It’s a tough economy out there, even for a kid. And many parents are wondering how to broach the subject.
Should they shield their children from the hard times and spend like there’s no tomorrow? Or is it better to share the reality that more families — often their own — simply can’t have it all, even at Christmas? It can be a real dilemma.
“I’ve explained the situation, and I’ve also avoided it,” says Mimi Chacin, a mom and business owner in Miami whose husband lost his job in advertising. The family is doing OK. In fact, the children’s cooking classes Chacin teaches have remained full so far — a sign, she says, that many parents are still willing to spend on some extras for their kids.
But in their own household, she and her husband are still having to cut back — on travel during the holidays, for instance.
“I find myself not wanting to put them under that stress, but also sitting down and explaining that things aren’t easy for anybody right now,” Chacin says of her sons, ages 9 and 4.
Rita Cortese, who owns a Plato’s Closet store, part of a chain of teen-oriented secondhand clothing shops, has been hearing more of these conversations among parents and their children in recent months, especially over bigger-ticket purchases. While most items in the store are in the $5 to $7 range, a pair of designer jeans could be $25, for instance.
“The parents will say, ‘You can’t have the jeans and the sweater. Pick one,’ ” says Cortese, whose store is in Deptford, N.J., just outside Philadelphia.
Now in her second year of business, Cortese chose the store because she thought it’d be fairly recession-proof — and, so far, it’s doing relatively well. This year, she says customers are more likely to spend a total of $75, rather than the $150 to $200 they were spending last year.
How much financial information parents share with their children depends on their age, says Michal Ann Strahilevitz, a professor of marketing and consumer behavior at Golden Gate University in San Francisco.
But as children get older, she thinks, it’s important for parents to talk about what their families can and can’t afford — and to make it a life lesson.
“Money is not the best way to show love to children,” Strahilevitz says. “So . . . think about other nonmonetary ways to make the holidays special for you and your family.”
Darren Wallis, a dad in Webster Groves, Mo., a suburb of St. Louis, says he and his wife have tried to do that with their sons, ages 10, 8 and 4, even though the family is financially stable right now.
In recent weeks, his older boys have been going through advertising circulars and making their holiday wish lists. “They do go with that everything-and-the-kitchen-sink approach,” says Wallis, who works in agribusiness.
But when Wallis asked his boys to include prices and total them up, even his older son was a bit shocked that his wish list came to $904.
Wallis and his wife decided to use it as an opportunity to talk about what that money could buy: “Here’s how many tanks of gas that would be. Here’s how many trips to the grocery store.”
“We wanted them to have some real-world practicality,” Wallis says.
And no, he won’t be buying everything on the list.
