From yesterday's Times, a report about having to all of a sudden be more frugal with your teenager. I'm not overly sympathetic to this - fortunately, the report wasn't focused on the Upper West Side - but must remember that the peer pressure at that age can be brutal:
[The teenagers interviewed] all felt the pressure and the desire to acquire: their knowledge of brands and prices was encyclopedic. “The stuff it takes for them to be perceived as middle class is extraordinary,” said Tom Murphy, who teaches the high school’s “Economics and Society” seminar. “Laptops, Xboxes, iPods, phones — and it’s nonnegotiable.”Even so, they probably don't want you to work more to have to afford all this stuff:
And yet, she added shyly: “I love the gifts but I’d really like to spend time with him. But my parents are working harder than ever and they’re so worried. I don’t want to force him to spend time with me. I can be a real earache.”
And from today's Eagle: easy credit may be a thing of the past. The article points out that as nice as it is to be able to fund affluence by credit card, it has a lot of bad consquences as well, like a terribly low savings rate and fixed obligations that form a high percentage of monthly income, which is the situation I'm in.
1 comment:
I never bought any of that stuff for my kids when they were teens. Most of them got their own phones and games and the ones who got ipods got those themselves too. If they want it they should get their own jobs. No way parents should start kids off in life with that kind of money wasting mentality.
Post a Comment