families worth $5 million has more than doubled in the last decade, to 756,000, according to Edward N. Wolff, professor of economics
There's something to be said for raising children in an affluent age. For one thing, families tend to have less anxiety over financial security; more material comforts, for another. Consider the millions of middle-class kids whose home computers provide them instant access to more knowledge and information than their parents, raised with the Encyclopedia Brittanica, even knew existed. Today's kids are also more worldly and sophisticated, thanks to a rich diet of the Learning and Discovery channels, punctuated with vacations to parts of the planet their parents at the same age could only dream about. Yet many parents are finding this particular time troubling and difficult to contend with. Chalk it up to the extraordinary materialism that defines the times, coupled with a need for instant gratification that reads like nothing short of entitlement. As Anna Gordon says, "It's so hard to say no to your children because it only makes them feel deprived, compared with all the other kids who always get everything they want, when they want it." The trappings of materialism seem to inform every aspect of modern-day life, from how much people work to what they wear to how they spend their leisure time. And this materialism is certainly at the heart of a parent's struggles to raise a child to understand what it means to be a good person. they've gotta have it And that's coming through loud and clear to kids. More than $2 billion was spent on advertising to children last year, more than 20 times the amount spent 1 0 years ago. It's no wonder some parents feel besieged by a culture that tells kids happiness can be bought. "We don't let the kids watch network TV because of the commercials," says the mother of two toddlers whose family lives seven minutes from downtown Portland, OR. "But after one playdate at a friend's house when he was 2, our older son came home knowing all about Pokemon characters-and, of course, wanting them. The sponge factor is amazing." Karla Taylor and Mike McNamee, both professionals in the communications field, don't even have a television--and haven't for as long as they've had kids. "It has as much to do with the vapidness and violence of the shows as the captive-audience exposure to advertising," says Taylor, an editor and writer in Bethesda, MD, whose husband is a senior correspondent in the Washington, DC, bureau of Business Week. "That probably makes us one of the only houses in Bethesda without Nintendo," adds the mother of Elliott, 14, and Grace, 8. But she's convinced it also helps keep her children less "stuff-oriented" than the bulk of their classmates. "They're not immediately aware of a new release of PlayStation," she says. "And clothes shopping with them has never been about buying brand names, even though Tommy Hilfiger and Abercrombie & Fitch are all over Elliott's school." At school and at home, it's getting more and more difficult to escape brand names. "Companies have increasingly targeted kids," says Michael Jacobson, executive director of the Center for Science in the Public Interest in Washington, DC, and coauthor of Marketing Madness: A Survival Guide. "One, because they have a lot more of their own money now"--the average child between the ages of 4 and 12 spends at least $600 a year--"and two, surveys show that kids can influence their parents' buying decisions, from brand-name groceries to going out to dinner to the family car." never enough It's also shades of the eighties: Workaholism, once denounced in the wake of that greed-is-good decade, has been reborn as a celebration of work, and parents are once again assuaging their guilt over not providing enough "quality time" with their families by indulging their kids. Except now, the indulgences are much more elaborate than they used to be. Chris Riley, an advertising executive at a Portland, OR, agency, believes that a child's material nagging is directly related to the time crunch many families feel. "The great temptation is to give in to our kids' demands, which buys us relief, which we justify because we're working so hard and, after all, we have the money to spend on them," says Riley, the father of a 12-year-old daughter and 8-year-old son. "One of the great struggles for working parents today is recognizing that so often our children's demands mask what they're really craving: our attention." "Parenting in America has become a competitive sport," says Alvin Rosenfeld, M.D., a child psychiatrist in New York City and the coauthor (with Nicole Wise) of The Overscheduled Child: Avoiding the HyperParenting Trap. "If we don't provide our children with every available materialistic advantage and enrichment program, we believe we're being remiss as parents." Activities are being emphasized over relationships, Dr. Rosenfeld says, and resentment is fostered all around. "Parents are constantly feeling inadequate because no matter how much they've done, they could always do more," he says. "And children feel a kind of performance anxiety because if they're not getting the best grades or scoring the goal, they think they're letting their self-sacrificing parents down." the cost of compassion The mother of a 9-year-old daughter and 6-year-old son, who lives in affluent Westchester County, NY, and requested anonymity, agrees. "There's this sense that volunteering requires a huge time commitment, but it doesn't have to," she says. "We wanted our kids to know there are less fortunate people living right here in our own community." So for about an hour and a half every other Tuesday night, this family of four volunteers at the local food pantry, bagging donated groceries to be delivered to families in need. "We didn't force it down their throats; we just said that Daddy and I thought this would be a great thing to do together," says this mom, herself a former candy striper. "And now that we've been doing it for nearly a year, I know it makes the kids feel good about themselves." Their daughter even started volunteering with a friend at a nearby Head Start program. For Volz and her cinematographer husband, Don Lenzer, it was important that their daughter "understand early on that there are class discrepancies in the world and people in our country with less than she has," says Volz. Four years ago, before Tona turned 6, the family started participating in the Fresh Air Fund, which matches inner-city kids with out-of-city families for two weeks in the summer. The program was established to broaden the horizons of less fortunate children, but Volz and Lenzer were hoping to also broaden their daughter's. "Tona was excited, but it was hard at first for her to share her room," Volz recalls. "Also, Daphnie, who was from Brooklyn and the same age as our daughter, was definitely not shy. She let Tona know all the ways their lives were different." But Daphnie has been back every summer, and the girls have become close friends. "Suburban children can live somewhat cloistered lives," says Rabbi Daniel Siegel, special projects coordinator for the Solomon Schechter Day School in West Orange, NJ. "Even for well-intentioned parents, it's a challenge to expose kids to the ills of society. That's an issue they grapple with in living where they do." Which is why, six years ago, Siegel initiated a social-action program: "Our students come from economically fortunate families. It was important to make the connection between what we teach--that we have a responsibility for others--and what we do." The program, strictly extracurricular, started with a single food drive and has developed into more than two dozen projects a year, including helping Habitat for Humanity build houses for the homeless, distributing holiday meals to seniors, and raising money to buy toys for needy children at an area daycare center. "That's been an interesting learning experience for our students," says Rabbi Siegel. "They've remarked on how expensive things are when you only have so much money to spend and say they never realized how many violent toys are being marketed to little kids." To their credit, students have begun proposing their own ideas for school-sponsored charity projects, he says. "This bodes well for their future involvement, beyond school." what's it worth to you? "It's imperative to use this affluence for positive experiences, to help my kids appreciate the value of our trips abroad versus trips to the mall," Riley says. "On the other hand, if you allow your kids to grow up believing 'I want means I get,' well, you're setting them up for a lot of problems, aren't you? So what's needed is a constant dialogue that includes trade-offs as well as explanations behind the no's." Bettina Volz's strategy has been to help her daughter learn by hands-on experience. Last year she and her husband started Tona on a weekly allowance of $3; one dollar would go to a charity of her choice, one would go into savings, and the third was hers to spend however she wanted. For her charity, Tona selected the Heifer Project: "She liked that it provided farm animals to families in developing countries so they could make a living and improve their lives," says Volz. At the end of the school year, her parents matched her collected funds. "'When Tona received a personal thank-you letter from the organization, she felt really good about what she'd done." The concept of savings was an equally important lesson to Tona's parents. The local bank required a minimum of $25 to open an account, so the couple decided to let their daughter save the money on her own. The week she counted up $25, the family went to the bank together. "We made a big deal about her opening the account and helped her fill out the application. It made her feel very important," says Volz. "And I think it was more meaningful than if we had started her off with the amount." Anna and Louis Gordon chose a more drastic approach. Afraid their children would lose all perspective if they remained in the midst of San Mateo's excessiveness, they made a decision that six years earlier would have been unthinkable: to investigate other places to live. After a year of extensive research, the Gordons decided on Bellevue, WA, where they relocated last summer. The Seattle suburb has its share of Silicon Valley's neo-rich. "The difference," explains Anna, who manages a mental-health agency in her newly adopted town, "is that people here invest their money in public schools, in the parks, not just in super-chic cars. It's also a tremendously philanthropic community. In San Mateo, the skewed values of the dot-com boom put us over the edge. My husband and I both realized that we were working too hard and sacrificing too much family time just to pay the bills." Though the family has lived in Bellevue only a short time, Anna has already noticed a difference in the kids: "They no longer complain about what they don't have," she says. Recently, a friend of one of their daughters came from California to visit, and Louis took the girls to lunch. "Later, our daughter told us how surprised she was that her friend thought nothing of ordering the most expensive thing on the menu," says Anna. "That was a great moment for us." LEAH POSCH is a writer in New York City.
Photography by Marc Royce.
|
trees. "Most of us are having to work harder and longer," says Betsy Taylor, "and thanks to cell phones, laptops, and e-mail, there's almost no line anymore between work and personal life." It's a phenomenon of the new economy: Keep working and moving forward, or you'll be left behind.
