In his new book David and Goliath about the advantages of disadvantages, Malcolm Gladwell describes the rough upbringing of a kid in Minneapolis who would become a wealthy Hollywood producer. His father taught him the value of money by making him split the cost of things like new shoes or a bicycle.
If he left the lights on, his father would show him the electric bill. “He’d say, ‘Look, this is what we pay for electricity. You’re just being lazy, not turning the lights off. We’re paying for you being lazy. But if need the lights for working–twenty-four hours a day–no problem.” (pp. 45-6)
His father told him how much things cost and made him adjust because times were tight. He worked in the family’s scrap metal business, lived in a bad neighborhood in business and law school to save money, and worked hard to rise to where he is now–living in a colossus in Beverly Hills with a gate “that looks like it was shipped over from some medieval castle in Europe.”
He worked hard to succeed and now wants to provide opportunities for his children, including the opportunity to learn the same lessons that brought him so much success. But now with millions of dollars, he lacks the incentive his father had to show his kids the electric bill. He’s never going to have trouble paying it which means what he learned by necessity growing up where he did, his children can only learn by artificial imposition.
Gladwell’s thesis is that some disadvantages turn out to actually make one better off. It’s hard to be the kind of parent you want to be with too little money because children are expensive and thinking about making ends meet and the stress of not giving them what you’d like to is exhausting. “What if I didn’t have to worry about money?”, the young father asks himself.
Then you’d have to worry about money in a different way. Or at least you should worry.
Money makes parenting easier until a certain point–when it stops making much of a difference. What is that point? The scholars who research happiness suggest that more money stops making people happier at a family income of around seventy-five thousand dollars a year. After that, what economists call “diminishing marginal returns” sets in. (p. 49)
What once made parenting easier eventually makes it harder. Soon you don’t worry about providing opportunities but having those opportunities be taken for granted. The graph of parenting from difficult to easy on one axis and wealth from poor to rich on the other isn’t a straight line. It’s upside-down U shaped.
Doesn’t this make you pity rich people and their kids? Not so much, but that isn’t the point. There are plenty of kids in lower income households who learn dependence, laziness and entitlement instead of frugality and industry. And there are those in wealthy households who receive the work ethic of their parents (assuming this is the ethic that gained the wealth). But circumstances naturally push against both of these, hence our saying “Shirtsleeves to shirtsleeves in three generations.” One generation grows up poorer and works hard to get out of it. Their kids enjoy and inherit their wealth but not the work ethic. They live on the fumes of their parents, but their kids receive less of the wealth and none of the ethic. Faithfulness begat prosperity, and the daughter devoured the mother, Cotton Mather said.
Parents feeling the stress of not providing enough for their children should take heart. Greatness is born of adversity as Gladwell demonstrates in numerous fascinating case studies. And parents with piles of the stuff have to take caution. To whom much is given, much is required. I remember one wealthy friend telling me his whole goal was not to ruin his kids with his money. He was cognizant of the danger, and to some extent as Americans we all should be.
In Proverbs 30:8-9 Augur asks “Give me neither poverty nor riches; feed me with the food that is needful for me, lest I be full and deny you and say, “Who is the LORD?” Or lest I be poor and steal and profane the name of my God.” It’s easy to be either frugal or generous, and hard to be both. Christian parents have to disciple their kids to work hard and to feel the consequences of laziness early. I think it was Dave Ramsey who said allowance is simply welfare for children–money that comes your way for breathing. Rather, money should be earned for work.
Gladwell quotes psychologist James Grubman:
“The parents have to learn to switch from ‘No we can’t’ to ‘No we won’t.'” But “no we won’t,” Grubman said, is much harder. “No we can’t” is simple. Sometimes, as a parent, you have to say it only once or twice. It doesn’t take long for the child of a middle-class family to realize that it is pointless to ask for a pony, because a pony simply can’t happen.
“No we won’t” get a pony requires a conversation, and the honesty and skill to explain that what is possible is not always what is right. “I have to teach them: ‘Yes, I can buy that for you. But I choose not to. It’s not consistent with our values.'”
The last thing anyone wants to do is work hard, be blessed and then ruin their kids with that blessing. And this is the temptation for those to whom much is given.