Do you worry that raising your kids in the dc area will skew their sense of normalcy?

[Anonymous]

This is a tangent that I started thinking about after reading through the “big vs small houses” entertaining thread.

What mostly concerns me living in a modest/small home in this area is that my children’s ideas about money and success will be skewed for life. We live in a $750k home in Bethesda, which only gets us 2 bedrooms! That is insane compared to the rest of the country. We have a HHI of close to $300k and some family money as a safety net as well. Based on these stats alone we are doing super well compared to 95% of the families in the US.
But I worry about how I will explain this to my young children when they become old enough to notice the difference between our “tiny” home and their friends’ larger homes. Will they think we are “poor” even though we most certainly are not?

I know that my kids will feel super loved and will grow up in a happy home, but how do I instill in them a sense of gratitude about all they are blessed with from a young impressionable age once they start going to school with kids that are mostly “better-off” financially (at least from appearances)?

[Anonymous]

We live in a very diverse suburb of DC and I wonder if my kid thinks that is how it is across the entire USA. I have told her its not but it may be a rude awakening someday. (we are a multi-racial family)

[Anonymous]

Where is the big house/small house thread?

[Anonymous]

Better to be skewed in this direction (expecting to need more money for basics than you will need if you leave the area) than the other. 50% of the real estate forum here is people complaining that back home in Tennessee they'd have a mansion, a mansion I tell you! for these prices. Their expectations are skewed and it makes them miserable. What's the worst that can happen to your kid, they look around in Cleveland one day and realize their dollar goes a lot further than mom and dad's did?

[Anonymous]

Anonymous wrote:We live in a very diverse suburb of DC and I wonder if my kid thinks that is how it is across the entire USA. I have told her its not but it may be a rude awakening someday. (we are a multi-racial family)

That's us, too. I've lived in this area for most of my life and when I visit places with a homogenous population, I feel out of place.

[Anonymous]

I don't think that kids are going to be grateful for what they have, because it's just what's normal to them. You can express gratitude, for sure, and you should, but I think that you also need to make sure that you aren't constantly comparing what you have to people who have more. If you think of your house as small or tiny or modest, or your family as relatively poor, then that's the habit you are teaching. Don't assume that all the kids your kids go to school with are living in the big houses. There are people in apartments and condos and small houses even in Bethesda, and your kids will likely be in school with some of them.

[Anonymous]

All of the DC area is not like Bethesda. We are in Aspen Hill and it’s very down to earth over here.

[Anonymous]

Why does a child need to feel "blessed"? Kids DGAF. I've lived in everything from a basement bedroom in a house to a mansion, and not in a linear increasing or decreasing order. Life isn't about the size of your house or even how nice your house is. As a kid I literally did not even notice that some of our friends' houses were twice as big as ours. I mean, I guess I realized they had more rooms and were physically bigger, but all I cared about is do they have a nintendo system and good food. I feel sorry for people that are so focused on house size. I also question why you need your kids to express gratitude or be blessed. Just let them be kids. They are egocentric by nature.

[Anonymous]

OP here, Thanks for all of the different perspectives. I appreciate them and it makes me think of this issue a little differently and perhaps it isn't an issue at all.

[Anonymous]

Anonymous wrote:Better to be skewed in this direction (expecting to need more money for basics than you will need if you leave the area) than the other. 50% of the real estate forum here is people complaining that back home in Tennessee they'd have a mansion, a mansion I tell you! for these prices. Their expectations are skewed and it makes them miserable. What's the worst that can happen to your kid, they look around in Cleveland one day and realize their dollar goes a lot further than mom and dad's did?

THIS. Better for a kid to be raised in less, grow up, decide they're rather live in South Carolina or whatever and realize that it gets them a mansion. Though be forewarned, once they move to South Carolina and get that mansion, they are NEVER coming back. Same thing happened to me and many of my friends -- moved here from NYC, found it so reasonable financially, that now job offers to go back to Manhattan all seem meh . . . .

[Anonymous]

I love how insular you all are in DC. Its cute.

[Anonymous]

Anonymous wrote:All of the DC area is not like Bethesda. We are in Aspen Hill and it’s very down to earth over here.

Exactly. Any post that talks about “this area” as competitive, wealthy, etc. is just talking about NW DC, Bethesda, Chevy Chase. I’m in Silver Spring and I don’t recognize these threads. $750k would get you a nice house.

[Anonymous]

I live in a smallish 2,000 as ft house in California. Some of my daughter’s friends live in bigger houses that are in cheaper neighborhoods as well as bigger houses in wealthier neighborhoods. She is 12. She does not notice the neighborhood only the size, and niceness, of the house. She definitely thinks our house is the worst and smallest. It’s ok. She’ll live! Lol

[Anonymous]

OP, my family was in a similar position growing up in that we lived in a Bethesda neighborhood that was relatively less well-off than many (now it's all McMansions, but whatever). Yeah, I did notice when I got to high school that there were differences. I didn't feel poor necessarily, but I knew we had less money.

I didn't realize that we still had way more money than most of the rest of the country, or that most people's parents were not MD/PhD/JD, or that most of the country was much more white. I learned that by going to college and then staying in the Midwest for a while. I do think it's incumbent upon privileged parents to minimize the bubble in which their kids are raised. Many of my peers who grew up with more never learned that lesson, and I find them intolerable now (their disdain for people with less is palpable). We live in a different MoCo suburb that is more diverse than the one in which I grew up, and I appreciate that diversity. It's still not enough, but it's better than most of the other options.

[Anonymous]

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:All of the DC area is not like Bethesda. We are in Aspen Hill and it’s very down to earth over here.

Exactly. Any post that talks about “this area” as competitive, wealthy, etc. is just talking about NW DC, Bethesda, Chevy Chase. I’m in Silver Spring and I don’t recognize these threads. $750k would get you a nice house.

And not even all of NWDC. We live in an apartment building in NW. So do many of the kids at my kid's school -- our building is full of families with kids. My kid sometimes talks about wanting a SFH, but her rationale is that we could paint the walls a different color, not that she thinks our home is too small.