THE other morning on the way to school, out of the clear blue, my youngest child, Annie, a ninth grader, asked if we were going to be all right.
I was caught off guard. Usually during the morning rush we just grunt at each other. But I knew exactly what she meant: all this economic worry.
I explained that nobody knew what would happen, that this is a scary time, but I thought we’d be as O.K. as anyone.
I pointed out that we have always lived frugally — at that particular moment, we were driving in our second-hand Volkswagen convertible with 98,000 miles that we bought for $5,000 for our teenage sons. It is our lowest-mileage car. (The Volvo my wife drives to the train station has 150,000, the Astro van 110,000.)
Annie was quiet, then asked, “How do people lose money?”
It’s a lot for a child to absorb, everything that we and the world are going through. A friend compares this moment to waiting for a hurricane looming offshore. We know it’s big, we know it’s dangerous, we know it’s going to smack us good, we know the worst is to come, but until we get whacked, mostly what we can do is wait and worry.
Kids are very good at absorbing our worries, but they’re confused, too, because for most of us, nothing is too different so far.
Annie keeps asking, “Are we in a depression yet?”
I tell her if it comes to that, she won’t have to ask.
Over Thanksgiving my twin freshman sons came home from college, and my wife and I talked to them honestly. We told them about the money we lost in the stock market and our 401(k)’s. We told them that our jobs seem safe for now, but explained how shaky the newspaper business is and how quickly that could change. We told them their college money appears safe because it was conservatively invested and then explained what that means.
Our oldest, Ben, a junior, is in Australia doing a semester abroad, and when we spoke on the phone I tried to make him understand how different the country he left in July is going to feel when he returns at Christmas. “I get it, Dad,” he tells me.
They do and they don’t.
I think the best we can hope for is that they’re equipped for whatever’s ahead.
It will help, I believe, that though they have been raised in an upper-middle-class home, my wife and I are frugal. They didn’t get money to buy lunch at school, always went with a brown bag and carried water bottles filled from the tap.
Now that they are adult size, they notice our kitchen is too small to fit all six of us. And they know that four years ago we had an architectural plan drawn for a $150,000 addition that we were all excited about, then mothballed it when we realized we’d need the money for their college educations.
From their early teenage years, they were expected to have jobs. When Ben was 12, he’d wake at 5 a.m. on weekends to assemble the Sunday papers at the corner deli. All four had regular baby-sitting jobs starting in middle school. All worked summers, starting at age 14. At college, Ben has made his pocket money — $75 a week — lifeguarding at the university pool. And all three boys paid for their first semesters from their summer earnings. None of this is to say that they have a clue about what’s about to hit.
And that is mostly a blessing.
They won’t notice near as much as we do, because they don’t have as much at stake. They own little, can be more flexible, and in some ways will benefit financially from their parents’ generation’s losses.
For years the media has done stories about middle-aged parents complaining because their grown kids couldn’t afford to buy a house in suburban New York. No need to complain anymore. This downward economic spiral is creating tons of affordable housing, although what we parents couldn’t have foreseen is that the opportunities for our children will be subsidized by our lost equity.
I have lived through two bad economic stretches, when I was single and not much older than my sons are now. Both served me well.
I graduated from Harvard in the mid-1970s, during a period of stagflation — high unemployment (7.2 percent) and high inflation (8.8 percent). Kids a few years ahead of me routinely got entry-level reporting or clerk’s positions at papers like The New York Times, The Washington Post, The Wall Street Journal. My senior year, I wrote 50 letters and got 49 rejections. The only paper that would hire me was in Rochester.
I didn’t want to go, but very quickly, I stopped thinking of myself as a victim of the economy. I just loved waking every morning and being a reporter. Over the next several years, as I climbed from Rochester, to Louisville, Ky., to Hazard, Ky., to Miami, I didn’t know it at the time, but I was benefiting from being a bigger fish in smaller ponds. Right out of college, I was doing investigative pieces, celebrity profiles, long narratives. When I got to The Times a decade later, an editor younger than I, who in an improved economy had arrived straight from the Ivy League, informed me that every feature story had to end in a quote. I didn’t say, “Yes sir,” as I would have if I’d come straight from college; I figured ways to work around him.
The severe recession and high inflation of the early 1980s? I still didn’t own anything, still was single. Economically, what I remember most was earning 12 percent interest on Treasury bills. The inflation that was gnawing at older people on fixed incomes would help grow the down payment for our first home, the home that my wife and I bought at a bargain price in a depressed Long Island housing market, the same home where we’ve raised our children.
My son Sam called from college recently with a business proposal. He wants to make T-shirts that extol one of the college’s great virtues in Sam’s eyes: the female-to-male ratio is two to one. My initial reaction was forget it, get a job at McDonald’s, you need to make your spending money. But then I thought, well, who knows. I agreed to let Sam take $400 of his savings from his summer jobs to make 40 T-shirts that read, “Preserve the ratio.” He plans to sell them at school the weeks before Christmas for $15 each. If it works, he makes $200 on the first batch. “And that’s just the beginning, Pops,” Sam said. “I got this idea...”
The young are foolish, but that’s their blessing, too. I keep reading that we’re suffering a crisis in confidence. For better or worse, my sons are not, at least not yet. With luck, these hard times will make them tougher and wiser. With luck, they’ll fight their way through, accumulating war stories to draw on when they are middle-aged like their Pops and the world goes bad on them.
