The delicate balance between appreciation and entitlement

We want our kids to have it all -- especially the things we didn't have. But how do we make sure they don't take it for granted?

Photo by Dário Gomes on Unsplash

I don’t think of myself as having grown up poor, but I know I didn’t grow up rich.

My parents were young and in graduate school for a lot of my early childhood. They separated once, then divorced for good when I was about 10.

I remember moving seven times during childhood, always within the same big town/small city (Grand Forks, N.D.) and always into different places where we were renting. I don’t remember living permanently in a dwelling that someone in my family owned until I was 27 – a condo my wife and I bought together a few years before we got married.

I grew up as an only child, and I only occasionally noticed that we didn’t have a lot of money. But someone did because our family qualified at least some of the time for reduced price lunch tickets. Coupons were clipped. But that was just life. It didn’t seem strange. It was normal.

I took one roundtrip flight between age 1 and 20, when my mom and I went to Florida when I was 12. It felt expensive and extravagant, especially when I tallied up the cost for a school project: $1,500.

That seemed like all the money in the world.

We always had food. We always had a place to live. And maybe back then in the 1980s and early 1990s, money was just different?

A lot of my friends were in roughly the same financial shape, except for one. He was the first one to get a Nintendo, his house was a spacious split-level and he always had money for baseball cards.

When you grow up like I did, maybe it’s hard to understand the limits that money can put around your choices — and how it can frame your experiences. You have what you have. Going out to eat or getting a new toy? Those are special occasions.

My wife grew up in similar financial circumstances, albeit in a two-parent household with four children. Money was always tight, and options typically felt limited.

Together, now, we have moved up in economic class.

I know we’re not rich, but I’m positive that we’re not poor. We’re in the middle class, and by some definitions we fall on the upper side of that spectrum — something that still surprises me whenever I see data.

We have three children, all under the age of 10, and we have managed to navigate child care costs, COVID and everything else life has thrown our way to reside in a comfortable spot.

Even as we get exasperated at how much everything seems to cost — these potato chips are $6? Our Target bill was how much? — we can afford everything we need and a lot of the things we want. Even having three kids these days feels extravagant to a degree.

I never want to take that for granted.

But where I find a constant struggle — one my wife and I’m sure many others who grew up on the lower end of the financial spectrum can relate to — is in striking a balance in raising our kids:

Giving them many of the things that we didn’t have and couldn’t always afford without raising them in a way that will make them entitled or spoiled.

Not all of that tension is monetary. Some of it is just a reflection of the times. Kids these days have very little frame of reference for not being able to have things — songs, movies, facts, the latest meme video — essentially instantly.

If you are around my age (47), you likely have grown into this expectation. But our generation can still remember a different pace: Having to wait until the next week for the next episode of a show we liked. Having to wait until Saturday morning for cartoons. Having to buy a cassette or hope your favorite song is played on the radio.

Now we have multiple streaming services. And if anyone wants to hear a song, they just yell like my 4-year-old son: “Alexa, play Bones” (he’s into Imagine Dragons).

Pushing back against instant gratification takes effort. This sometimes means saying no even when we could say yes — to a new toy, an impulse purchase on Amazon or ordering takeout instead of making dinner.

It means trying to maximize experiences — trips, memberships or even something as simple as the time that is afforded to those who don’t have to constantly struggle just to stay afloat — and remembering that adjusting our pace can be just as important as our spending.

But it is challenging. I use that word instead of hard because it is not hard. It is privileged, requiring the sort of intention again that is afforded to those who can make choices. But it is challenging in that narrow definition of something that requires work.

My wife and I want them to have the things we didn’t have. That’s at least a part of the point of achievement.

We’re occasionally reminding our kids — and often reminding each other — of the relative privilege, of what is possible now that didn’t seem possible when we were young.

I hope the more limited circumstances in which we grew up give us a lens that makes us both appreciative of what we have and constantly cognizant of our privilege. If anything, I struggle with the guilt of having more than a lot of people do.

I think we’re doing a pretty good job, at least so far, of raising appreciative children. They still get excited about small things and minor gestures. We shop for good deals, trying to explain to them the difference between price and value. It still matters.

It probably helps that we legitimately can’t say yes to everything — that we can buy a lot of the objects and experiences we want, but that there is a financial limit we can’t stretch beyond.

They all are learning the value of money, though our four-year-old still doesn’t really understand that a $20 bill is more valuable than a $1 bill or a quarter is worth more than a nickel. To him, it’s all just money. One is one.

We let them make choices with money they have received or earned, gently nudging them but ultimately using moments as lessons. When she was younger, our oldest daughter lost $3 of her own money on one skill crane game, and the look on her face when she realized how quickly it vanished makes me positive she’ll never do that again.

But it doesn’t mean they won’t ask for more, or that we won’t constantly have to thread the needle between appreciation and entitlement.

What I end up telling our kids a lot of times, when they are disappointed by the word “no” and are trying to state their cases for why it should be “yes,” is some variation of this: You’re confusing not getting anything with not getting everything.

And what they might not ever fully understand: Being able to say no when we could say yes is a luxury compared to having to say no when yes isn’t an option.