When my baby, (now thirteen-years-old) began to babysit, I had mixed emotions.
On one hand I was glad that she understood that all the ‘extra’ stuff that she wants, ie. One Direction concert tickets for $100.00-a-pop, TOMS shoes that everyone is wearing, that Northface coat, the Columbia jacket, real pearl earrings (the list goes on and on) are not going to automatically be provided to her unless she chipped in some Benjamins 
I’m all for a teen feeling like they ‘fit in’ but in my experience, it’s the rare kid who gets everything that they want when they want it. I know that there are always going to be exceptions-but as a wise man once told me, (my father-in-law actually, imagine a deep baritone voice here) “There are always gonna be people who have more than you, and people who have less”–too true.
My older daughter is volunteering in the Domincan Republic teaching English in a struggling school. In fact, she is not just simply teaching English to the kids, she is teaching basic hygiene in an effort to keep diseases down as there is no running water to wash hands during the school day.
In lieu of care packages she requests Purell to be sent. Many of the kids at this school walk about forty-five minutes each way to get an education and live in homes that are just what we would expect them to look like when we think of third-world countries.
I have my thirteen-year-old read her sister’s e-mails and I think they have a profound (and mostly unspoken) effect on her to appreciate all that she does have. This morning as I was dropping her off at school, she climbed out of the van and from out of the blue said, “I checked on-line and lots of people have bought up the One Direction concert tickets-there are more still available and even though I have almost saved up enough from my babysitting money, I’ll probably just save it-Bye Mom!” Gotta Smile.
I’m all for her having fun: attending football games, Sweet Frog visits, shopping at the mall with her friends, buying new books for her Kindle. These seem like more reasonable splurges to me at this point.
By the way, the fact that she is earning $10.00 per hour babysitting just astonishes me; when I babysat I earned fifty-cents per hour?! My first big splurge was a box of Chicken-in-a-biscuit crackers that I hid under my bed so that none of my seven siblings would know that I had them and Mom would have made me share! My daughter’s first big splurge was a new outfit from Target that was NOT even on sale.
She’s such a rebel sometimes.
