038: The Opposite of Spoiled

We’re concluding our mini-mini series today on chores – and on paying children to do chores, which leads us to larger conversations about money. If you missed the first part of this then then you might want to go and listen to last week’s interview with Dr. Andrew Coppens, who explores the ways that families in different cultures approach chores and what lessons that can hold for those of us who want to encourage our children to do their chores. Today we’re going to take that conversation to its logical conclusion by talking about money, and what better guest to do that with us than Ron Lieber,who wrote the book The Opposite of Spoiled: Raising Kids who are Grounded, Generous, and Smart About Money (affiliate link). It’s a really practical guide to talking with your children about money – from what information they should have at what age, to what to do with a child who always wants you to buy them something at the store, to what to say when a child wonders why homeless people don’t have enough money.   Other episodes mentioned in this show 021: Talk Sex Today 034: How do I get my child to do chores?   This episode is the first in a series on the intersection of parenting and money.  You can find other episodes in this series: 105: How to pass on mental wealth to your child 107: The impact of consumerism on children 112: How to Set up a Play Room 115: Reducing the Impact of Advertising to Children 118: Are You Raising Materialistic Kids?   References Carl Richards’ cartoons for the New York Times Lahey, J. (2016). The gift of failure. New York: Harper. Lieber, R. (2016). The opposite of spoiled. New York: Harper. (Affiliate link) Lythcott-Haimes, J. (2016). How to raise an adult.: Break free of the overparenting trap and prepare your kid for success. New York: St. Martin’s Griffin.   Read Full Transcript Transcript Jen: [00:37] Hello and welcome to the Your Parenting Mojo podcast. Now before we get going with today’s episode, which I’m actually really excited about, I wanted to start with some housekeeping items. Firstly, I wanted to update you on our progress towards the goal that I set a couple of weeks back to double the number of subscribers to the show and I wanted to check back in with you and let you know that I’m about halfway towards my goal. So if you subscribed to the show recently, then thank you. I really appreciate it. And I also wanted to remind you that if you subscribe through iTunes, then I actually can’t count that towards my goal because the subscription on iTunes kind of disappears into a black box. I never hear about it and I have absolutely no idea how many subscribers I have there. So if you enjoy the show and are subscribed through iTunes or if you aren’t subscribed at all, would you mind doing me a huge favor and subscribing through my website at YourParentingMojo.com Jen:    [01:26] You’ll also get a free gift for doing it through my website, which is a download of seven relationship based strategies to help your child thrive. So I hope you find that useful. The other thing I wanted to mention is that I’ve been doing some soul searching regarding the show. This is episode 38, which means we’ve been running for about nine months now and I really loved working on it. I completed my masters in psychology focusing on child development several months ago and it’s really not an exaggeration to say that I learn more from producing the average episode for you than I did for the average paper for my degree. I love reading and researching and synthesizing and I really get a kick out of having the show. I also love hearing from you and I’m honored that a number of you have taken the time out of your day to thank me for the work that I do and also to make suggestions for episodes which you know, I take seriously as many of the episodes I run these days are based on those suggestions, but I’m coming to a period in my life where things are about to get kind of busy. Jen:   [02:23] I’m working on a master’s in education because when I say I love to learn, I’m really not joking and I still have a full time job and of course I’m a parent and underlying all of this is my desire to shift away from having a full time job and toward being self sufficient so I can homeschool my daughter. So I’m trying to come up with ways to keep doing the podcast, which so many of you seem to find useful and also have it continue to help support my own goals. I’m considering a number of options here. One might be to drop the episode frequency down to every other week instead of every week, and since it takes about 12 hours to research and write an average episode, that really would be quite time saver. I’ve also thought about accepting advertising, but honestly I’d really hate to do that because most of what I advocate is that you have everything you need to effectively parent your child and it would feel really disingenuous to turn around and then try and sell you stuff on the show. Jen:     [03:16] I’m also thinking about releasing each episode for a week or so publicly and then putting them behind a pay wall for ongoing access. Perhaps this could be combined with a membership to a private Facebook group where I post information about research I find that’s relevant to child development and where we could even have conversations on topics that interest the group. The membership fee might be something like five bucks a month, which works out to about a dollar 25 an episode, which really doesn’t seem like an unreasonable investment to me as I’m thinking about it. I reached out to several listeners who have been in touch with me with some frequency – some of you have a lot of suggestions for episodes and you know you guys are pondering on your answers and I’m looking forward to seeing those. If you’re a subscriber to the show, then you’ve probably also received an email because you guys are the ones who support me by showing up here week after week and learning about parenting alongside me. Jen:   [04:04] If you have strong thoughts about ways that I can continue to make this work, then please do drop me a line and even if you’re just a part time listener and you drop in every once in a while to see what’s going on, then welcome and please feel free to cast your vote by sending an email to [email protected], or using the contact form on YourParentingMojo.com. If you’d like to cast your vote one way or another, then feel free to let me know or if you hate all the ideas and would stop listening if I use any of the ones I’ve mentioned, you can let me know that as well, or if you have any amazing ideas that I haven’t mentioned yet, then please let me know those too. Thank you so much for your support as I work on figuring this out. Now onto today’s episode, we’re concluding our mini mini series today on chores and on paying children to do chores, which leads us to larger conversations about money. Jen: [04:52] If you missed the first part of this, then you might want to go back and listen to episode 34, which was my interview with Dr Andrew Coppens, who explores the way that families in different cultures approach chores and what lessons that can hold for those of us who want to encourage our children to do their chores, and today we’re going to take that conversation to its logical conclusion by talking about money and what better guests to do that with us than Ron Lieber, whose website tells us that he is a husband, a dad, and the your money columnist for the New York Times. He’s been that your money columnist for the New York Times since 2009. But his bio actually doesn’t say how long has held the first two. How long have you been a husband and dad, Ron? Mr. Lieber: