Freeman was wrong. It turns out, kids aren’t goats (anymore), but they are money pits.
It started as we sat around his kitchen table, discussing Amish saving and sharing. Freeman is a fifty-two-year-old farmer from Michigan; he and some of his eleven children farm corn, oats, hay, and dairy replacement heifers. He sells his beef to a local ranch, a natural, no-corn-fed, no-antibiotics meat source.
“I didn’t get a chance to take a shower today, so you might get a whiff of me as we’re talking,” he said congenially.
“Oh, you’re just fine,” I said, hoping that would be true.
As we settled in to the conversation, I asked him about how he’s imparted that famous Amish money wisdom to his children. “How have you taught your kids the value of a dollar?”
“My goats?” he said, grinning broadly. “I haven’t really taught my goats anything about money!”
Momentarily confused, I quickly recovered. “Oh, you think ‘kids’ are goats.”
“They used to be!” He burst out laughing at his comic bit, and I joined him.
How could I . . . build into my kids a piece of the same self-control, delayed gratification, and money sense the Amish form in their children?
I find it hard to believe there are people in our modern world who still think of fluffy purveyors of chèvre when they hear the word kids. But that’s the Amish—old-fashioned and quaint (at the end of our conversation, I was relieved that I hadn’t caught a “quaint” whiff of Freeman, despite his friendly warning). And it’s their old-fashioned, timeworn wisdom, handed down to their little ones, that saves them countless dollars as it sets the foundation for generations to come. How could I—the modern, minivan-driving mom of three—build into my kids a piece of the same self-control, delayed gratification, and money sense the Amish form in their children? Was it possible to unravel some of the materialism and consumerism our culture—and really, Doyle and I—had wrapped them in like so much mohair?
Because a kid by any other name is still expensive, and they still want tons of stuff.
CUTTING THE PIE SMALLER
The first time I came home from a research trip in Lancaster, having visited several Amish families, I walked into my messy house, and my three cherubs shot toward me in a frenzy of greed, wanting to know what souvenirs I had bought them.
“Whadja get me, Mom?”
I thought of Amish children I had witnessed working in their homes and farms. Amos’s little daughter, Katie, about two and half, stood on a stepstool, plunging dirty forks and spoons in hot, soapy water.
I peered at my sink, overflowing with dishes.
I thought of little Moses, playing contentedly with wooden toys in a recycled ice cream bucket, and schoolaged boys and girls playing games together after school and chores were all done.
My kids were rooting through my luggage like crazed baboons, looking for something shiny.
Clearly, I had failed miserably to impart either a work ethic or a sense of self-control.
Still, I knew I couldn’t fairly compare myself to Amish parents, or measure my children by children raised in a drastically different culture. Well, I could, but it would only lead to me beating my head on the driveway in shame and guilt.
Besides, “when children grow up in an individualistic society, they soon accumulate in themselves a desire for more things,” said Dr. Donald Kraybill, whom we met previously. “[Plain] children are not individualistic. They all dress the same, and when you grow up in a family of six to eight children, you soon learn the pie is cut into smaller pieces. The biggest thing is, Amish parents have the community to back them up when they say no to their children; you don’t.”
A comforting fellow altogether, Dr. Kraybill, and a wise one. Yet, I could definitely take a page or two from the Amish parenting manual. Though my children were definitely products of the “Fancy” culture in which they were raised, the junior muttons were not beyond reform. With the help of my Amish friends, Operation De-spoil the Kids was on.
Building Contentment
Who better than the mother of fourteen children to give me a North Star in one simple sentence? “It’s a natural thing for children to want,” Fern, wife of Amos, said softly. “We try to teach them to be content with what they have.”
My kids want a lot of things—how about yours?
Just yesterday my five-year-old daughter called out from her perch in front of the fire, er, TV: “Mom, if you want that thing that squishes our blankets and jackets—like, way squishes them—you gotta call now!”
It was funny and also a little sad. She’s the same cutie pie who daily begs me for:
• mail-order worms for a small-scale butterfly farmette
• “prettier dresses” for herself and her dolls, all named either “Strawberry” or “Princess”
• a pink canopy for her bed
• pink curtains
• pink furniture
• pink items of all kinds
I could go on.
She’s also the same little lady who recently climbed into bed with me one Sunday morning, mournfully asking for ice cream for breakfast because “my teeth feel very warm.”
That right there is the perfect example of kids wanting something and not even really knowing it’s not good for them. Children do perpetually want things, but they can be redirected. Because the truth is, “the more children have, the more they want,” or so said Atlee, a young farmer and father of seven.
How can I grow contentment in my children, and make them see that the things they have already are a good and cheap source of fun? I wondered.
I decided to take inventory of Phoebe’s toys, with her help, hopefully distracting her from the urgent need to buy worms and wardrobe for the Strawberries.
We had a box for books and toys that we could donate to “little girls who don’t have enough special things.” That box actually filled up pretty quickly, and in the process of sorting, Phoebe discovered some previously shunned toys that she wanted to play with again.
The next time she beseeched me for new toys, I reminded her of the lovely things she already had to play with. Of course, it’s not that simple to shut down a dogged young consumer working an angle—remember, she’s the one who pleaded “warm teeth” as an excuse for morning ice cream—so I also told her she could only ask for something new if she had played with her current toys for an hour.
Yes, she did forget her wants by the time the hour had passed, until the next commercial, of course. Then I told her she could only ask for one thing a day, and to shut the TV off, for heaven’s sake.
Sigh. The Amish really do have an advantage by not having televisions. They don’t have to constantly deflect marketing messages targeted directly at their offspring the way we do.
But I do hope my inventory experiment stretched Phoebe’s contentment muscle a little bit.
As we unearthed all kinds of forgotten dolls and games and books, it reminded me of something another Amish mom told me once regarding families and thrift: “People are careful with the things they have; they try and teach their children to be careful with their things too.”
Well, yeah. Everyone knows that, right? Except I could see with my own two eyes the dislocated game pieces, squashed books and game boxes, and toys with broken parts.
In some ways, teaching my children, especially the little one, to be satisfied with what they have started with me paying more attention to how they were treating their things. It also probably meant spending an hour or two on a scrounging mission of locating game and puzzle pieces and doll clothes and reuniting those things with their proper toys. Oh, it would be so much easier to just bag up the less-than-pristine stuff and start over with new, but what message would that send? As Andy, an Amish father of nine, told me, “A lot more is caught than taught.” So hopefully, Phoebe was catching on to the fact that there were untold hours of happiness to be had playing with the things she already owned.
Teaching my children, especially the little one, to be satisfied with what they have started with me paying more attention to how they were treating their things.
Because, if I’m being honest, I really don’t want to bring worms into my home.
A Cheaper Way
My boys are older and easier to reason with, most of the time. I’m trying to help them develop the same kind of frugal mind-set that is emerging in me after spending time with the Amish.
A biggie is filtering out wants versus needs (see chapter 10). Ezra is currently obsessed with the Percy Jackson books by Rick Riordan. At the beginning of third grade, he was a reluctant reader (the son of a writer! The grandson of a bookseller! Where, oh, where had we gone wrong?). But all that changed with Percy, and he was tearing through the series like an Angora billy mowing through a patch of alfalfa.
Do you know how easy it was for me to justify the purchase of three $7.99 books in a row? I practically threw the money at him when he asked. But then it occurred to me that those books might be available in the used section of the bookstore, so I made him look there first.
No used copies were to be found.
I could have made him wait until we had time to visit the library on the chance that the Percy installment he was on had not been checked out by seven other nine-year-old boys.
But I promise you, book four is going to have to wait. Because as much as I deeply relate to someone becoming addicted beyond all sense to a series of books, he really didn’t need it (almost); he just wanted it really badly.
Speaking of wants, parents of my generation seem to want our kids to want for nothing, except as the Amish teach us, they are desperately wanting for self-control, the ability to say no, and the capacity to distinguish between wants versus needs. The Amish are brilliant at telling the difference between a want and a need, and they transfer that discipline to their children. We need to do the same.
So, on my de–spoil mission, I had to resist the urge to coddle Ezra by immediately rushing out to buy book four. Instead, I had to do the harder work of imposing a little delayed gratification. We brainstormed about it and decided he would ask his Percy pals to find out if anyone had a copy of book four that he could borrow (he had already loaned out a couple of the books to one of his friends). Failing plan A, we would head to the library and, if need be, put his name on a list. He could also choose to spend his own money if he wanted to.
The first three books in the Percy Jackson series: $24. The next two books: armed with a new, cheap tactic, hopefully, minus $16.
The Amish are brilliant at telling the difference between a want and a need, and they transfer that discipline to their children. We need to do the same.
Mick Jagger and Bishop Jacob Agree
Many times it boils down to just saying the magic word: no.
Our kids truly are indulged, because for whatever emotional and psychological reasons (that would fill up another book), Gen X parents don’t want to cause their children a moment’s discomfort. And saying no to what they want is uncomfortable.
Bishop Jacob, a sage grampop of fifty-six grandchildren, some whose names he’s not even sure about (“Sometimes you have to think once or twice,” he admitted) gave me the bottom line: “Say no to your children, because it’s chust not good for them if you never say no,” he told me. “They’ll never learn, later in life, that they can’t always get what they want.” (Cue the Rolling Stones, whose song “You Can’t Always Get What You Want” instantly popped into my head—and didn’t pop out for days.)
No to $20 worms.
Nein to $7.99 books.
Nyet to that $400 guitar, which my guitar phenom twelve-year-old really, really wants.
No. No. No. Because Jagger and Jacob are right. It’s a tough lesson we learn continually over the course of our lives, starting, hopefully, in childhood.
Sometimes no is just no. A parent doesn’t need a whole song-and-dance explanation for why he or she is saying no. But, sometimes, no might mean a lesson in delayed gratification, another admirable tenet of Amish money management.
“If children want something, they are encouraged to work for it,” said Mindy Starns Clark, author of several books on the Plain people, “as the Amish believe that a gift given too easily robs children of the joy of earning it themselves.”
Fern said that her kids had been “begging us for a couple of years” for that trampoline I mentioned in an earlier chapter, which will probably be theirs soon. Several of Atlee’s kids had been saving for over a year to go in together on a Radio Flyer wagon (the Radio Flyer #29 All-Terrain Cargo Wagon, for example, is $98 new). I visited his farm in February, and he anticipated that they would have enough saved up to buy the wagon by May or June.
Postponed bliss . . . there’s nothing like it, and I have a feeling those kids will enjoy that wagon so much more because they put off buying it (under Atlee’s guidance) until they could afford it.
And I think Jonah will be that much more gratified by his Epiphone Les Paul guitar, which he will buy with his own money, saved up over the course of a year. Ten dollars a pop for mowing lawns, twenty-five-dollar birthday and Christmas checks from Oma, allowance money, etc., have been piling up, and within a month he will probably have the funds in hand to buy that precious guitar.
Because like the song says, “If you try sometimes, well, you just might find you get what you need.”
Too Late Schmart?
There’s a Penn Dutch saying that goes, “Ve get too soon old und too late schmart.”
Kids grow like clover in a hay field, and somehow in that short time, parents are called upon to impart the value of a dollar, the power of frugality, and those all-important money schmarts, er, smarts.
One brainy idea from Fern: “Keeping children busy is a good thing,” she said. “They don’t have idle time to think about all the things they want.” And she has more than a dozen offspring to keep busy, after all.
My three youngsters may not be shucking corn and mucking stalls like their Amish counterparts, but there’s plenty of work around our house to keep them prudently occupied.
Before they “get too soon old, there’s a longstanding work ethic that says you’re expected to work because you’re part of a family,” said Dr. Kraybill.
Huh. Why have I so often felt ill at ease and even guilty for putting my kids to work? It all goes back to my generation’s aversion to tough love and our propensity to baby our children (I know, I know . . . another book). I mean, they do chores, but—this was made abundantly clear after I started visiting Amish homes—not nearly enough of them. I decided it would be good for my family to divide and conquer a little more, to “share the burdens” as the Plain people did.
“Work,” said Erik Wesner, “is formative for children. The ‘idle hands are the devil’s playground’ proverb is one well-known among Amish. Parents make sure to ‘share’ burdens with their children by having them do chores and help around the house from an early age (four or five years old is not an unusual age to already have some small tasks which you are responsible for). In this way, they are ‘sharing’ the cultural traits with the next generation, ones that have helped the Amish as a whole to survive and thrive.”
“Thriving” has a nice ring to it.
So, thanks to Amish parents modeling their money mentoring, I launched the six-pronged “De-spoiling” plan with my kids:
1. Teach them contentment with what they already have.
2. Show them how to hunt out savings and freebies.
3. Help them distinguish between wants and needs.
4. Say no with some regularity.
5. Encourage delayed gratification.
6. Teach them that hard work won’t kill them, and is probably really, really good for them.
Too late schmart? I don’t think so. Hopefully, just-intime schmart is more like it.