I’ve written about this sort of vacation before, and I’ll write about the whole multi-generational family vacay again, I’m sure, but for now I bring it up because it was yet another chance for my boys to take in little tiny lessons about money. Specifically, the quarters they asked for so they could feed the machines in the game room and increase their stash of rubber bracelets, fake rings, and sticky frogs. As it was vacation, we were liberal with dips into our pockets for extra quarters after they ran out of the modest amount they extracted from their piggy banks at home.

But it was interesting to watch, especially as I’d just written a piece for the website DailyWorth.com about teaching small money lessons to kids. Not big teaching moments: we weren’t drawing up lessons about compound interest or how the Fed works (which I don’t always get myself). But little ones, like the value of a quarter, a dollar, a couple of bucks. Here’s what I wrote for DailyWorth:

I like to treat my five- and seven-year-old sons, but I don’t want them to believe Silly Bandz fall from heaven, or that my wallet is a magic dollar dispenser. So every time they troll the grocery store with me or get tempted by the snacks for sale at summer camp, I try to impart little money lessons—and they’re actually adding up.

• Dollars and sense. Candy and ice cream at day camp are usually a dollar or less, and my sons didn’t understand why I was reluctant to just hand over a buck or two. So I totted it up for them: $1 per boy, per day, comes to $10 a week. That number produced newfound respect for how much their snacks really cost. And respect is where responsible spending starts.
• Size matters. The other day, I tossed a loaf of raisin bread in the grocery cart, remarking that it cost $3.50 a loaf. My seven-year-old piped up: “The Subway sandwich at camp is $3.50.” Ding! “That’s one sandwich,” I said. “This is a whole loaf of bread—breakfast for you and your brother all week.” And he got it. I could see him mentally comparing the idea of all those breakfasts against a measly six-inch hero.
• No matter how you slice it… I sometimes let the kids buy pizza ($2 a slice)—but I usually stop them at one slice (they want more for competition’s sake with their friends, not because they’re hungry). I tell them: $2 may not be much money, but $4 is too much for a lunch they won’t finish, especially when I have perfectly good food at home. I have to repeat myself (often!), but the other day I heard my older son say to the little guy, “You don’t need two slices of pizza for lunch, you know.”

Of course, I get regular reminders that this is a big learning curve for them—and me. Yesterday was supposed to be Carnival Day at camp, and I gave the kids $5 for the games and activities. Well, the carnival was postponed due to bad weather, but guess who spent the $5 on candy anyway? Sigh. One step forward, two steps back.

Since the last time we went upstate to this particular resort, in those ancient, lovely mountains, we didn’t have a lot of things. We didn’t have, for example, the experience of my father undergoing (successful!) surgery for lung cancer. We also didn’t have my newest nephew, Nico, or know what college my older nephew Nicholas was going to. The point is, we’re growing, we’re changing, we’re together.

And we’re thrifty!

I’m pretty sure I knew that already. I mean, I knew it already because it’s not exactly new news (though the research Gopnik cites, some of it her own, from the University of California, Berkeley, where she’s a psychology professor, is new). I know that science has discovered amazing things about a baby’s inborn capabilities, and how those capabilities blow out of the water our previous beliefs about newborns–that they are basically inert lumps, taking in food from one end and pooping it out at the other, little more than  adorable amoeba. But I also knew it because I’ve seen my own babies at work, so to speak.

The first time I held James, my younger boy (well, maybe the second time; the first time, I was still numb from unwanted C-section surgery to remember much), I saw something familiar in his eyes. There was a knowing glint in those newborn eyes, I swear. “This one’s trouble,” I said to my husband later. James was sharp as a tack from the get-go, and he hasn’t let up since. Here he is, at two months (a different mom would claim he’s counting to one with that raised pinkie!):

My smart baby James. Just what is he planning in that elastic brain of his?

All of which makes me feel better about the fact that I haven’t tried all that hard in the intervening years to “boost” my babies’ learning.

The biggest example is, of course, Mommy & Me or Gymboree and other, similar classes meant to give babies a chubby leg up on a lifetime of learning. I didn’t do it. The only foray I made into that whole arena were a few free Mommy & Me-style classes at my local library, which I’ve mentioned before on this blog. I never really liked them much. The woman who ran the classes was a little too into the whole thing, for one; but more important, when it came to the craft portion of the session, she seemed to expect us moms to do the gluing and the folding and whatever, and I frankly am not into that kind of mom-directed art project stuff.

Mostly, I didn’t follow up on other classes because they didn’t fit into our schedule. At the time, we were new to our town, and I was working three days a week at my old editing job in the city (Daniel, then one, was home with a nanny). The baby and I had two weekdays together, and no car (the library happened to be in walking distance, or I wouldn’t have done that, either). We stuck close to home by necessity, but also by temperament — mine. I’ve never been a joiner. Also, though I can’t underestimate baby classes’ value for breaking up the tedium of life at home with a baby, I’ve always been skeptical of anyone who asserts that babies need them. At best, I find all those classes a crashing bore; at worst they felt like a replay of junior high, but with babies in tow. I never quite fit in; I wasn’t a full-time working mom or a stay-at-home mom, but a curious hybrid of both. (See what I mean about junior high? How would I find the right kind of friends? Easier to just avoid the whole thing.)

Gopnik makes the point in her piece (and the research bears this out) that babies and young children (say, under 4 or 5) can’t focus on just one thing, and that in fact, that’s not how they learn best. Their brains are elastic (I love that image!), filled with neuronal connections that allow them to explore and take in what their senses offer them with no preconceived ideas of how things should look, taste, react, feel or sound like. It’s all new, it’s all stimulating, and it’s all good. Even preschoolers aren’t really “learning” as much from the journal-keeping and flash-card-working that many of them do in school (or at home!). They’re learning by hanging around with their peers in the classroom, or with their siblings and parents back at home; by watching, by listening, and above all by playing.

Another Mean Mommy relief moment! My instinct (to not be a mommy-joiner; to not feel I have to get on the boost-baby’s-brain bandwagon; to do my own thing at home even if all I’m stimuating my child with is the sight of me folding towels or doing a Pilates DVD) was on target.

Gopnik mentions a famous experiment in which children and adults were asked to watch a video of two people tossing a ball back and forth, and count how many tosses they saw. Some time into the video, someone in a big gorilla suit walks slowly across the set. Guess who notices the gorilla and who remains focused on the counting task?

So I guess you can say by not doing more classes (and by using those insane Baby Einstein DVDs not as learning tools but as a mommy-needs-a-shower-break) I’m giving my kids a chance to see the many gorillas walking across the scene that they may otherwise have missed.

Do you think classes make your baby smarter?