by Gerard Coulombe

Created on: July 11, 2009   Last Updated: July 14, 2009

How to make your teens change their spending habits is a challenge nowadays. My grandson, for whom I am stand-in father in lieu of his dad, whom mom divorced over his narcissistic abuse, just asked if I would give him some money to go to the beach. He is going with a friend with whom he just had an overnight, and his friend's mom is taking them to Jennings Beach on Long Island Sound here in town. I asked if he had any money of his own, he said he had less than he has had; he just needed money for something to eat, sort of like paying his own way, in case his friend's mom offers to buy them snack food, he could offer to pay his way.

His friend's mom is very generous. He is there often, but he has many friends and many overnights in good company. In my day, I, too, at eleven, asked my mom for money to go to the movies, double features mostly, Movietone News, cartoons, a serial, a Hopalong Cassidy cowboy movie, a Mr. and Mrs. North movie, and a Travelogue ending with "And now we say farewell to the beautiful...." Mom gave me a dime. That's what it cost for three hours of front row bliss on a Saturday afternoon like today. Actually, I'm not complaining because as costs are, I'm getting away cheap. He will have a healthy time at the beach. Had he asked to go to the movies, a single feature with munchies would have cost much more. Kids don't ask to go to the movies anymore.

Which is my segue into why things are different, and it is so much more difficult to change an assumption that kids have which is that they are entitled to all the things they hear said is theirs for the price. The price is only secondary to getting the service, product, entertainment they must have because everybody else does. They harangue and push and plead, and cry and pout, and slam doors on particularly challenging occasions when they see that they are not going to get their way. I'm talking about my grandchildren, aged 11, who are triplets, two girls and a boy, and their fourteen-year-old older sister.

There is any number of reasons why teens and even younger children have expensive spending habits. The first is that much has changed generationally. The taste for possessions and the need to buy grew with the tremendous technological advances in a variety of broadcasting media, which opened more doors for advertising to grow exponentially. It was a reshaping of the taste that people developed for the acquisition of things for their sake of things with a constant, repetitious barrage

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