The Speech We Give Our Kids

and the One We Never Give Ourselves

 

S. Rosen

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Summer is when it starts.

The bunk lists come out, and within two days your eleven-year-old knows whose mother bought the new water bottle, whose father is sending the good sneakers, and which girl has the bedding everyone is suddenly desperate for.

And somewhere around the third “but everyone has it” of the season, you sit your child down for The Speech.

You know The Speech—we all give it, all the time. The one about how just because everyone has it doesn’t mean you need it. The one about how our possessions don’t define us and how gashmiyus never brings true happiness. The one about middos and inner worth and how Hashem doesn’t care about sneaker and water bottle brands, and neither should we.

It’s a great speech. And we mean every word.

The problem is what happens when the speech is over.

Because that’s when we pull out our phones and start scrolling through house listings, because the family down the block just bought and suddenly, we’re wondering whether we should be buying too. We get into the car (the one we traded in last year because everyone in our chevrah was upgrading), and head to the sefarim store, where we absolutely cannot leave without the same set our chavrusa just put on his shelf. We come home and our wife mentions that all the cousins are wearing matching gowns for the upcoming chasunah, and we sigh and pull out the credit card, because of course they are, and of course we will, and what kind of parent lets their kids be the odd ones out?

We spend 20 minutes explaining to a child that “everyone has it” is the worst possible reason to want something and then spend the rest of the evening using it as the reason for nearly every adult decision we make.

It’s time we were honest about what we are actually teaching.

Because our children are not learning from the speech. They never were.

They are learning from the sigh before the credit card swipe. They are learning from the way we discuss the neighbor’s renovation. They are learning which families we invoke when we ask whether we can “afford” something, and they notice the comparison is never to families with less. It is always to families with more, or families exactly like us, doing exactly what we are about to do ourselves.

 

They are learning that the speech is for children, and the credit card is for adults

 

They are learning that the speech is for children, and the credit card is for adults.

It’s not comfortable to admit, but there is a genuine answer to “but everyone has it,” and the answer is not always no.

Sometimes everyone really does have it, and being the only child who doesn’t is genuinely painful in ways adults can underestimate. There is a difference between being mechanech and being miserly. There is a chinuch in saying no, but there is also a chinuch in saying yes when the alternative is a child who feels permanently outside his own bunk.

The onus is on us as parents to make those calls. Nobody is suggesting we shop at the thrift store while everyone else is at the boutique. That is not piety; it is just a different kind of statement.

But there is a question worth asking before the next swipe of the card, and it is not “Can we afford it?”

It is this: Would I still want this if nobody around me had it?

And this applies to:

The house.
The car.
The matching outfits.
The chasunah package.
The sheitel.
The kitchen renovation we keep insisting is a “necessity.”
The sefarim shrank we barely open.

Rip away the social context and the quiet competition of who has what. Ask yourself honestly: if nobody else was doing this, if nobody else was buying this, would I still be chasing this next big purchase?

Sometimes, the answer is yes. And if so, we should buy it and enjoy it without a side of guilt.

For other purchases, and we all know what they are, the answer is no. Or at least not yet.

And that is the hard part.

Because the speech we give our children is not really about sneakers, and the chinuch we owe them is not really about hearing “no.” It is about teaching them that each person must decide for himself what enough looks like instead of outsourcing that decision to the block.

It is showing them that you can want something, ask yourself why you want it, realize the only reason you want it is because the people around you have it, and then put it back down.

That is the muscle we need to build.

And if we never exercise that muscle ourselves, our children will know. They always know.

They watch what we can live without. And over time, that becomes their definition of what a frum Yid can live without too.

This summer will bring a hundred small versions of this question for our children. We will give the speech a hundred times. They will roll their eyes a hundred times.

But somewhere in the middle of all that, they are going to notice whether we ever give the speech to ourselves.

That is the chinuch they will absorb: not the words we say, but the decisions we make.