I was the last arrival into a large family. I became an
uncle at age 12 and by age 18 my nieces and nephews constituted a small tribe.
Babysitting was as natural to me as mowing the lawn. I
learned to discipline (much to one of my sister’s chagrin), tell distracting
stories to stop tears, bribe when my stories were ineffective and to shamelessly
use my cute charges as a conversation starter with girls (they were better than
a puppy but I digress). I have always been comfortable around babies and little
kids.
Despite my comfort level with children, becoming a parent
was a sobering event. Our first daughter’s (Erin) birth in 1989 was a seminal moment in my life. It went quite smoothly for me but required substantially more effort from my wife, Connie. Like many new parents,
I think I had FOSU (fear of screwing up). Time passed, Erin seemed to be pretty
normal when her little sister Cailin arrived three years later.
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| Day 1 as a parent: trying not to show my "FOSU" |
I blinked a few times and Erin was starting school. Connie
was a force of nature as a parent. The girls were busy: school, play dates, sports,
homework, parties, etc. Our kids were
strategically placed for photo ops so often at community events that the editor
of the local paper issued a temporary ban via memo to her staff on “those Lowry
girls” picture being in the paper. True story - I know because the editor’s
husband worked for me and “fessed up" in a moment of weakness.
My role as Dad was pretty simple – be a good playmate, read
bedtime stories/say prayers, settle an occasional dispute over the last piece
of candy, help put a tutu on our 70lb dog before an impromptu play. Pretty
basic stuff. That is not to say I didn’t take my role seriously, Connie just
excelled at doing the harder stuff leaving me to ponder where I could “add
value”.
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| Erin sharing another "life lesson" with her father |
The girls were in elementary school during an era when many
parents spent more time worrying about “protecting” their kids from reality
rather than helping them learn how to deal with it. If I screwed up at school
in the 1960s and 70s, I expected that a little “muscular Christianity” would be
dispensed to help me see the error of my ways. By the time I reached adulthood,
teachers could get into trouble for giving a child a “stern look” or somehow “creating
a hostile environment”. Of course, we wouldn’t want to “crush” junior’s spirit
or lower her self-esteem. A bit of overstatement is intentional but the
emerging trend was clear. That was one reason our daughters never entered the
public school system. The catholic school where our kids spent their first few
years of education still believed in discipline.
Not spoiling the kids was a theme in our house.
We saw that happen with many of their peers. We wanted the girls to develop
solid work ethics. From an early age we used “market principles” to try to
accomplish this goal. For example, when the kids asked for something that was a
“want” rather than a “need”; they were expected to pay for a percentage of it
from their “piggy banks” which included money they earned from various modeling
and acting gigs arranged by their mom. “Of course honey, you can have that $12
teddy bear, you just need to give me $6 for your share when we get home”. We
caused the homelessness of many stuffed animals with this policy. Were the
girls emotionally damaged? I don’t think so. A few years later, Erin
would build a brand in part by telling stories about her parsimonious father.
We spent much of the girl’s childhood living in Asia. Most
of their pre-college education was in schools in Japan and China. Nothing like
competing in schools with the progeny of Asian “Tiger Moms” to help hone a
child’s work ethic. Compared to the Japanese, Chinese, Korean, Singaporean, and
other Asian parents we were “pikers” with no academic standards. The occasional
“B” that hit the report cards in our house did not cause an emergency parental
summit meeting like it would in the home run by a “Tiger Mom”. Silly me, I
didn’t even know that taking the SAT a dozen times was a “thing” until we lived
in Shanghai.
Despite living abroad, the girls still worked odd jobs – pet
and babysitting, being the “English voice” on language tapes. As an eight year
old, Cailin modeled for a Japanese clothing catalog. You can imagine how
thrilled I was to find my baby’s picture was in a catalog that said “PENTHOUSE”
on the cover.
Anyway – you get the picture. Had we stayed in the US our
parenting style would have seemed “severe” but by Asian standards we still
qualified as “shiftless” Americans. Truly a “win – win” situation for us. When
we told Asian friends at parties that we expected our kids to contribute to
paying for college (hopefully by getting scholarships) smiles eroded into icy
glares. What kind of human being didn’t “sacrifice everything” to ensure their
offspring attended “an Ivy”, Oxford, MIT, Stanford, etc? For the most part, an Asian “safety school” was an “aspirational” choice for 98% of US students. It always seemed ironic to me that success
for a Korean mom who looked down on “weak American standards” was for her child
to attend a top ranked US school. American universities were the "the educational promised land". “Call us shiftless if
you must but our colleges are still the gold standard” – I never said that but
I thought it often as I listened to many a stressed out Tiger Mom opine about
her child’s college entrance prospects. “Harvard just sent a rejection note,
and he is waitlisted at Princeton, so far he has only been accepted by Duke –
where did we go wrong?”
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| Our standards were a joke to "Tiger Moms" |
Fast forward a few years……………………… Erin, our elder “bundle of
joy” is out of college, packing to move to NYC with her drama and mass
communication majors (from a school that didn’t make many Asian “safety school”
lists) to join the “working poor”. I could hear the distant Tiger Mom’s virtual
giggle – “what is mass comm? - is it math for white people?” “I am so glad MY
daughter graduated with honors in advanced math from MIT and is going to NY to
work at a boutique hedge fund”. Blah, Blah, Blah.
You can read about Erin’s “working poor” years on her blog: www.brokemillennial.com. The “happy
ending” (the American kind not the Asian version….) was that while being “underemployed”
and working three jobs; Erin’s creativity and work ethic kicked in.
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| The "donut" story became a book and a business |
The success of Erin’s blog that morphed into a book deal
thrilled her parents and her little sister. Her blog cast me in the role of the
evil father that made her pay for things she wanted as a little girl and
contribute to her college expenses. I am glad the girls are too old to be taken by "social services". I became of big fan of her blog wondering
how she was going to make me look like a “financial fascist” on an almost
weekly basis.
Erin came up with what she called her financial epiphany aka
“origin story” where I helped stake her donut selling business during a
community garage sale day but then had the nerve to teach her about net profit
at the age of seven by taking the cost of the donuts out of her pile of cash
from the sale and making her pay her four year old sister a living wage. I did
not insist she pay for Cailin’s health care.
Week after week, month after month, I waited for Erin to
tell the tale of my proudest moment as her financial mentor. Yet four years into the blog, the most
valuable lesson I felt I imparted on her impressionable mind was yet untold. She
loved the Krispy Crème donut tale and her angry assault on my Halloween “candy
tax” but how, I pondered could she have forgotten the “TCBY moment” as I liked
to think of it. I scoured the advance copy of the book she sent us – a black
cloud descended as I pondered the improbable – the TCBY story was long forgotten.
A couple weeks ago there was a Broke Millennial “book launch”
party in New York. The hostess of the event asked me to say a "few" words. I
smiled and thought to myself “quite a few words, the TCBY story needs to be told”.
So, microphone in hand, I launched into my favorite Broke Millennial story but
since Erin forgot it maybe I should leave it for another day. The lesson here
folks is you never know which lessons you try to teach will actually “take”
with your child.
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| If you haven't bought the book, it makes a great graduation gift |
As a parent you don’t get a report card for many years. Erin
went through high school and college without showing much evidence that the financial
lessons we tried to teach the girls had made an impact on her thinking. Perhaps
it required the stress caused by having a low paying job while living in a high
cost city to activate the dormant “life lessons”. In any case, I will not try
to take any credit for the creativity Erin showed in morphing from Broke
Millennial to a published author with her own successful business. I am just
glad it happened.
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| Cailin is claiming the Broke Millennial mantle from Erin |
According to Erin’s younger sister, Cailin, she is the new
Broke Millennial in the family. Cailin works in the rough and tumble entertainment
world in LA. Cailin is the proud parent of our “grandhamster” Thelma. Thelma
starred in a recent Katy Perry lyric video that Cailin produced. The video has
over 70 million views on YouTube. We don’t expect Cailin’s Broke Millennial
status to last long.
