My kids and notes: Year 8.4
June 20, 2023
Life with JB
Ironically, I was just talking to my therapist and PiC about this sort of thing: as someone who grew up poor, how do you feel about your daughter’s attitude towards money?
He grew up in a financially stable household. I didn’t. I consequently spend a hell of a lot more time talking to JB about money than he does: how we have to work for our money, how we prioritize saving above all because we always want to make sure that if something happens to our ability to earn, we will have savings to draw on.
I give them a very modest allowance and require them to save a portion of it at all times, while letting them start to make decisions (and mistakes, though that gives me heartburn) with their money. I tell them that we expect that they’ll make mistakes as they grow up, that they’ll be better served making small mistakes now where they can learn about how their behavior shapes their spending and learn to adapt systems that will work for them and their habits, instead of against them. My anxiety is of course heightened by the fact that they are most definitely a spender personality. That was my brother. I hoarded my money from the first time I held and saved my own red envelope money, whereas my brother could always find another reason to spend. I’m still years away from seeing how my attempts at teaching JB to be wise with their money and generous to others will work out.
I don’t want them to have financial anxiety and YET I want them to have the skills that the anxiety taught me. I’m really not sure how to do that.
I think it’s interesting that Scalzi mentioned being open with Athena about their income and spending choices. I’m open with JB about our spending priorities but not about our income yet.
Life with Smol Acrobat
Smol Acrobat is getting to the age where we teach them about caring when they hurt someone. They’re deeply concerned when someone has already sustained an injury and will check on it daily for weeks. Months, even. But recently they accidentally hit me in the eye. My “ouch!” and reminding them gently to check in and ask “are you ok?” caused them to freeze up completely. No apologies at this age since we were told ages ago they aren’t developmentally ready to do that. That startled me, I didn’t think that would cause stress for them.
I’ve seen something similar in Demon Cousin. That kid blames the other person for getting hurt and has a screaming meltdown when asked to check on the injured party. I’m not saying Smol is going down that road, but I immediately saw the parallel and we practiced the line “are you ok?” many times with all kinds of different scenarios to take the tension out of saying it. They’re already good at “scuse me”, they do that at daycare a lot, apparently. We’d taught them to say excuse me when trying to get past someone (mostly Sera who doesn’t understand anyway but it’s a hell of a lot better than letting them yell at and smack her to get her to move). After an extended practice session that night, they relaxed and willingly used it to check in the next day.
They’re wielding many new words inexpertly this month: booboo, getting better. Healing! Sun waking up. Mommy, WAKING UP! (said while patting my face when I try to sneak in a nap during a reading session) Retty niaow! (Ready now). Pout pout fish, pout pout face. (said while squishing my face between their hands)
Pronunciation and enunciation are an ongoing struggle. Ta-do has finally morphed into towel. We’re working on strawberry. We need to get through this on our own because I will cry if we have to spend $500/month on speech therapy.
Pupdate
I’ve tried to invite Sera 🐶 to be my office buddy many times, even bringing a bed in for her, but she’s always refused. I don’t force her, if she leaves she leaves. But it’s sad. I’m used to having a dog very nearby. Seamus used to lay with his head on my lap when I sat on the living room floor with him to work. I miss that.
JB carried an armload of costumes into the office and left them for me to deal with. Before I could, Sera 🐶 staked them out as her nest. She’ll come and sleep in the office as long as she can sleep on the nest of JB’s clothes. It makes no sense.
Precious Moments
Smol Acrobat is currently obsessed with owies. JB’s owies, dad’s owies, relitigating the time they took an owie from that door six months ago, see? See here on this foot? Door! They need to check everyone’s owies to confirm they’re getting better.
They demanded to see my owies, rolling up my pant leg.
Oh, I don’t have an owie there.
“See! Owie!!” Prods my leg.
Oh. I guess they’ve heard me aching around the house. “You can’t, kiddo, my owies are in the bone.”
“See bone! See bone!!!”
I have two responses–
First is that I was a money-hoarder from a young age, while one of my brothers was a spender. My other two siblings seemed more middle-of-the-road, so we collectively spanned a spectrum. I would say that right now, the spender and I have both come closer to our sides of the middle. I can spend money without agonizing over it; he can save money. One of the middle-of-the-roaders seems to have stuck to the middle of the road. And the other middle-of-the-roader is now more of a spender, to the point at which I sometimes worry a little over what I’m guessing about their spend:save ratio. It’s possible to have spender tendencies and still be reasonably okay.
Second is that Scalzi’s approach to kid communications about money is probably not going to be mine. I do want my kid to understand that we work for money, which we use for taking care of ourselves as a family and for saving for the future. She sees me and my husband working, and I talk with her about it and how it connects to how we use money. I’m not telling her dollar amounts or labeling rich/poor/middle class, though. At her current age, she’s innocent and transparent enough that whatever I said would get shared at school sooner or later. I just don’t see a lot of good coming from that happening. I’m not sure at what age I would want her to know the specifics, but it’s not anytime soon.
Thank you for sharing that. I think I’ve seen too many people who are spenders on the more extreme end of the range, so it’s really nice to hear about more moderate examples.
Do you think you want to share real numbers with her when she’s older and understand discretion? I want to WANT to, but I don’t know when JB and Smol Acrobat would be mature enough that I’d feel comfortable doing that. JB is going on 9 and while they understand the concept of poor/rich in the sense that some people don’t have the means to even get the basics that they need, vs people who have so much they can afford to make dozens of bad decisions, they don’t have any numbers to peg to either of those ends of the spectrum.
Sharing real numbers… maybe when she’s 29, and it’s more information about my husband’s and my end-of-life setup than about something that’s relevant to how she runs her own life?
Could I get away with keeping it quiet for so long? Probably not. But it’s a tempting thought. Both because of what I want for her developmentally and because of my own psychology….
XD What are you worried about if you share numbers with her at a younger age?
I think a lot of it has to do with the very affluent town I grew up in. We were middle/lower-middle, but the town had a lot of upper-middle and wealthy. There were a lot of kids who fit the unpleasant affluent-kid stereotype. In their teenaged years, a lot of them were very spending-focused and judgmental about others, very “it’s their own fault, they shouldn’t be helped” about people in need. I wonder now how many of them were really like that vs. how many of them were posing because that was how they could fit in socially. Quite a lot of them don’t seem at all like that now, from what I see on Facebook.
I worry that when when my kid hits her teenaged years, she’s going to be looking for ways to belong. If she knows our family’s financial details, I worry that it could pull her more in the direction of kids like the ones who dominated at my middle and high schools. I just don’t want that. Even if a lot of the ones I grew up with outgrew being that way or didn’t believe as loudly as they spoke, it’s not a phase I want her to go through. I know I can’t control her phases and friend-groups, not really, but… I can at least try to not hand her the ones I don’t want, ready-made and waiting.
I thought I’d done a whole post response to the Scalzi post about money, but I guess it was just a paragraph in an RBOC.
I do think the big difference between us and the Scalzis is that we give our kids an extremely modest allowance, so they actually do have to make choices. They can get things but not everything. It’s probably fine to be able to buy every subscription service if you have as much of a cushion as the Scalzis do, but my kids don’t have that much cushion and I’d like them to have the tools to drop to lower middle class if circumstances required it (medical expenses come to mind…). Not that I want them to drop, but lots of unexpected things can happen.
We’ve moved from middle class to high income during our childrens’ lives, so we have discussed that transition with them.
nicoleandmaggie recently posted…A week of eating
I think our approach is more in line with yours (and Alice’s) than Scalzi’s as well. We don’t have enough money to ensure that they won’t ever drop down in SES, and so we want them to have the tools to survive any drop.
At the same time, we’ve been transparent about the fact that I came from less than nothing and had to work very hard to get here where we are quite comfortable.
Hmmmm off to read that link.
“I don’t want them to have financial anxiety and YET I want them to have the skills that the anxiety taught me. I’m really not sure how to do that.” YEP this is it isn’t it! Mine loves seeing his money build up but also talking about what it can buy him and wht he wants to get. To his credit he does make wise choices when he does spend, hes thoughtful.
Interesting, I haven’t thought about sharing income etc, but reflecting this reminded me of one reason NOT to. Knowing what my parents made many years ago (when we first immigrated, they didn’t make great money and of course things cost a lot less and minimum wage was a lot less) has actually been detrimental for me. $18 an hour was not terrible back then but today it less than minimum and less than living wage. The reason I say it was detrimental is it has subconscoiusly anchored me to that number. So, I realised that I measure a lot of things by that. Like I should just feel grateful to earn more than that figure – but not accounting for the fact that $18 last century (literally) is not $18 today.
NZ Muse recently posted…3 steps to feel-good money