Wants vs Needs

I was plan­ning another install­ment in my series about kids’ allowances [the first being Allowance — Yes? No? and Why?] but I’ve decided I need to back­track a bit and cover some back­ground philo­soph­i­cal ideas first.

I believe that the foun­da­tion of a healthy rela­tion­ship to money (and healthy inter­per­sonal rela­tion­ships, also) is a solid under­stand­ing and inner accep­tance of Wants ver­sus Needs.

My mother, bless her soul, is a ter­rific woman. She raised four chil­dren mostly on her own. Now she’s the world’s great­est grand­mother. She’s gen­er­ous, kind, thought­ful, fun, tal­ented, and highly intel­li­gent. She’s also a shop-aholic. Really. It’s a sick­ness. She’s deeply in debt, con­stantly bor­row­ing money, and the source of a great deal of stress for my sib­lings and me. It’s very painful to watch an oth­er­wise intel­li­gent adult engage over and over in self-destructive behav­ior. My mom has no bound­aries when it comes to mate­ri­als goods — basi­cally if she wants it, she needs it.

Thir­teen years and a life­time ago , I was the mother of an infant and a soon-to-be 3-yo. Dur­ing the first 6 months of The Son’s life, I spent a lot of time nurs­ing and pon­der­ing the changes I had seen and was see­ing my first child go through. The Daugh­ter had gone from that same babe-in-arms helpless-infant stage to this terror-in-cherub’s cloth­ing. Grad­u­ally it became evi­dent to me that what I was see­ing was her tran­si­tion from being 100% needs-based to hav­ing both wants and needs. Actu­ally, if you’ve ever had a 3-yo in your life you’ll know that they appear to go from being 100% needs-based to 100% wants-based!

Any­way, this recog­ni­tion of a child-development stage lead to one of the most impor­tant tools I carry in my Moth­er­ing Tool­box — a Wants/Needs hier­ar­chy. It looks like this — in descend­ing order of impor­tance:
1. Children’s needs
2. Par­ents’ needs
3. a) Children’s wants and b) Parent’s wants

As sim­ple as the hier­ar­chy is on paper, iden­ti­fy­ing the dif­fer­ence between a want and a need is often no easy task.

Infants are easy — they are 100% needs based. They need to be fed, changed, and loved. They sim­ply do not have wants. A cry­ing infant doesn’t want to be picked up and com­forted, she needs it.

But tod­dlers are a dif­fer­ent story. They’re learn­ing that the world does not revolve around them and it’s a painful expe­ri­ence — for every­one involved. Tod­dlers need food, com­fort, and basic care just like an infant but they also need to be taught the intri­ca­cies of wants and needs. This is very long learn­ing process and unless we, as par­ents, under­stand and inter­nal­ize the con­cepts of Wants and Needs we can­not effec­tively teach our chil­dren to under­stand the differences.

As the say­ing goes, “neces­sity is the mother of inven­tion.” It was in a moment of neces­sity that I stum­bled upon the first les­son I used to help cement the con­cept of Needs vs Wants in my own head and begin teach­ing The Daugh­ter the harsh real­i­ties of life as an older sis­ter One morn­ing soon after The Son was born, we were play­ing out a typ­i­cal home-life scene: The Son and The Daugh­ter were both cry­ing. As a nor­mal post­par­tum mother, I was tired, sleep-deprived, bleed­ing from one end, leak­ing from another, and ready to cry myself. In des­per­a­tion, I had a con­ver­sa­tion with The Daugh­ter that went some­thing like this,

Sweetie, do you hear your brother crying?”

The sobs quiet slightly so she can lis­ten, “Yes.”

“Here’s the rule: only one baby can cry at a time. Since he’s the ‘new lit­tle, lit­tle baby brother’, he gets to go first. As soon as he’s done cry­ing it will be your turn. Okay.”

Tears dry up. A few brain cogs tum­ble as she processes this.
Then, “Okay.” And she sits down patiently to wait for the baby to stop crying.

What an incred­i­ble and eye-opening expe­ri­ence that was for me! What a learn­ing expe­ri­ence it was for both of us. The Daugh­ter, although cer­tainly not con­sciously aware of it at the time, learned that the baby’s needs came before hers. And I learned that she was capa­ble of delay­ing her needs.

Since that fate­ful day, we have con­tin­ued to explore and learn about the hier­ar­chy of wants and needs. I believe there are two keys to help­ing chil­dren learn to rec­og­nize the dif­fer­ence between their wants and needs. They are 1) to model behav­ior and 2) to intro­duce the terms and use them often.

Do you really want Jr. to come to the table now? Or must he come because he’s been called? Do you want her to eat her veg­gies or do her home­work? Do you need that new skirt or that new power drill? It may seem like such a silly sub­tle mat­ter of seman­tics but don’t under­es­ti­mate the power of a seem­ingly sim­ple word. Next time you’re con­tem­plat­ing a pur­chase, ask your­self if it’s a want or a need.

Our chil­dren are both teenagers now and I’m proud to say that they both have a solid grasp on the basic dif­fer­ence between their wants and needs. They know what gro­ceries are needed (milk, dairy, fruits, veg­gies, grains, meat) and what is wanted (chips, soda, juice, etc). They’re also clear on the idea of what cloth­ing is needed (a win­ter coat, prac­ti­cal every­day shoes, under­wear) and what is wanted (3 pair of pants instead of 2, that extra pink polka-dot bra just because it’s pretty). And they are quite clear on the fact that any­thing beyond food, shel­ter, and com­fort is a want. More impor­tantly, they under­stand the hier­ar­chy of wants and needs and are capa­ble of putting aside their wants for needs and, some­times, their needs for the needs of others.

Still, we con­tinue to model behav­ior and lan­guage about wants and needs. The sit­u­a­tions are more com­plex and often the ques­tions are harder. When is one person’s needs more impor­tant than another’s? How do your wants impact mine? How about how our needs and wants impact the future and our abil­ity to meet pro­jected needs and ful­fill future wants? How best do we accom­mo­date every one’s needs and wants within a lim­ited bud­get (because no mat­ter how large a family’s bud­get, it is almost always lim­ited). Then there’s the issue of our needs and wants as a cou­ple; and the needs and wants of all of us together as a fam­ily unit. Obvi­ously, bal­anc­ing the needs and wants of one per­son is eas­ier than bal­anc­ing the needs and wants of a cou­ple or a family.

For nearly four years, I’ve wanted a new ‘fridge. This sum­mer the scales really tipped from want to need. Our chil­dren were party to all of our con­ver­sa­tions about whether or not it was really time to replace the appli­ance. They were involved in all of our debates on what style, which brand, with or with­out ice-maker, etc. When we finally made our choice and bought the refrig­er­a­tor, they knew how many of the fea­tures cho­sen were what we wanted and how much of the pur­chase was fill­ing a need.

The chil­dren were also party to the process of pur­chas­ing a new car this sum­mer. I wanted a family-sized car and I wanted an iPod input jack. We ended up with a small com­muter car with­out an iPod jack because it was all we needed.

Now that Christ­mas is bear­ing down on us, din­ner con­ver­sa­tions are start­ing to cen­ter on how the car and refrig­er­a­tor pur­chases need to be taken into con­sid­er­a­tion when look­ing at this year’s gift bud­get. Clearly our needs ear­lier this year will impact our abil­ity to ful­fill wants this Christmas.

At this point, if you’ve read this far, you might be won­der­ing if I see all needs and wants as involv­ing mate­r­ial goods. The answer is, no, of course not. But this is, after all, a Per­sonal Finance blog In all seri­ous­ness, though, the point I’m try­ing to get across is that, as par­ents, it’s our respon­si­bil­ity to, first, be clear in our­selves what is a need and what is a want and then, sec­ond, model for our chil­dren both the process of dif­fer­en­ti­at­ing between our needs and wants and the imple­men­ta­tion of our own per­sonal needs/wants hierarchy.

Whether it’s of our own mak­ing or through sheer dumb luck, our fam­ily life is free of sib­ling rivalry, accu­sa­tions of one child get­ting more than the other, and recrim­i­na­tions that we just don’t care or under­stand. Bet­ter yet, our chil­dren seem to trust us implic­itly to meet their needs and their wants to the degree that our bud­get allows and our dis­cre­tion deter­mines pru­dent. But then, our kids have grown up secure in the knowl­edge that their needs will always be met and that, with a bit of patience, they very often get the things they want too.

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