Valuable Lessons

SAN JUAN CAPISTRANO — Kathleen Youngman moved to Southern California some 15 years ago from Ottawa, Canada, where, she said, the living was quite different. And not just because of the snow.

“I grew up with a lot of friends whose parents had money--diplomats and that sort of thing,” recalled Youngman, a 36-year-old private art instructor and the mother of three children, ages 9, 7 and 3. “It was more conservative, old money.”

Orange County might be equally conservative, but the money here has a distinctly fresher face. And those who have often spend, filling freeways with expensive cars, closets with designer labels and kitchens with gadgets.

Little wonder that children have become avid consumers too. Remember those days when most little girls had one Barbie doll? And there weren’t even any Power Rangers in their varied morphed forms?

Many parents were raised with the words “We can’t afford it” used as a litany to explain why they could not have all they wanted as they grew up. But in a county where many parents can afford it, the business of saying no often seems more complicated.

Back-to-school shopping season can make the struggle particularly acute. Do you go for the trendy Jansport backpack with the suede bottom or a nylon pack at less than a fifth the price? It’s a time when children are inclined to think that merely fashionable shoes will not do; they must have the distinctive yellow stitching of Doc Martens. It can seem like you’re paying $70 extra simply for some yellow thread.

It’s an odd challenge: How do you raise children to value the nonmaterial things in life when they are surrounded by so much material?

Such concerns led Youngman and five other mothers back to school. They recently completed a six-week course called “How to Raise Children in an Affluent Society,” conducted by Tere Wilshin, a family counselor with 20 years’ experience leading parenting classes through the Capistrano Unified School District and Laguna Hills Parks and Recreation Department.

“These parents, they realize there’s a problem, and they’re making a real effort to ground their children in what’s important in life, according to their perspective,” Wilshin said.

The idea of the well-to-do seeking guidance to avoid spoiling their kids can, at first blush, seem insular at best. For lower-income parents who don’t have the option of saying yes, the problems of the affluent are just so much self-indulgent whining.

But parents and child-development experts argue that raising children amid affluence involves problems rooted in such common parenting issues as guiding moral development, teaching children how to interact with society and nurturing self-definition.

“A lot of parents appear to think that just by providing for their [children’s] material needs that they’re raising them well, and they’re not,” said Anthony Coletta, professor of early childhood and elementary education at William Paterson College in Wayne, N.J. “There’s a low awareness, a lack of insight into what this is doing to the kids.”

Coletta said wealthy parents sometimes need to spend less money and more time on their children.

“These are children of excess,” he said. “They get too many material things and very little parental involvement. Like many children at the lower socioeconomic rungs, they are very peer-dependent.”

That’s what one mother, who asked only to be identified by her first name, Beth, was trying to avoid by enrolling in Wilshin’s course.

“For example, the Beanie Babies,” Beth said. Children “are not happy with one. People want like 20, to be able to amass them. Before, you got one doll, one bike, and that was sufficient.”

The problem comes in explaining to her 8-year-old daughter why she will not be getting all the toys she wants.

“We’re trying to raise our daughter like that, discussing with her why she can’t have everything,” Beth said. “It’s not that we can’t afford it, but because she doesn’t need it.”

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Tips on Teaching Kids Real Meaning of Values

Family experts say diligence and a clear perspective on values can help parents inure their children to the lures of material culture. These suggestions were gleaned from interviews with parents and experts and from support materials from Tere Wilshin’s class, “How to Raise Children in an Affluent Society.”

* Live the values you want your child to have. A parent who makes a habit of amassing the latest goods or who puts a big focus on the right labels should expect children to do the same.

* Make the values you are living clear to your children, perhaps pointing out that you are not buying something because you don’t need it. They will be more likely to imitate.

* If your children are feeling low or have had a troubling experience, try alleviating the bad feelings with a walk together, or a trip to a park or the beach, rather than with a shopping trip.

* Have children use their own money to buy toys or designer goods they pressure you to get them. “I find my children really don’t want it if they have to pay for it,” one mother said.

* Involve children at an early age in family charitable acts. It can be as simple as letting your children pick a charity to receive a family donation or take part in drop-off trips to Goodwill.

* When it comes to back-to-school items, some parents set a budget and let their children get what they will within that budget. If they would rather have just one pair of jeans with the big label and stick with last year’s T-shirts, they’re learning to make responsible choices about what money can buy. Just try not to wince at the sight of those fraying T-shirts.

* Be flexible. Perhaps you can give in to them on the less expensive fashion items--such as the pencils that look like they’re made out of denim, which cost a little more than your basic No. 2s--and stick to your guns on the shoes.

* Teach them the joys of discount shopping and used-clothing stores for the prestige items they want at lower prices. Durable backpacks with the right look, such as Land’s End, are also available through mail-order houses, often for far less.

* Teach your children to be knowledgeable consumers; kids make great activists. They can find out if a given clothing manufacturer has pledged to monitor against contracting with sweatshops by writing for the federal government’s Trendsetter list to No Sweat, U.S. Department of Labor, Washington, D.C. 20210. They also can check in the library on what consumer magazines have to say about the value and durability of many products. (The August edition of Consumer Reports evaluates backpacks.)