To maintain a happy family, much is required of both parents and children. Each member of the family must become, in a special way, a servant of the others.
– Pope Juan Pablo II
In my years of working with people and their money, I have been privileged to see some wonderful parents model good values for their children. One of those parents is my friend Bill. The first time I met Bill, he came to my office with these two sons to get some money out of the children’s universal life insurance policy to buy motorcycles. Bill explained that they had been using the policy as a savings account. For a long time, these young people had been working to earn money and were saving as much as possible to buy the bikes.
Bill bought these policies for his children when they were young. He or they could buy more every few years, and they insured at a very low price. Bill had taught his children the importance of investing in the future, so they would know how much his father had put into mutual funds for his college expenses. However, the life insurance policy was designed to help them save money to buy something they really wanted, like bikes.
Bill did not give his children rigid rules about saving and spending. Instead, he taught them principles and allowed them to make their own decisions. He helped them understand that they could spend the dollar in their hand today, but if they invested it, that dollar could cost $2 or even $10 in the future. Some parents help their kids save for the next toy, but Bill gave his kids a vision of what their lives could be like if they had money to invest in their own businesses as adults or financially independent as grandparents. Now, that’s a long term perspective! But Bill didn’t just focus on money. He taught his children the value of hard work, integrity, strong relationships, and the joy of serving others. He took them on trips to homeless shelters and to building churches in faraway countries. After each trip, they came back with more information about what really matters and more appreciation for everything they have. Bill didn’t just talk to his kids about the values they should have. He showed them by modeling a lifestyle of responsibility and service, and took them to places where they could see, feel, hear, taste, and smell the needs of others.
One of the main tools Bill used to impart character to his sons was Scouting. Bill was a scoutmaster and his sons loved his involvement in the Boy Scouts. Together, they hiked, climbed, swam and camped at remote sites around the area. The projects they completed taught them lessons about teamwork and integrity, and both sons eventually earned their Eagle Awards. I have a feeling that organizations like the Scouts give parents and their children an advantage over the rest of us, because organizations are in the business of instilling character in their members, not just entertaining them or winning at all costs. In Scouting, Bill helped his sons (and many other boys) build physical muscles, emotional muscles, relational muscles, spiritual muscles and, ultimately, financial muscles. And these children really appreciated their father’s investment in their lives. They are now in college and consider their father their best friend.
The annual study of UCLA freshmen shows that today’s teens are obsessed with having more and more possessions. Three-quarters of those surveyed said it was essential for them to be “financially well off” in order to buy all the things they want. Shockingly, that figure is nearly double the survey results from 40 years ago. In a similar survey, the Pew Research Center found that the main goal for 80% of those between the ages of 18 and 25 is to get rich. David Walsh is a psychologist who directs the National Institute on Family and Media and author of No: Why Kids of All Ages Need to Hear You and Ways Parents Can Say It. He observes: “Our children have absorbed the cultural values of more, easy, fast and fun.” His research found that parents today spend 500 percent more on their children, even adjusted for inflation, than parents a generation ago. “Many parents have developed an allergic reaction to their children’s unhappiness,” Walsh notes. *[Quoted in The Houston Chronicle, “A generation obsessed with having more stuff,” by Martha Irvine, January 23, 2007.] Parents have played a significant role in creating high expectations and self-absorbed demands of their children, and parents can play a role in reversing this trend, at least in the lives of their own children.
The authors of The Millionaire Next Door warn that giving children too much money prevents them from developing their own skills in earning and managing money. Those gifts of money become straitjackets. On a broader scale, parents who fail to engage children in meaningful work around the home erode their children’s sense of responsibility, creativity, and drive. Stop and think about the life of an average middle class American child today. He has far more wealth available than most people in the world and almost all people who lived in earlier times. She is entertained nearly 24 hours a day with television, video games, and MP3 players, and is connected to her friends at all times of the day through her cell phone, text messages, email, and her MySpace account. She is the most plugged in person in the world, rarely turning off the sights and sounds to go outside for air.
The pervasiveness of technology has a powerful impact on people and their ability to communicate, and especially has shortened many parents’ time with their children. A Wikipedia article reports that Linda Stone, formerly of Apple and Microsoft, coined the term “continuous partial attention” to describe the constant distractions of email, instant messaging, cell phones, and other devices. The article reports:
“Continuous partial attention is CONTINUOUS partial attention. It is motivated by the desire to be an LIVE node in the network. Another way of saying this is that we want to connect and stay connected. We want to search for opportunities effectively and optimize the best opportunities, activities and contacts, at any given time. Being busy, connected, is being alive, recognized and important. We pay continuous partial attention in an effort to WASTE NOTHING. time, any behavior anywhere that implies an artificial sense of constant crisis. We are always on high alert when we pay continuous partial attention. This artificial feeling of constant crisis is more typical of continuous partial attention than multitasking.”
Children in our culture have very little free time. Instead, their parents often feel like they are depriving their kids if they don’t take them from soccer practice to violin recitals, or midget cheerleading practice to volleyball games. Instead of learning the value of reflection and creativity, children and their parents value busyness and competition above all other virtues.
TV sitcoms make kids kings and queens of their homes, and shows often portray parents as bumbling idiots who exist only to cater to children’s whims. Too often, these cartoons find expression in real people in our homes, and fiction becomes reality. (I like to laugh at Raymond, but I don’t want to be Raymond! I wonder if one leads to the other. Hmmmm.)
Since we’ve made children the center of the universe, it’s no wonder so many children whine, complain, and manipulate to get what they want. They have been taught through thousands of messages that they deserve the world to give them what they want and make them happy, but that perception creates some of the most unhappy people in the world, children and parents alike. Parents really do want the best for their children, but love doesn’t mean doing everything, all day, every day to fulfill all their dreams or giving them so much that they never have reason to complain. As parents, our primary responsibility is to love our children so much that we do whatever it takes to impart responsibility, wisdom, and a desire to serve others. That is a difficult task. It’s much easier to give in to demands, but real love backed by genuine wisdom and strength allows us to become counterculture parents, imparting character instead of giving our kids what they just want because “every other kid has it.”
Wise parents regularly remove their families from the noise of culture so they can spend quality time together. Even at home, they spend time playing board games, family conversations, and hobbies. Sometimes they even turn off the TV! These parents model the values of simplicity and good communication. They work hard but take time off to maintain balance in their lives. These are the happiest and healthiest families I know.
Jim