Tag: money

The Price of Learning

Posted in life lessonsTagged , , , , 57 Comments

“Living is the art of getting used to what we didn’t expect.” – Eleanor C. Wood

The other day my friend Katie asked Miss O what she’s been learning in second grade. Miss O said that she’s been learning a lot about coins. Not only the value of each one but adding them up – they are doing a lot of math using coins.

This reminded me of the experiment I tried with Miss O based on a beautiful post written by Chaya Sheela. In the post, When my children were rewarded with the Westminster family, she recounted how her kids learned to save and the bank awarded them with new ceramic pig figurines. Chaya is an experienced and talented teacher as well as beautiful writer so she inspired me to try something new with my kids.

Drawing from her wonderful story, I thought I’d try to create a similar lesson for Miss O about making buying decisions when we went clothes shopping. At the store I told her she had $100 for buying the clothes and shoes she needed. Anything that she didn’t spend of that money was hers to keep and save. My estimate was that she’d spend about $45 on a good pair of sneakers and $45 on clothes and have about $10 left over.

We went through the clothing and it worked. After we calculated the prices out, instead of buying six items, two of which were very similar to things she already had, Miss O decided to buy only four. It reduced the total to about $30 instead of $45.

But then we looked and looked for a pair of sneakers that would fit her narrow foot. And with all the choices, we never found a pair that was just right. I loved that she was being responsible about finding a pair of shoes that would really work and last for the year.

But it meant when we went through checkout and she paid for everything, she pocketed $70. I reminded her many times that she’d have to use that money to buy sneakers when we found a good pair that fit.

Eventually we went to multiple stores, found the right pair and she used the money to pay for them. But she’s been telling people that she pays for her own shoes even since. 😊

So I’d say she’s doing fine in the money and math department. If that’s all they teach in second grade she’s going to do fine and I’m grateful that it’s the school teaching, not me.

However, Mr. D swallowed a penny yesterday so it seems like we are all learning about coins, one way or another.

The Other Side

Posted in meditation, ParenthoodTagged , , , , , ,

“Resolve to be tender with the young, compassionate with the aged, sympathetic with the striving, and tolerant with the weak and wrong. Sometime in your life, you will have been all of these.” – Buddha

Last weekend I took my kids to a swimming beach in a very wealthy suburb of Seattle. It was beautiful – the grounds perfectly maintained, a recently built dock of all the latest materials so no one would get a splinter, a cabin as beautiful as you would hope for a restful lakeshore vacation for the lifeguards to use when they were off rotation and a play structure with no graffiti. It felt like an idyllic break from the signs of homelessness, addiction and lawlessness that are so evident in Seattle these days.

Within 10 minutes of peeling off our top layers and getting into the water I heard a father chastise his son, who looked about 10-years-old, “You are just a dumb kid.” And because I’ve read so much about how shame doesn’t work, especially in parenting, I felt shocked because I can’t recall hearing someone shame their kids in the six years I’ve been a parent. I’m in no way claiming that it doesn’t happen in the big city but just that I haven’t heard it.

We moved on to the play structure which was almost deserted except for two other kids. My daughter breathlessly ran over to where I was standing told me that a little boy who was about a year older than my toddler was punching my son in the stomach. The child’s mom was about 50 feet away, completely uninterested, so I walked over and the child had taken a lap around the structure and was now pushing my son. As I carried my son away from the child, I thought again how odd that was both to have kids touching each other these days and to have parents totally tuned out. These little incidents reminded me of the adage that money doesn’t solve everything.

My dear dad spent fifteen years as a senior pastor in a Presbyterian church in a very wealthy community before he retired. I remember the gist of many sermons he delivered to the very generous and lovely congregation was that quite often the problem with money is that it makes us think we don’t need faith. Whew, that at least is one problem that I don’t have. 😊

As I drove back to my middle-class neighborhood, I was thinking about our universal humanity. That I with my kids, the homeless heroin addict on the street and the wealthy patrons at the park on the other side of the lake all have hearts that ache for love, lungs that long for clean air, and backs that get tired when they carry too much. Maybe we only differ in how far we think we are from suffering. It made me remember again that there is no way to drive away from suffering but instead I just have to meet it, in me and in others, with as much faith and empathy as I can muster.