I’ve heard this more than once…
“the only real holiday, needs a hotel in the sun… with a great swimming pool and child care… me, I can relax and be pampered… and Junior can join in all the kids club stuff and swim his socks off…”
needless to say, this comes from folk who live off credit cards and the like…
Suggest to them a cost-cutting holiday/project and I get treated to blank stares of amazement… 
Suggest to the people who smoke and complain about the price of food that they should maybe cut back and see the comments you get …
I actually did this once while manning a stall at a Brocante when a man said to his little girl that he hadn’t got enough money to buy a small item (1 euro )that she had seen.
I asked if he would mind telling me how many cigarettes he smoked a day, he quite willingly did this, my partner was there and between us we did a calculation of how much a year he was sending up in smoke. He was astonished having never done the calculation before, his partner he said also smoked…
I agree Teresa…my 3 are in the 20 to 40 (30) age group…I think they have already faced years of austerity and facing many more…my son…the youngest has a decent paying job and has been considering both buying in the U.K. and buying here…at the moment he’s placed all plans on the back burner…the times when mortgage interest rates went through the roof were the deciding factor in my sister moving to Canada…getting really worried they had fixed their mortgage at what turned out to be an unsustainable rate…
Problems with smokers (and I was one 40 years ago is that cigarettes are no regarded as an indulgence but a necessity. Yet it is curious that I gave up a 40 a day habit stone cold when I was 39 years old when a packet of 20 moved over $Aus2.00 each and I too did the math. and was earning good money, and had no dependents, (still don’t thank God).
Now they cost what? - almost €10? I see Football Club shirts cost £80? Tickets to watch a match -?
Yet people talk about being ‘poor’? It is pathetically laughable, nd if it wasn’t for kids possibly being injured by false values and passing them on, I am of the belief that these people deserve all the shocks that are coming to them
I agree and also that we can’t judge today’s people by the standards we used 30, 40 or even 60 years ago.
Throughout our lives we usually want to be (more or less) accepted by a peer group. And it wasn’t that hard as it didn’t require that much. When I was a kid my school friends were even tolerant of the fact that my clothes were a bit different (my aunt gave me a lot and she had dreadful taste!). These days kids are more brutal, and social media exacerbates this. So you have to have the “right” things or face exclusion.
And similar mores apply in your 20’s and 30’s…so eg not having your nails done would point you out if you were part of that sort of peer group. And not having a mobile phone! Not possible…
Luckily, usually by around 40 we find that we can be a bit more resistant to social norms if we want to.
Yes Jane, every so often I have to remind myself to stop acting like that Monty Python sketch where the odld farts (like me) compare what we DIDN’T have as opposed to what we did - but sometimes it is very hard not to do precisely that.
Maybe I was a hard mother, but our daughters desperately wanted Sylvanian Families for Christmas, they were being heavily promoted on tv at the time.
I explained that to them and we bought them two beautiful dolls.
The dolls have just been back to the factory and had their bodies remade and are still loved.
I wonder how long the Sylvanian families would have lasted?
We also shopped around with their Christmas money in the Sales instead of buying the first thing they saw.
Life lessons learned which are now being passed on to their children.
Well we made a sylvanian family burrow out of a large box that we fashioned the top to look like a tree trunk, and you could lift it off to find their house inside…which we decorated with all sorts of bits and pieces. So just had to buy a couple of the actual characters rather than all the expensive box sets with paraphanalia and everyone was happy. The kids (no longer kids) still remember the box burrow! And I still remember sewing tiny curtains.
Excellent.