Raising Kids in a Bull Market: Teaching Gratitude When Everyone Has More

It happens at the school drop-off, in the carpool line, in the lunchroom. Your child comes home and casually mentions that a classmate got the $100 sneakers, or the newest phone, or a birthday party with a petting zoo and a magician. And something tightens in your chest. Are we not doing enough? Are they missing out? Am I raising a child who will always feel behind?

Rabbi Lawrence Kelemen has spent decades talking with parents wrestling with exactly this question, and what he’s found flips the usual assumption on its head. When he was asked at a chinuch convention how to raise children in a wealthy environment — kids sitting in a classroom discussing who has the $100 shoes — his answer surprised the room. “Actually, unfortunately, what I’ve seen,” he said, “is it’s not always the children that are wealthier that have more, it’s sometimes the parents that are feeling more guilty that are giving way more to their children.”

Read that twice. The problem isn’t usually the neighbor’s bank account. It’s often our own guilt, translated into overgiving.

The Guilt Behind the Gift

Think about the families you know going through something hard — a separation, an illness, a stressful move. As adults, we understand the backstory. We know there’s tension at home, or grief, or fear. But children don’t see backstories. They see outcomes. As Kelemen puts it, “all the children see is, this one got an iPod.” The gift becomes the story, because the gift is the only part a child can actually observe.

This means that a lot of the material excess kids notice in each other isn’t really a wealth gap at all — it’s a guilt gap. A parent working long hours buys the newest gadget to fill the space where time should be. A parent going through a hard season overspends to compensate for what they can’t otherwise give. None of this makes anyone a bad parent; it makes them a human one. But it does mean the real work of raising grounded, grateful kids has less to do with your income bracket and more to do with your own relationship to guilt, comparison, and giving.

So before addressing what to say to your child about the shoes, it’s worth pausing on a quieter question: what am I trying to solve for myself when I reach for my wallet?

Gratitude Isn’t a Feeling — It’s a Habit You Build

Here’s where Kelemen’s teaching goes even further, and where it becomes genuinely actionable. Drawing on the work of Rabbi Shlomo Wolbe, he distinguishes between two very different kinds of inner growth. One is organic — like planting a seed and giving it what it needs to grow on its own. This is how we nurture a perspective like awe or appreciation for what we have. The other is inorganic — like construction. It’s deliberate, hands-on, brick by brick. This is how we build habits: saying please and thank you, washing hands before a meal, brushing teeth at night.

Gratitude, Kelemen teaches, needs both. You can’t just hope a child grows up feeling thankful the way you hope a plant grows toward sunlight. Feeling grateful, on its own, isn’t enough if it never turns into the practiced habit of expressing it. As he puts it simply: “You have to plant and you have to build.”

This reframes the whole project of raising grateful kids in a culture of abundance. You’re not just trying to manage what your child wants. You’re trying to construct, deliberately and repeatedly, the muscle of noticing and naming what they already have.

What This Looks Like at Your Kitchen Table

So what does “building” gratitude actually look like in a house with real kids who really do want the sneakers? A few concrete places to start:

• Make thank-you a spoken habit, not an assumed feeling. Don’t wait for your child to feel grateful before asking them to say so. Have them say thank you to the bus driver, to the grandparent who mailed a card, to you for making dinner — every time, out loud, even when it feels rote. The habit comes first; often, the feeling follows.
• Narrate abundance instead of assuming it’s obvious. Kids are remarkably bad at noticing what they already have, because it’s invisible to them — it’s just “normal.” At dinner, try naming one specific thing you’re grateful for that day, and ask your kids to do the same. Specificity matters more than sentiment: “I’m grateful Grandma called today” lands harder than a generic “I’m grateful for my family.”
• Check your own guilt before you check your wallet. The next time you feel the pull to buy something to smooth over a hard week, pause and ask what you’re actually trying to fix. Sometimes what a child needs isn’t the item — it’s ten uninterrupted minutes of your attention.
• Talk about the invisible stories behind other kids’ things. When your child mentions a classmate’s new phone, that’s an opening, not a crisis. You might say, “I wonder what’s going on in their family that made that feel important right now.” It plants the idea, early, that things are often standing in for something else.
• Let them notice want without instantly resolving it. Wanting the shoes isn’t a moral failure — it’s a normal part of being a kid around other kids. You don’t need to shut the wanting down or immediately satisfy it. Sometimes the most useful thing you can do is simply sit with them in it: “Yeah, those are cool. It’s okay to want things you don’t have.”

The Long Game

None of this produces an instantly grateful child. Construction never works that fast. But brick by brick — a thank-you here, a noticed blessing there, a moment of restraint instead of a guilty purchase — you’re building something sturdier than a feeling. You’re building a habit that will outlast whatever is trending in the lunchroom this year.

The families around your children will always have more of something. That has been true in every generation, in every economy, in every neighborhood. The real question was never how to keep up. It’s whether your child is being taught, deliberately and repeatedly, to notice what’s already theirs.

If this way of thinking about chinuch resonates with you, there’s a lot more where this came from. Join the inner circle at lawerencekelemen.com for ongoing teaching on raising children with character, gratitude, and groundedness.

This blog was co-written with Artificial Intelligence.