shakespearemom

I was just reading an MSN article about one of the homes built by Extreme Makeover Home Edition three years ago. My hubby and I watched that show for a season or so, but I found it hard to keep watching when the houses started going over the top. Some poor family living in a three-room hovel often came back in a week to find a four-bedroom mansion with six wide-screen televisions, three living rooms, or even a full-size indoor basketball court. It was simply too much.

I kept wondering what the family did with all that luxury, with all that space, all those extra things. And I thought of how many homes could have been refurbished with all that donated stuff. Instead of doing one home to the hilt, the same show could have redone an entire city block in the hood, helping dozens of home owners not live in shoddy housing. Each house could have gotten a single wide-screen tv, a single living room, and moderate help with utilities, etc.

Only now, with the MSN article, another ugly truth has come forward. It’s the standard truth, one I’ve seen too often in college, where I teach. People value what they have to work for, and they cannot value stuff that is given to them in the same way. The recipients of one of these extreme homes are now about to lose their home because they took out a $450,000 loan using their home’s equity, and squandered it all. They didn’t work to build their home, and thus didn’t value it as they might have if they had actually paid for it themselves. And now it’s lost.

I say I’ve seen this same pattern at college, and it’s usually involving student tuition. If a student is being sent to college by a parent, and is paying none of the fees himself, he very often has less invested in the class than someone who is paying for the class himself. Teenagers show the same behavior with cars. If a teenager has to pay for her own gas, she will drive around less. If she has to pay for the car herself, she will be more careful with it (since it’s HER responsibility).

It’s part of human nature to value what is easily acquired less that what is harder to get. That is why so many young people have an expectation that all will be given to them, that they won’t have to really work for anything. All of their lives, everything has been given to them, to the point that they simply don’t value it anymore. They assume everything will fall easily into their laps, and they don’t recognize the amount of work their parents put in towards getting those luxuries for them. So, once they go out on their own, they are mystified when they don’t get the jobs they want, when employers actually expect any work out of them, or when they can’t live at the same level their parents do. They don’t see the consequences of not paying bills, not showing up for work, and not investing in a relationship.

I need to be cautious to avoid this pattern with my own two children. They need to earn what they have, and learn how to work for what they really want. Once they aren’t under my roof, the monetary benefits end, and they will have to earn their way towards their own cars, homes, jobs, etc. And it’s my job to teach them that lesson now, before they blow $450,000 because they didn’t understand the value of what they had.

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