Give children responsibility as you raise them

Dear Carolyn: My husband and I both come from very underprivileged backgrounds. Thanks to hard work and some incredible mentors, we were the first in our families to graduate from high school. We attended the same Ivy League university, and now have graduate degrees and amazing jobs in our fields.

While we were students, we worked 30-plus hours a week at food-service jobs just to scrape by. The few hours a week we had outside of work and classes to study or sleep felt like a godsend. It’s not pleasant to admit it, but we both felt really resentful of so many of our classmates, whose checks for tuition and living expenses seemed to fall from the sky.

Our problem is this: While we’d both love to start a family, we’re terrified to do so. We’re now in a position where we could afford to send our children to private schools, to pay for college, to go on vacations, to do all the things we didn’t get to do when we were kids. And while it sounds like a dream to be able to give our children the world on a platter, we’re terrified our kids would turn out to be the same kind of entitled brats we so resented when we were students.

Would it be fair to raise kids the same way we were raised, even if it means they might have few privileges compared to their peers? — R.

Dear R.: Your hardship was genuine. Any ingratepreventive hardship system you construct for your kids will be artificial.

How would you have felt those late nights over a pile of dishes had you known your parents were home resting their heads on fluffy pillows of cash?

There are ways besides material deprivation to raise kids who aren’t jerks. You can make it clear early on that you’ll buy them the basics and they can save their allowance/get jobs to buy luxuries.

Don’t make your kids suffer; just make sense. Talk to your husband about what kind of parents your circumstances allow you to be, good and bad, then shoot for the good.