I came across Laura Grace Weldon's article Five Ways Frugal Living Benefits Kids and she talks us through a very compelling five reasons why forgoing expensive life and child-raising bells and whistles is good for our families, namely their littlest members. Her article asserts among other things that living “with less” simply makes us and our children happier.
“How? We recognize that a sense of well-being depends on intangible qualities like warm interpersonal relationships, reasonable autonomy in one’s choices, exactly those things that money can’t buy… Studies show that happiness has much more to do with experiences than with possessions.”
I loved reading this entire article, feeling that the choices my partner and I are making for our new arrival both incidentally and purposefully support a frugal parenting model. We both independently chose to leave our good-paying full-time corporate jobs to live simpler, more fulfilling lives and the rewards we are reaping by way of more time with each other and for our artistic pursuits, as well as flexibility in where we live and how we travel, will be a blessing to our child, as well. These benefits make the financial challenges worth it to us, challenges that are minimized by our own chosen minimalistic lives.
