<p>From-Ordering-Steak-and-Lobster-to-Serving-It:</a> Personal Finance News from Yahoo! Finance</p>
<p>A very sad story. Would you read it with your 14-15 year old, and have a discussion about it? In the "information age" we are in now, there's so much you don't want your kids to read/ to know and they do anyway, but I doubt this is a story that grabs their attention. Should we protect and let them "enjoy" their innocence for a few more years? Is it too early to have a heavy talk like this?</p>
<p>It is never too early to discuss finances and lifestyles with your children. The real question, based on my interpretation of the article, is whether or not it is too early to let your children know that you would prefer to hold on to a high standard of living rather than reduce overhead to make sure that the family is solvent. The father in the article would prefer to “try” to pay a mortgage of over $6,000/mo than “break even” with a sale. It sounds like he had quite a nestegg which he used to pay the mortgage etc. over the past years since he was laid off. What a shame! I know people that lost high paying jobs that they knew could not be easily replaced and immediately reduced their standard of living. Others held on to homes and cars and lost everything just like the man in the article is about to experience. How soon do we let out children know how foolish we are? That, WE should have listened to our parents regarding the absurdity of “excess.” IMHO</p>
<p>Thanks watertester.</p>
<p>Aside from teaching kids the realities of planning for a rainy day, a Black Swan event in their lives, either as a result of outside circumstances or some internal tragedy, the most important lesson for our children in that whole article is summed up well in its last two sentences when Mr. Araya notes about his new condition:</p>
<p>“It was a hard reality at first,” he says. “I used to see unemployed people and think they were lazy, that it was all on them. Now it’s happened to me.”</p>
<p>Teaching your child not to make assumptions about others, teaching your child HABITS of kindness and respect, teaching your child to be able “to hear” the dismissive, snobby, nasty tone that can often creep into the lives and views of the wealthy and comfortable is to make your child into a better and more resilient human being…in my opinion.</p>
<p>watertester, if our children are mature enough to leave our homes and travel a thousand or more miles to enroll in a boarding school full of stangers for 3 or 4 years, then they are mature enough to know, feel and see the cruel winds of outrageous fortunes and misfortunes and, we hope, to learn some brutal lessons of the hard times in which we now live.</p>
<p>Great perspectives! toombs61, I am not sure if every kid is as “mature” as we expect them to be. Remember not long ago, a few CC kids complained that the CC parents are “whining” about the hardships and inseucities they are facing? To be fair, compared with many ordinary kids at this age, these are great kids. They are motivated and work hard, and work with their parents on major goals. I wasn’t sure that on top of dealing with the pressures in all fronts of attending a highly competitive BS, is it a bit cruel to tell them now that life is just that tough, and that not only your parents are but you some day will be in the risk of losing what you have worked hard for in a instant? Well, It IS the reality, and maybe it should be part of the education, but what meanings to draw from the story and how to deliver the messages deserve some discussion.</p>
<p>I don’t hesitate to expose my children to this sort of reality. And if I was the type of person inclined to have plaques around my house, I would have one that read, “Wealth is not by how much you have, but by how little you need.” I read that somewhere as a child and it stuck with me. I can’t remember to give credit.</p>
<p>The only time I “hide” finances is when I know my oldest son would refuse something because “that’s too much money.” I don’t want him to grow up afraid to invest in something that truly has value. When he asks, I just say something like, “It costs about what it’s worth (or less than it’s worth).”</p>
<p>Good post!</p>
<p>Is this post by choateboundchild a joke? (I think that it has to be.) Is choateboundchild sending his/her Christian children to boarding school with the hope that they will not be confronted by non-christians? Crazy. </p>
<p>One main reason you send kids to boarding schools is that you want them to see, know, understand, appreciate, and challenge other children who are not like them in beliefs, heritage, doctrine, background, class, income, sex, color, etc. If you want kids to act, think and believe just like Mom and Dad, keep them home with Mom and Dad. Nothing at all wrong with kids staying home fro high school under the loving care and eye of their parents. But please don’t send children away to prep schools with the hope that they will avoid something that is the very essence of the school: diversity in all things great and small.</p>
<p>What am I missing here?</p>
<p>Yep, just I like thought: We’ve got a joker on our hands. See Prep School Cafe thread “God, you people are unbelieveable”, post #41, where choateboundchild announced “im jewish”, although below he/she professes the conversative and Christian beliefs of his/her children.</p>
<p>Well, choateboundchild has now pulled his/her posts (or CC has pulled them). Ah, too bad; the joker has disappeared. Was principalviola back in town?</p>
<p>I’m suspecting that principalviola had morphed into “yoursky.”</p>