Do you think they need as much of the "things" as parents seem to feel obligated to provide for them now? There is no need for this false dichotomy of "things" or "complete lack of things".
As I've commented on here before, I and a lot of the people I know seem to have gone through childhoods where the parents believed this trade-off was really binary. I got it less than many people, but I still would have liked to see my parents, and their parents as well, not suffer through existence so much because of "needs" they thought we had. The only reason they thought we had those needs is because all the other parents in the neighborhood reinforced that children have those needs by catering to their own children thusly. It almost seems like the same force that drives parents to obsess about the safety of their children. They don't want to seem like the parent who cares the least.
The problem is that the goalposts you allude to in a higher-level comment are defined by this mechanism. I agree that goals will change -- any life change will result in resetting of goals --, but I think we absolutely suck as a collective on evaluating where those goals ought to reset to, and just let blind oneupmanship against other families guide us to local maxima.
Your comments ring very true to me. My father decided he'd rather stay in a relatively low chemical engineering job rather than push up the corporate latter into a black tie management position. As a result my friends all had much nicer toys and bigger houses, but they rarely saw their parents. On top of that my friend's parents never seemed happy, ever. Whereas my father has always been one of the happiest people I know. Throughout my highschool years he'd tell me stories almost nightly of something interesting he'd done that day. Now that I'm older and nearing the end of my own degree I have no doubt I'll keep the same perspective: stick with doing what you love no matter how much you make off of it.
- I should clarify that we didn't live anywhere near poverty. My father wasn't putting us in a bad situation to keep the job he loved. We were just significantly lower than the people around us, and as a result he didn't have many friends among his peers (by that I mean parents in our suburb) because they looked down on him. So that situation may not have any real bearing on this discussion since he didn't seem to be facing a hard decision: give up the respect of a bunch of career pushing suits or hate his life and his job, hmmm.
