All my life, I’ve heard a refrain that’s especially prevalent in working class families; it’s a version of this — I just want my kids to have a better life than I did.
Since becoming a dad, it’s a sentiment that’s been easy to aspire to. Even though I have had a pretty good life of my own, of course I want Noah to have a better one than I have. What’s less clear, though, is what exactly better means.
I can’t speak for others, but invariably, I have interpreted that to mean more money. Not just as a means to an end, but to give him access to what I perceive as the qualifiers of a better life. Better schools, more experiences, opportunities to travel, and perhaps less pressure to pursue and commit to a career path simply because there are bills to be paid.
Even on the cusp of his fourth birthday, I have already unlocked many of those opportunities for him. He’s in a private pre-school with a great support system, he’s got a passport with stamps in it, and he’s been exposed to a lot of things I wasn’t as a kid. He even eats broccoli.
Yet, now that it seems his life is better than mine, I’m beginning to wonder what ‘better’ even means.
Do I want my son to earn a lot of money? Yes. Do I want him to trade in what fulfills him to access more of it? No.
Do I want my son to go to good schools? Yes. Do I want to put him in private school, or at least reside in neighborhoods with proximity to good public schools, or spend a starter’s home worth of money on getting him a college education? I doubt whether any of the above will be worth a damn, aside from normalizing him for an environment and a culture that seems to have, as George Carlin once put it, ‘a few winners, and a whole lot of losers.’
I acknowledge that maybe my questions are driven by a pessimism about the state of the world. The cost of things everything, the erosion of core industries in the face of AI, and a world where the majority of information on the internet is purely, intentionally negative and divisive. I suppose my parents and their parents before them had similar feelings about the world they grew up vs. the one their kids would inherit.
And maybe that’s what I’m trying to say when I assert that I want better for my son. Maybe what I mean is that I want him to have a perspective and a hope for the world that is better than mine.
What I’m learning is that providing for him financially is the baseline; it’s non-negotiable. How I provide for him, though, and how I live my life are going to say much more to him about what ‘better’ means than whatever school I put him in, or what car I drive him in. Every day, I’m somehow blindsided by what anyone with a child, a brain or both will tell you — that kids don’t learn from what you say, they learn from what you do.
I know that a majority of kids who don’t have better lives than their parents invariably end up there, not because of how prevalent their resources were or weren’t, but because of how their parents lived.
It’s a challenge I’m taking seriously. And I know he’s watching.
He has the best of both worlds with you as his dad. It IS about what you do!