Question: I’ve worked hard all my life to give my kids everything they could ever want, maybe because I grew up poor. I didn’t finish school, but I wanted my kids to go to college. Now my oldest son is a junior in high school. He is very smart, but he doesn’t really care about school, and even if I take things away like his game boy and his Wii, it doesn’t matter. I want him to have a good job some day, but at the rate he is going, it doesn’t look like he is going to.
Anne Fenton, MD: You are describing a problem of motivation. Unfortunately, many kids today have so many toy that they don’t care about any of them. Appreciation seems to be a thing of the past. It sounds to me like your son may not need a therapist as much as a father to help him appreciate the value of all those material things, not by giving him more and more, but by taking all of it away and starting from scratch. Think how you developed the kind of motivation that enabled you to afford all those things for your kids. It wasn’t by having more than you needed, but needing more than you had.