How to Raise Grounded Kids When Your Family Income Doesn’t Match the “Normal”
I stood next to my 12-year-old Lila in the athletic shoe aisle at Target last month, watching her flip between the $120 Nike Airs in one hand and the $35 clearance cross-trainers in the other. “All the starters on the soccer team have these,” she said, nodding at the Nikes, not looking at me. I felt that familiar twinge I’ve gotten a hundred times since we moved to this suburban district seven years ago: the one that says you’re not keeping up, you’re letting your kid down. We’d just dropped $800 on a new water heater that week, and there was no room in the budget for designer sneakers. But I didn’t say what I used to say, the thing that made my voice tight and made Lila shift awkwardly: “We can’t afford that.”
Instead I said, “They’re really cool. I get why you want them. That’s just not what we choose to spend our money on right now. We can get these cross-trainers that work just as well for practice, and put the extra $85 toward that beach cabin you want to rent with your best friend this summer.” She stared at the Nikes for another minute, then put them back. By the time we got to the checkout, she was talking about how she needed new hair ties for practice anyway.
My husband fixes cars for a local shop, and I work part-time as a paraeducator at the elementary school down the street. Combined, our income is about half the median for our zip code, where most dads work in tech and most parents have side hustles that pull in an extra $50k a year. We’re not struggling to put food on the table or pay rent, but our “normal” looks a lot different from the one most of our neighbors have. We don’t do spring break trips to Mexico, we don’t buy brand new phones every two years, and 13th birthday parties here are pizza in the backyard, not rented event spaces with hired entertainers.
A couple years ago, when Lila was in fifth grade, the school organized a three-day camping trip that cost $150 per kid. We couldn’t swing that all at once after a big transmission repair, and Lila begged me not to apply for the PTA scholarship – she didn’t want any of the other kids to know. So we made a deal: she’d help our next-door neighbor pull weeds and clean out her gutters for two weekends, I’d match what Mrs. Henderson paid her, and that would cover the fee. She came home sunburned and tired, and told me the best part was staying up late telling ghost stories, not the fancy waterproof gear everyone else had. That’s when I started to realize that guilt was my problem, not hers. I’d been projecting my own insecurity about our budget onto her, instead of framing our choices as just that: our choices.
That’s the first thing I tell other parents who ask me how we do this. Stop apologizing for your budget, and change the way you talk about money. Instead of “we can’t afford that,” which frames your family as broken or less than, try “that’s not what we choose to spend our money on.” It shifts the narrative from scarcity to intentionality, and it takes the shame out of the conversation for your kid.
Another small change we made that’s worked really well is giving Lila a fixed monthly clothing allowance of $50, that’s it. If she wants a $100 hoodie, she has to save for two months. If she blows it all on cheap lip gloss and stickers, she doesn’t get any extra that month. It’s low-stakes for us, and it teaches her to prioritize what she actually cares about, instead of just asking for whatever everyone else has. Two years ago she saved for three months to get that 40-ounce Stanley tumbler everyone was obsessed with, and she still brings it to school every day. If I’d just bought it for her, she probably would have lost it by now.
It doesn’t always go smoothly. Last spring she came home from school crying because a girl in her class pointed out the crack on the screen of her hand-me-down phone and asked why we couldn’t buy her a new one. I didn’t give her that cheesy “we’re rich in love” speech that you see on Pinterest. I just sat with her on the couch and said “That was really rude, and that sucks. I’d be hurt too. If you want, we can start putting $10 a month aside toward a newer used phone, and we can get a $10 screen protector this weekend to cover the crack.” She stopped crying, we got the screen protector, and she hasn’t mentioned it since. Some days she still feels left out, and that’s okay. I don’t have to fix every bad feeling for her.
We’ve built our own traditions that don’t cost much, and those are the things Lila talks about as her favorite memories. Every Friday night is pizza from the corner shop and a movie we check out from the library, and we make chocolate chip cookies that are almost always underbaked. Every summer we do a “hike challenge” where we hit a new local trail every weekend, and we get a $2 ice cream cone from the gas station at the end of each one. We have a whole wall of polaroids from those hikes, and Lila brings all her friends over to look at it.
Last week we were talking about college, and she said she’d rather go to the community college two towns over for the first two years to save money, then transfer to the state school. She said she doesn’t need to go to a fancy out-of-state school to get a good degree or be happy. I still have bad days, where I worry I’m not giving her enough opportunities, where I wonder if she’ll grow up resenting that we couldn’t give her the things her friends had. But so far, what I see is a kid who knows what matters, who doesn’t judge people by what they own, who can be happy with a $5 ice cream cone and a hike in the woods. I don’t know if we’re doing it perfectly, but it’s working for us right now.
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