Kids Come Home With Truths We Don’t Want to Face

The other day, the 6- and 8-year-old daughters of some friends of mine came home from a neighbor’s house to ask their mother if they were rich. She told them they were not.

“Well, then, how much money do we make?” one of the girls persisted.

Around the same time another friend’s preteen daughters began expressing concern about the family car, a Volvo. They yearned for a Mercedes.

And then there was this from a 6-year-old visiting the house of her classmate, a neighbor of mine, for the first time.

“Our house is much nicer than yours,” she pronounced.

None of this surprises me, yet it manages to disconcert.

Our children reflect our own lives, innocently playing back the good and the bad, ignorant of nuance, until they learn otherwise.

But my friends and I don’t really talk about materialism or greed. Not unless we have to.

In our world, that of the middle class, it is right to want more, to strive to “get ahead,” to accumulate material things. It is vulgar and flat-out wrong when it begins to really matter.

Our children are supposed to understand the difference.

“Sometimes I wonder what I’ve done wrong, why I’m not driving a Jaguar,” says my friend, she of the Volvo. “I mean, you look around you and it seems like everyone else has one. Then I see how I’m getting caught up in all this. That worries me. And what about the kids? That’s the real dilemma.”

We were talking on the phone when my friend was telling me this, quickly, in bursts of passion. She was busy, her turn to car pool, and her daughter was pacing.

She had just finished telling me about the new business she was starting up. She was exhilarated by the challenge, the future, the money.

“Then what I want to do is take the profits from this and invest it in real estate!” she said.

But then we got to talking about “this invisible line.” When we cross it, it trips a silent alarm.

Her daughters want a Mercedes. She could only sigh. Then her guilt seemed to gel.

“You’re not going to believe this,” she said, “but I’m actually going to join a church. I was raised Catholic, but my religion has been compartmentalized. . . . My children haven’t even had that.”

The father of the girls who were curious about their family’s GNP took another tact. When he came home from work that evening, his daughters asked him the same question they had asked their mother.

“Yes, we’re rich,” he told them, not missing a beat. “We’re rich because we have each other.”

Later he told me he had given them “the usual hippie drivel” about what’s important in life, that money can never buy happiness or love.

I smiled, picturing him in this role of gentle educator, funny and warm.

“Yeah, well,” he said, “what I felt like saying, was, ‘If they’re so rich, how come they don’t have a swimming pool?’ ”

We both laughed at that one. The joke was on us.

But my neighbor, for one, was smiling less. She worries about her daughter’s 6-year-old friend with the superior house, the superior clothes and the superior attitude.

She doesn’t want her own children to expect the best. She wants them to earn it.

That’s why these particular thoughts of childhood bother my friends and me. They slap against our sensibilities, baring a conflict we rarely discuss.

When I was growing up, my mother would tell me, only half in jest, “It’s just as easy to fall in love with a rich man as it is with a poor one.” But she was guessing about that herself. The man she married was hardly rich.

And what of this proverb: “It’s no crime to be poor.”

No, it isn’t. But is it becoming a shame?

There are other easy one-liners, far too many to recall, that punctuate the moral lessons of childhood. Some of them will be dismissed as mere fable, trite and cliched. Others will come alive.

As a parent, I worry about which ones will stick with my own child. I know she’ll be watching to see which ones have stuck with me.