Yesterday our teenage daughter did not have the best day of her life, the reason being that her little sister got a gorgeous, brand-new phone that is significantly nicer than hers. Not because we practise favouritism in our home or particularly approve of kids owning expensive electronic devices, but because our younger child is really careful with money. She had been saving and squirrelling away whatever she could doing chores and selling old toys on Gumtree for more than a year in order to raise enough cash. When her dad surprised her with it, we watched her little face crumple as she burst into tears of disbelief, and sharing her moment of joy had us all reaching for the tissues. That is, except for her sister, whose tears stemmed less from happiness than from a deep and abiding sense of the injustice of the world.
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The trouble is, for our older child, money burns a hole in her pocket. If she ever has any cash to her name, she’ll take her girlfriends out for lunch or buy herself the cool jacket she spotted at the vintage store. And I completely understand because I’m a bit like that myself – terrible at saving – but I still feel it’s important to teach her the value of money and to allow her to experience the reward of working for something. It’s hard with kids nowadays: they live such charmed lives compared with ours at their age. It’s normal for them to eat out, go shopping with their friends, and have new clothes and cool stuff. The materialism that was unthinkable for me as a teenager is just normal life for her.
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Like, I suppose, my teen years – having a mom who drove me around and spoilt me as much as she could afford to – was very different from my mother’s life as one of five children, where money was scarce and treats were few and far between. With our kids today, we enable their expectations and then wonder how we created these little monsters who think it’s boring eating supper at home and expect to be entertained the entire weekend. So, in our own little way, and where we can, we try to remind our daughters that the way they live is not ‘normal’. And the expensive gifts and amounts of money their friends are routinely given run counter to the values we hold as a family. But it does feel like a bit of an uphill battle – not to mention slightly hypocritical given my own weakness around a nice jacket….
I suppose the best we can do is equip them for the world the way it is now, and continue to remind them that those living in fancy houses and driving expensive cars are not better or happier than anyone else. In fact, often the opposite holds true. And encourage them, in the big, co-ed, diverse government school they attend, to befriend and hang out with people from different walks of life. And remind them that South Africa is a place of vast, glaring inequality and being born middle-class means they have a responsibility to uplift, help and give back wherever and however they can. I hope that by being raised in a household where kindness, respect and humility are valued above anything you can buy in a store moulds them into decent people, give or take the odd designer label they’ve managed to procure. And that the values we seek to instil in them serve as reminders to us, the adults, of how much we have, and how abundant and rich our lives are compared with many. Whether my younger daughter’s cool new phone will teach her big sister a lesson about delayed gratification remains to be seen. They have very different personalities and ways of navigating the world, and as their guardians we can only do so much. But I think sometimes, when it comes to the things we give our children, allowing them the opportunity to work for something they want and not get it till they’ve earned it can be the most valuable gift of all.
Susan Hayden is the voice behind the popular blog Disco Pants & A Mountain
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