高消费的孩子你承受得了吗?

At 10, Grace Morgan is a young fashionista and takes pains to dress in the latest styles. But her mom, Amy, works part-time and her husband was recently laid off, leaving little room in the family budget for designer-brand clothes.

So Grace didn't ask her mom to open her wallet this fall to buy clothes. Instead, she sold a stack of her own old jeans and shirts at a rummage sale and paired the proceeds with discount coupons to get the stylish jeggings and tops she wanted for school, says her mother, of Lake in the Hills, Ill. Grace is learning 'we have to make choices with our money,' she says.

The cost of raising kids is continuing to rise. A middle-income family can expect to shell out nearly a quarter of a million dollars, or $222,360, to raise a baby born in 2009 to age 18, according to the Department of Agriculture. That is up about 1.4% from 2007, before the recession began -- and it doesn't include college costs.

Now, amid tight household budgets and a growing belief that today's youth will face a lasting drop in their standard of living, many parents are working to reshape children's expectations. The result is 'a massive, painful shift' in behavior, as kids learn to economize or work to pay for consumer goods they want, says Jason Dorsey, an Austin, Texas, consultant to employers on intergenerational issues.

Ms. Morgan is teaching Grace and her brother Noah, 13, to resist consumer pressures. 'We very openly heckle' such shows as 'My Super Sweet 16' on MTV, ridiculing such excesses as when a teen receives a Mercedes or opulent vacations, she says. Both children have learned to enjoy inexpensive family camping vacations, and they sell items on eBay to raise cash for purchases. 'The joke around our house is, if it's not nailed down, they will sell it,' Ms. Morgan says.

Still, Grace insisted on going to Justice, a specialty chain for tweens, for back-to-school clothes. 'She could have gone to Wal-Mart and gotten much more,' Ms. Morgan says. But 'you have to close your eyes and zip your mouth' to let kids learn to make choices.

In the past, money talk was taboo in many families, and many parents sheltered children from financial realities. Parents 'want everything to be just great for our families. It's hard sometimes' to set limits, says Gina Maione Earles, chief executive of Mothers & More, a 4,100-member networking group, where teaching kids money skills is a popular topic at meetings.

But fewer families can afford to indulge their kids; 24% of parents made back-to-school shopping budgets with their kids this year, up from 18% in 2006, says a Capital One survey of 500 households.

Telling a pre-teen or teen you can't afford something usually doesn't work, says Susan Beacham, founder of Money Savvy Generation, a maker of educational products for kids. 'Kids are very concrete' in their thinking, she says. 'If you say at the mall, 'I can't afford those shoes,' then go to a grocery store and spend $150, they don't understand the difference. They will just think, 'There she goes again.' ' A better approach is to give children a budgeted amount for necessities and require them to stick to it and account for their spending, she says.