Money is everything; money isn’t everything
One of my daughter’s classmates shows up in the morning tired, listless and generally doesn’t pay much attention in class. Halfway through the morning just before recess, the kids break out their snacks and this classmate beelines to her backpack and devours her lunch. At noon, she has no food left when all the other kids are eating theirs and she simply keeps to herself. Even the resumption of the school snack program of fruits and crackers wasn’t enough to suppress her hunger pains. It happens daily and my daughter is sometimes annoyed that this classmate repeatedly asks for her uneaten food. As a bit of kindness, I pack something extra for my daughter to give.
It’s disheartening to witness in our very rich nation those low-income households with children who are literally starving every day because parents have to make difficult choices between paying the rent and buying food. It is even more demoralizing that these children bear daily witness to the feasts their full-bellied peers have in front of them while they go without. And so began a few compassionate discussions with my daughter on allowances, debts & interests, the future of her savings and the general value of money so we can begin to understand what we hope we will never experience.
My wish for my daughter is that she has enough money to do whatever she wants, but not enough to do nothing at all.
I was fortunate enough that with a bit of savings and a severance package from an employer, the lifestyle with my daughter was unaffected during my bout of unemployment. It still took the better part of a year to me to find the right employment, but we survived based on my own mother’s teaching. Like many of her generation who had endured scarcity of foods and stability of work during war and other times of economic hardships, she taught me some simple yet valuable lessons which I practice to this day and I drill them into my daughter. For most of us, the pathway to success is still the formulaic good education gets a good job and adhering to the principle of spending less than one’s income. What’s relevant to my daughter is that she is driven to school with a hot lunch box, rather than taking the bus with a baloney sandwich and soup crackers. She has proper clothing for all sorts of weather. She has the luxury to participate in private extracurricular activities like language, music and swim programs. For all her creature comforts, she knows that it is money earned by me that paid for it. Money allowed for all of this and without it, most of it will not happen. It is more difficult to teach ‘have not’ when one ‘has’, than it is to teach ‘have’ when one ‘does not’.
Money bought us a lot of things. But money isn’t everything and sometimes, it buys nothing that matters. All the money in the world cannot buy a moment of playtime with her friends during the pandemic. Neither will money be very useful as she cannot buy her way out of homework nor housework. She’s older now and she appreciates gifts of experiences more than gifts of things. And the few times when she got sick and needed doctors, she learned that money will buy good healthcare, but it cannot buy good health.
One of the true dichotomies in life is that while wealth has the ability to buy much to fill a heart’s content, the act speaks of an emptiness that needs to be filled. As some of the kids in my daughter’s class are outdoing each other with talks of fancy phones and clothes all within earshot of the classmate who can barely hear over her own hunger pangs, the lesson is not missed by the hungry one. Material things almost always don’t matter. I try my best to teach my daughter that money is only a means to an end; the focus should not be its accumulation, but the opportunities it affords. My wish for her is that she has enough money to do whatever she wants, but not enough to do nothing at all.
