Perhaps some of you remember the line from the movie, “My Big Fat Greek Wedding,” when the character Maria Portokalos screamed at her son Nicko, “Don’t play with the food! When I was your age, we didn’t have food!”
Sound familiar? In my home growing up, the version went something like, “Eat your food. After all, the children in China are starving.”
This is only a snippet from the “Depression-era” psychology that no doubt permeated most of the childhoods of baby boomers (those 75 million of us) raised in the 1950s and 1960s by parents who were, in turn, raised during the Depression of the 1930s.
Today’s baby boomers are no doubt imprinting their children with concepts like, “No, you cannot have the Nintendo this year, we are in a recession,” or even worse, “You will be changing schools because we were forced to move out of our neighborhood unable to afford the house payments.”
Fast forward to 2029, when the “Great Recession of 2009” is a two-decades-old memory. What will your children be communicating to your grandchildren?
The answer may very well be that they will be preaching recession-era concepts that they are acquiring right now, such as spend within your means, save, prepare, plan, and don’t be stupid in a bubble!
What we live through has a profound effect on the choices we make. The world of psychiatry is permeated with the concept that identity and behavior is rooted in how we were raised.
My mother grew up poor in Milwaukee (or so she constantly told me), the daughter of eastern European immigrants.
Even after marrying my father, a man with good job skills who took her to a middle-class lifestyle, the lessons of her youth were profound.
Which, in turn, powerfully impacted the lessons of my youth.
Just the other day my mother asked me to pick up and install a cable box, so she could save the $25 installation fee.
I begged her not to make me do this, because anyone who knows me knows that I am incompetent when it comes to fixing or installing anything. I am great with software, bad with hardware.
Predictably, I couldn’t get the cable box to work. I begged her to pay the $25 installation fee. She finally relented.
