4:07pm Wednesday 3rd October 2007
A NEW term has started and my youngest daughter is busy catching up on all the news.
"What's in your lunchbox?" "Did the tooth fairy come?" "Can you swim a length yet?"
However, just occasionally the chatting becomes more focused.
"Have you got a new school bag? Do you live in a big house?" "Are you rich?"
Questions such as these make me feel uncomfortable. Why must children make such comparisons?
Why is wealth, or lack of it, important to a six-year-old? My first instinct is to protect my children from such a ranking.
I don't want them to be judged by the clothes they wear or the car their mother drives, and I certainly don't want them judging others.
And yet I know perfectly well that if they don't ask these questions in front of me, they will ask them anyway, later, in private, because children have an unquenchable thirst to know things, to find out about the world around them and discover how, precisely, they fit into it.
When I was 10 I made a friend called Karen. We talked about our families, our bedrooms, our likes and dislikes.
We played at being movie stars and giggled in our' corner of the playground.
Several months later she came to my house and declared that she thought I was poor because my dad cut the toes off my sandals when my feet grew too big and I wore hand-me-down jumpers.
Now here I was, living in a nice house with a big garden! She was confused.
She needed to place' me, not because she was obsessed with the things that money can buy, but simply because she wanted to decipher the code.
In order to give herself value, she needed to understand what others value.
I have tried to talk to my children about wealth. About how they don't need to seek it, or distort it, or envy it.
After all, they have lived for a while in developing countries, they have walked past real, cruel, life-denying poverty and returned home to their hot dinner and their books and TV and their comfortable beds.
Don't compare yourselves to your friends at school in Winchester, I tell them. Compare yourselves to Kishwar in Pakistan or Lena in Ukraine. See, really we are incredibly rich! The children nod, silently. They seem to understand.
Then my youngest daughter's new friend comes to play.
"My mum says we are incredibly rich!" I overhear, as they chat on the swing in the garden. I choke with embarrassment.
What if the new friend repeats this to her parents? That's not what I meant, I want to shout.
I meant "we have enough", "we have more than enough" and even "we have enough to share"!
But I'm not going to confuse my children any more.
They'll work it out for themselves.
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