Reply to As long as teens are studious, is there any harm in giving them a nice car?

Forum Index » Tweens and Teens

Reply to "As long as teens are studious, is there any harm in giving them a nice car?"

Subject:

Emoticons





More smilies

Text Color: Font: Close Marks

[quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous]How is a kid learning to work towards productive future if they get everything handed to them? The issue with this, is that they learn that mom and dad will always be there for me. Then they "need" nice cars, and whatever knives and dinners, and have no clue how much it all costs. You clearly plan to support your adult kids lifestyle forever, which is fine, but let's don't pretend they "deserve" it. No teen deserves a BMW, or similar.[/quote]
But my kid is super friendly! She's involved, but she doesn't party! She is also super pretty and she gets good grades. She deserves that BMW. [/quote]

I didn't read through all of these but I think you can give your kids things and simultaneously teach them about privilege, entitlement, hard work. My parents gave my siblings and I everything they could growing up - Catholic school education, a used car when we turned 16 (so no, not a brand new Jeep wrangler), filled our tanks with gas, never expected us to have a job during the school year (in mine and my brother's case we played year-round varsity and travel sports and guess what, I still babysat whenever I could, and he still worked whenever he could), gave us a monthly allowance ($20/week), etc.  We were solidly upper-ish middle class and entitled teenagers who expected our parents to pay for what we deemed "necessities."

But guess what! They still managed to instill a sense of the value of the dollar in all of us and everyone is a well-adjusted, practical adult. We all got full-time jobs after graduating college and never moved home (not through any means of family connection, we didn't have those). Our parents never helped us pay rent or bills after we graduated. We all managed to save enough money to buy our first homes in our twenties. We all have good sense to save for emergencies, retirement, and kids college funds. We don't expect our parents to foot the bill on dinners out when we're home, or not to contribute to family vacation rentals, and we haven't since crossing into the adult-hood threshold.

So all that to say, I think you can give your kids A LOT, as long as you make the value of the dollar clear, and as long as they come away with a sense of just how much you gave them, without turning them into spoiled failure-to-launch adult children.[/quote]

Options

	Disable HTML in this message
	Disable BB Code in this message
	Disable smilies in this message

Review message

Search Recent Topics Hottest Topics