McDonald’s Money

The other day I was at the kitchen table, paying bills and balancing the bank account when Kali looked over my shoulder, pointed at a circled dollar amount on a sheet of paper and asked, “Is that how much money we have?”

Any parent will tell you that you always pause to figure out the best way to answer your child’s question no matter how innocent the question may be. My first instinct – sometimes to a fault – is to always tell the truth. But then you have to worry about the ramifications of telling the truth. Take Kali’s question as an example – I had to ask myself, “Did we have the talk about privacy and money? Do I have to worry that I’ll see this post on Facebook:

My Mom has $1,600 in the bank!

I realized that a simple yes or no answer might not be so simple after all, so I gave the standard Mommy reply when we need time to stall.

“Girl, go play.”

As I prepared to write this, I tried to remember what my perception of the family finances were when I was a child (without being biased by what I know now.) Did I think we were poor? I’m not sure if I felt like we were poor, but I knew we didn’t have money. At least not a lot of it. My mother always attached money to our wants.

“Ma, can we have McDonald’s?”

“You got McDonald’s money?”

“Ma, can we go to the movies?”

“You got movies money?”

I was always left with the feeling that we didn’t have any money. Of course, now I realize when my mother said, “I don’t have McDonald’s money,” she meant exactly that. She had money, just not for McDonald’s. There was never a time when we didn’t eat, we just didn’t have McDonald’s.

Even though my mother and stepfather never fought about money openly (or even stressed over it in front of us) it wasn’t hard to figure out our financial station in life. Hell, just spending any time with family and friends who had more money or turning on The Cosby Show told me that we weren’t exactly the Rockefellers.

As a parent, I worry about what kind of financial message (even silently) I’m sending to my kids. There’s very little that Kali wants that she doesn’t get. But she also knows that these things don’t come magically. We’ve had the discussion about pay, taxes, and bills. She understands that going to work means getting paid. She saw me doing side merchandising and mystery shop jobs before the holidays in order to buy the laptop she wanted for Christmas.

I’m hoping this has given her an appreciation for the things we have. But there’s a fine line. We want our kids to take care of the things they have because they know they cost money and they know that money isn’t plucked out of thin air, but we don’t want our kids worrying about money. I don’t think they should have to.

I found myself choosing my words carefully when explaining our recent move to Kali. It’s an uncomfortable sentence, but I thought, “Mommy and Daddy can no longer afford that bigger house,” was appropriate. It was the perfect segue way into how much it costs to, well, live. Bigger houses are more expensive to heat in the winter and keep cool in the summer, this means bigger monthly bills and less money left over for extras or savings, etc.

Spending habits are just that – habits. If you have poor ones, your kids are in danger of picking them up. Of course, there’s also the chance that your kid may grow up to do the exact opposite. So affected by growing up in a household where utilities were also at risk of being shut up off, a child may grow up to be super responsible with their finances to simply not repeat their parents’ mistakes. But why risk it? Even if you’re faking the funk, is it better to always put on a happy face in front of your kids when it comes to money?

No matter how tight money becomes, there’s one area in which I refuse to have my kids affected. Food. Growing up, there was four of us kids and not a lot of extras. We pretty much ate breakfast and lunch in school, and things like cereal were saved for the weekends to be devoured in front of Saturday morning cartoons. And though we weren’t denied food, there was definitely the unspoken understanding that food couldn’t be consumed just for the sake of doing it. It seemed everything had to last. There wasn’t a lot of extra snacks laying around the house.

Soda was a treat. Kool-Aid was a (cheap) staple. It always seemed to me that other people had it so much better than we did. I’d go to my cousins’ houses and marvel at the amount of Sunnydale juices in the fridge or bags of chips in the cabinet. I was fascinated when school friends could go into the kitchen and prepare a sandwich without having to ask first. To me, these folks were living large! As a result, I make sure my house is filled with the things my kids like to eat. There are very few things (snacks purchased strictly for school) that Kali has to ask for before eating. I wonder if she thinks she’s living large.

Then again, she is only 11 and 11-year-olds aren’t exactly known for being rational thinkers. The other day she asked if we were poor. I told her no and then wanted to know why she asked.

“Well, I keep asking to be a premium member of that website I like, and you keep saying no.”

So, let me this straight: you live in a nice house with nice televisions, every game system on the market, tons of video games and DVDs, you have nice clothes and your own laptop and you think we’re poor because I won’t pay for unlimited access to a site where Chester Chester, Child Molesters could be lurking? *facepalm*

But maybe this means I’m doing something right. Maybe this means that she has all the understanding of money one needs to have at 11: things cost money and sometimes Mommy and Daddy will buy you the things you need/want because they can and it’s appropriate and sometimes they won’t because they can’t or won’t. Then again, maybe she was just being a smartass.

So, how much info is too much info? Should your children know what’s in your bank account? Should they be aware of exactly how much money it takes to keep the roof over their heads, the lights on, and food on the table?