So one of the side effects of the recession is that CNN occasionally posts special interest articles about how people are scaling back and coming to terms with life in this economy and whatnot.
Trouble is every time I read one I can't figure out whether it's an elaborate joke about consumerism or if I'm actually supposed to feel bad for these people.
Recession impacts kids' summer plans.Alright so I just want to make it clear that the greater issue at play here is one I can sympathize with, but the specific family profiled, I cannot.
Sheila Bernus Dowd's two children attended so many camps last summer that she used spreadsheets to keep track of their whereabouts.
Kiley and Caden Dowd, of San Jose, California, will spend more time at home and less at camp this summer.
This year is a different story.
Dowd's 9-year-old son Caden's only camp plans include a week at roller hockey camp for $100, which includes the cost of equipment. It's a far cry from 2008, when just one of his camps, involving video-game developing, had a $1,000 price tag.
"We can't afford to do that," said Dowd, a San Jose, California-based fundraising consultant for nonprofit agencies. "This year, we just thought it's been so crazy that we're going to throw that to the wind."
Last year you
sent an 8 year old to a $1,000 "video-game developing" camp, only one of so many that you
needed a spreadsheet? And this year you can only afford to send your kid to one week-long camp? My pain for you is of a magnitude I can hardly express. Dare ye not think of families who couldn't afford to send their kids to any camps, this year or last. It might hurt.
Or this other, only slightly more sympathetic family,
Marlon Barcelona, a seventh-grade teacher in Fullerton, California, is also cutting back on his two children's camp experiences this summer after learning he won't be pulling in an extra summer paycheck.
Barcelona's district in North Orange County canceled summer school. California's budget woes prompted education officials to cut summer school around the state, including elementary and middle schools in the Los Angeles Unified School District.
..."Day camp is $60 a week per child. We originally registered them in April or May for three weeks, and now it's just going to be that last week [of summer]," Barcelona said. "We're going to try to take them to museums and try to take them to some of the local parks ... do our best to make sure they still have fun this summer and get to see things instead of just staying home."
So instead of sending your kids away for almost a month, they are getting sent away for a week, and then you will have to... spend... time... with... them. Oh no. Horrors.
It would be nice if people would realize that kids don't actually need 24/7 stimulation and that maybe if you just like, set them up with a good book, or, I don't know,
talk to them, they'll be alright. Helicopter parenting is killing imagination, so maybe via the recession we will see a renaissance of old fashioned child's play.
Personally I went to a week-long summer camp a few years when I was young, and while it was fine, I had just as much, if not more, fun on my own the rest of the summer, and there
weren't even any museums.
In a previous edition of Tales of Woe,
nannies got laid off.
Amanda Mezyk had developed a close bond with her employers' children as their live-in nanny, which is why it was so painful when her bosses told her she was being laid off. Amanda Mezyk, 20, lost her live-in nanny job when the recession forced her employers to cut the family budget.
"I started crying and they kept repeating, 'I'm sorry, I'm sorry,'" Mezyk, 20, said about the day last November when her employers -- a Miami, Florida, plastic surgeon and a part-time dermatologist -- delivered the bad news. "They sat me down in the living room -- where we usually would sit and talk about the kids -- and they told me that business was slow and they had to cut expenses."
..."I was sad because I had to let the kids go," she said. "I love them like they were mine. And I want to be a part of their lives for the long run."
Her job as a live-in nanny at a lavish home in an upper-class, upscale private community came with many perks that suddenly had disappeared. The insured car provided by her employers for personal and professional use was gone. Without a steady income, Mezyk wondered how she would pay her mounting $8,000 credit card debt.
There would be no more accompanying the family on all-expenses-paid vacations to the Bahamas, Italy and China. The layoff also put an end to Mezyk's annual paid weeklong vacations.
To survive, Mezyk has moved in with a great-aunt and uncle until she can decide on her next move.
Yeah, just go back up there and read that another time or two. She had free rent, a free car, a week-long paid vacation
in addition to free family vacations, on top of a weekly salary, which was reported as an average of $700/wk in Miami. And somehow she managed to rack up $8,000 in consumer debt. It boggles the mind. I will never have perks that awesome. :(
Previous stories in this vein have included families planting gardens to save a buck, and as an exciting result their kids finally learn that spaghetti doesn't come from the ground, but carrots do; a family of 4 with parents making hundreds of thousands of dollars per year who live in a one-bedroom apartment in downtown Manhattan instead of just buying a house in Brooklyn because they "need to be close to culture"; and
newlyweds who moved in with the bride's ex-husband.
To some extent reading these stories makes me happy to have a job, and more resolute than ever to have all my consumer debt eradicated this year (it's going well!). But as far as these lifestyles, well... I just find it hard to relate, and frankly I think it is irresponsible of CNN to keep posting these ludicrous stories when they could be talking about people who are actually suffering.
