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 strongly suggesting the need to buy and possess, there was a sea change in restraint from owning such and such in multiples.
And the variety and technical quality and necessity for having them just grew.
All of this constant merchandising not only at your door from which it had originated but now in one's living room or wherever one watched television brought the package of the combination of entertainment for a fee. One had to suffer or suffered voluntarily the assaults on one's resistance to insouciant spending.
Add to that concoction that undermined valuing the credit card which is a system that pretends to loan you money to buy all that one needs and does not need often beyond one's means to ever pay back for all kinds of reasons, from lack of self-control where spending is concerned to a total lack of understand relative to what debt does to one's abilities to exercise control over the positions that one has voluntarily yielded control to the repo man earlier or the bankruptcy caused by debt beyond reasonable opportunity to ever repay in a lifetime. A credit card to a wealthy man is a necessary convenience. To a poor man, it means life on the street or worse after everything is lost, a house, a car, a job, a reputation, and a life?
There are all kinds of values, just as there are teens who value respect, learning, volunteering, working, as in respect for their elders, learn the difference between good and bad, volunteer to help those in need, work around the house, there are teens who understand the value of money: How it is earned, what it is for, who make it possible for them to have the things they need, when it will become necessary to earn their own to pay their way.
There was a time that young people worked to help their parents to keep the family afloat. It probably still happens in some places, it must. In those days when more had to help, where the number of years one attended school depended on it became apparent that they would have to leave to go to work to help at home. All this has changed for the better. Yet there were values learned in discharging obligations to family. For one thing, one learned that money was earned by hard work; your parents did not give it to you. You gave your wages to your parents who gave you an allowance, small enough for you to buy your necessities.
At work, you also learned what you did not want to do. Today, one is drawn to work by the promise of the wealth, financial and material, that money will bring and not for the practical purpose of having to survive on the wages you earned at the "sweat of your brow." Our grandparents did that. I did that so that our children would not have to work as much for quite as long to accumulate all those things and do all that we ever wished we could do but could not do for lack of money. But we were not so unhappy as our grandchildren some time who are unashamed to cry for simply not getting the thing they want but do not need. Our weakness, many times, is that we give it to them, what they want. It's how we break this cycle that might change their spending habits. If suddenly, we no longer have the money to spend, as is happening in some families, what will their reactions these teens? Our children?