I was waiting in front of a car wash today as a bright-faced, teenage boy washed the windshield of the 16-year-old Honda Accord that is to become my daughter’s first car. It stood a washing, since my son drove it back and forth to crew practices for the past two years, as evidenced by the dust storm kicked up when the car washer beat the floor mats against a post.This is the same car my daughter’s friends intervened on her behalf about, asking, “You aren’t really going to make her drive THAT, are you?” I pointed out that, until two years ago, it was the same car a vice president in our company drove. And, it’s a car I have invested thousands of dollars in to make sure it would be roadworthy for the child who will drive two years from now.
We have lots of kids. My car ethic seemed perfectly ordinary to me until another car washer broke my contemplation by yelling, “Nissan” to summon the owner of the red, 350Z sports car that I noticed admiringly as it was being washed. Certain the Polo-wearing, lawyer-looking man about my age would step up to claim it, I was amazed when, instead, a 16-year-old boy jumped up to take the driver’s seat of the $30,000 beauty.
In the age of childrearing excess that we live in, it’s difficult to raise kids who don’t have inflated expectations. I recently overheard one of my children’s friends say that his parents have agreed to buy him the latest, loaded, state-of-the-art laptop if he brings all his grades up to Cs. My son, who has earned straight As this year with no sweetener cast me a glance at me to say… what exactly? “See, I AM being cheated!” or “At that scale, you can’t even HOPE to afford MY grades” or maybe it was just “Is that crazy, or what?” I’m not sure how he interpreted it, but I’m sure he knew his friend’s largesse didn’t change a thing for him.
Perhaps my children will fill therapists’ offices someday, complaining about everything we didn’t do for them. God knows, there is plenty to complain about. First of all, the birthday parties. I remember my children attending birthday parties with multiple courses, like a fine dinner. The first course (with 12-15 kids) was at the movie theatre. The second was at the laser tag place. The third was at the pizza parlor. Waiting to pick up my child outside the last venue, I would mentally calculate what the whole shebang must have cost. Then there was the crafty mom, who had a party for 20 first graders with five different craft stations. She also baked an individual birthday cake for each girl at the party, and one of the stations provided them an opportunity to decorate it and take it home! A few years later, that was followed by the elementary school-aged party at the Moon with a live DJ, complete with limo rides from the schools. How does one compete with that? The worst were the A list and B list parties, where there were, in effect, two parties and some kids were invited to both, while the less fortunate invitees were only invited to the first. I remember one such party, which staged the first part at a horse ranch in Jefferson County. The second half was a slumber party to which my daughter was not invited. When I was late to pick up my daughter (having gotten lost in Jefferson County), the mother complained, “The girls who are spending the night had to wait to leave until you got here!” Another memorable moment involved cheerleading camp, which cost many hundreds of dollars and involved a hotel stay, beachfront, at the finest accommodations Panama City had to offer. After gulping over the projected price, I sat through a meeting of enthusiastic mothers who passed around an order form that included things like $75 gift baskets with a cheer bear, snacks and an “I miss you” card. One particularly eager mom suggested that our girls might feel left out if we didn’t all buy an “I miss you” gift. At this point, I became the wet blanket who suggested that maybe the $500 expenditure for four nights in Panama City was gift enough.
Lest I feed the illusion that I have succeeded in raising children free from materialism who gratefully accept their lot and ask for nothing more, let me assure you, alas, it is not so. Just ask anyone who has suffered through a scene in Target, Toys R Us, Best Buy, Justice for Girls or anywhere else where my children were being told they couldn’t have whatever they couldn’t live without at the moment. It does cause me to wonder and worry: Who will our children marry some day and what capacity will they have to sacrifice and put the needs of another first? What debt will they amass as they continue to gratify their every whim? It’s a dreadful thought. I wonder if it might be possible to stage a summit of parents to stop the insanity. Perhaps we need to adopt a new bill of rights. Children get everything they need and a little of what they want. They get everything they earn and a little of what their parents earn. It’s not really a parents’ bill of rights I’m envisioning here, but a children’s. After all, nothing makes a child more miserable than an unchecked, insatiable appetite for their heart’s every desire. Let’s all just say no.
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