Children who grew up hearing their parents say we can't afford that learned something far more complicated than budgeting. They learned that wanting things was a form of inconvenience, and many of them still apologize before asking for anything as adults

My mother had a way of saying it that made the words feel like a closing door. Not angry—never angry. Just this particular flatness in her voice, the way you'd describe weather that wasn't going to change. We can't afford that. She'd say it at the grocery store when I reached for the cereal with the cartoon on the box. She'd say it when the Scholastic book fair flyer came home in my backpack. She'd say it at Sears when I stood too long in front of something I hadn't even asked for yet. I was maybe seven the first time I realized I could save everyone the trouble by simply not reaching.

That was forty years ago. I'm sixty-seven now. And last Tuesday, at a restaurant with my daughter, I caught myself saying "I'm fine with water" before she'd even opened the menu—not because I didn't want the iced tea, but because something old and deep in me still calculates the cost of wanting things out loud.

The Economics of Desire

There's a difference between being poor and being taught that your desires are a problem. Plenty of families navigate tight budgets without turning a child's wants into evidence of their own failure. But in households where money was a source of shame—where scarcity wasn't just a condition but an identity—something more complicated got passed down than financial literacy.

Children in those homes learned to read the room before they learned to read books. They watched their parents' faces at the checkout line. They noticed which envelopes got opened immediately and which sat on the counter for days, face down, like they were sleeping. They learned the particular silence that followed the phrase we can't afford that—the silence that meant the conversation was over, and also that you'd done something faintly wrong by starting it.

Research on childhood economic stress by Rand Conger and colleagues has shown that financial strain doesn't just affect what families can buy—it reshapes the emotional climate of the entire household, altering how parents interact with children and how children come to understand their own needs. The mechanism isn't purely material. It's relational. When parents feel ashamed about what they can't provide, that shame leaks into how they respond to a child's request. And the child doesn't learn "we don't have enough money right now." The child learns "my wanting things causes pain."

That's a profoundly different lesson.

The Apology Before the Ask

You can spot us in adulthood if you know what to look for. We're the ones who say "I'm sorry to bother you" before asking a waiter for more napkins. We're the ones who preface every request with a disclaimer—it's not a big deal, don't go out of your way, only if it's not too much trouble. We shrink the ask before we make it, because somewhere deep in the architecture of our nervous system, asking for something still feels like placing a burden on someone who's already carrying too much.

I taught high school English for thirty-two years. During that time I watched thousands of students, and I could almost always tell which ones had grown up hearing some version of we can't afford that. They were the kids who wouldn't take seconds at the class potluck. The ones who said "never mind" the moment they sensed hesitation. The ones who, when offered a choice, always picked the cheaper or smaller option—not out of preference, but out of a habit so old it felt like personality.

I recognized them because I was one of them. And the hardest part of getting older hasn't been the knees or the reading glasses. It's been admitting I'd spent decades not wanting anything for myself—and realizing that wasn't discipline. It was damage.

When Frugality Becomes a Cage

I want to be careful here, because I'm not interested in villainizing my parents. My mother worked the register at a fabric store. My father drove a truck for a regional dairy. They weren't withholding—they were overwhelmed. And the phrase we can't afford that was, in its own way, an attempt at honesty. They were trying to prepare us for a world that, in their experience, didn't hand things to people like us.

But honesty without tenderness does something particular to a child. Studies on parental emotional socialization suggest that it's not the content of what parents say about money that shapes children most, but the emotional tone attached to it. A parent who says "that's not in our budget this month, but let's put it on the list" sends a fundamentally different message than a parent who says "we can't afford that" with a jaw clenched tight enough to crack a walnut. The first acknowledges the desire and offers a framework. The second—often unintentionally—communicates that the desire itself was the problem.

And children are extraordinary pattern-recognizers. They don't need many repetitions before they internalize: wanting things makes things worse.

So they stop wanting. Or—more precisely—they stop showing that they want. The desire doesn't disappear. It just goes underground, where it curdles into something harder to name. Guilt, maybe. Or a low-grade unworthiness that follows you into every department store, every salary negotiation, every moment someone offers you something nice and you hear yourself say, reflexively, "Oh, you didn't have to do that."

The Body Keeps the Budget

My late husband Richard—God rest his stubborn soul—grew up in a family that was comfortable. Not wealthy, but comfortable. And one of the things that baffled him about me, all forty-one years of our marriage, was the way I'd freeze at a restaurant when he said "order whatever you want." He thought he was being generous. He was. But that phrase—whatever you want—activated something in me that had nothing to do with the present moment. It sent me back to the kitchen on Prospect Street, where wanting the wrong thing at the wrong time could shift the weather of an entire evening.

Research on adverse childhood experiences and adult somatic responses has shown that early emotional stress can become encoded in the body's threat-response system. It's not that I was afraid of Richard. It's that my nervous system had learned, decades before I met him, to treat desire as a form of exposure. Wanting something meant making yourself visible. And visibility, in a household taut with financial stress, meant risk.

I think about this sometimes when I watch my grandchildren ask for things with such gorgeous directness. Can I have this? I want that one. Grammy, will you buy me the purple one? They haven't learned yet that wanting is supposed to come with a preamble. They haven't been taught to build a case before stating a need. And every time I say yes—every time I hand over the purple one without a lecture about money—I feel something in me repair, just a little.

What We Carried Into Every Room

The thing about growing up this way is that it doesn't stay contained to money. That's what people miss. They think we can't afford that produces adults who are careful with finances. And sure, some of us are. But what it really produces are adults who are careful with themselves—who move through the world pre-apologizing, pre-minimizing, making themselves as low-maintenance as possible so no one ever has to feel the particular discomfort of telling them no.

We become the friend who always says "I'm easy" when the group is picking a restaurant. The partner who says "I don't need anything for my birthday" and means it in a way that should concern everyone. The employee who doesn't negotiate the salary because asking for more feels like asking for too much—and too much was always the cardinal sin in our childhood homes. If you feel uncomfortable when people spend money on you, this is probably why. It's not humility. It's a survival strategy that outlived the emergency.

I spent years thinking I was just "low-maintenance." My daughter, who has a therapist's number on speed dial and no patience for euphemism, once told me: "Mom, you're not low-maintenance. You just taught yourself to need nothing so nobody could disappoint you." She was thirty-four when she said that. I was sixty-two. And she was right in the way that only your own child can be right about you—with love and a knife at the same time.

The Slow Work of Wanting Again

I'm not going to pretend there's a clean resolution to this. Sixty-seven years of practiced self-erasure doesn't unwind because you read an article or buy yourself flowers one Tuesday. But I've noticed something shifting in the years since Richard passed. Without someone else's generosity to deflect, I've had to sit with my own desires in a new way. What do I actually want? Not what's practical, not what's reasonable, not what's the least inconvenient option—but what do I want?

It's a harder question than it sounds. When I asked my father what he regretted most at eighty-two, his answer wasn't about money or career. It was about all the things he wanted to say and didn't, all the things he wanted to do and talked himself out of. He'd been raised on the same kitchen-table economics I had. He'd learned the same lesson: be grateful for what you have and stop looking at what you don't.

Gratitude is important. I believe that. But gratitude weaponized against desire isn't gratitude—it's a muzzle. And psychological research on self-determination theory by Deci and Ryan has long established that the ability to identify and pursue one's own desires isn't selfishness. It's a fundamental component of well-being. When that capacity gets shut down in childhood—when wanting is consistently met with shame, frustration, or the panicked arithmetic of not-enough—it doesn't just affect your relationship with money. It affects your relationship with yourself.

These days I'm practicing something small. When someone asks what I want—at a restaurant, at a birthday, on an ordinary Wednesday—I try to answer honestly before the apology arrives. I try to notice the impulse to shrink the ask. I try to say the iced tea, please like it's not a confession.

It sounds ridiculous, I know. A sixty-seven-year-old woman learning to order a drink without guilt. But some of the people who loved us most had no idea what they were teaching us. My parents loved me. They also taught me that I was safest when I was smallest. Both things are true. And learning to hold both—without forgiving too quickly or blaming too easily—might be the most complicated budget I've ever had to balance.