I really admire my parents, especially my mom, for being the way she is despite coming from the parents she had. Not because her parents are bad, but because my grandparents were always very Right-wing, very prudish and very Republican. My mom is everything they are not, and is very supportive of all the ideas that my grandma considered "wild" and "foolish."
My dad always made me pay for my own stuff, even when I was 6 or 7 years old. No free toys from daddy... if I somehow acquired money from birthdays or Christmas, I had to save it and buy things with that. Did I
really want that giant T-Rex with stomping sound effects? Or would I rather save that $40 and put it towards something larger, like a Sega Nomad?
(yes, that was the decision I made one Birthday...) So it's not that I bought things that were important necessarily, but I did learn to be selective with what I spent my money on. Now that I'm older and more independent, it's definitely a useful life skill -- especially since I have friends that lack that kind of selective spending, and it affects their quality of life.
Jam it back in, in the dark.
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