Growing Up in a Recession

By Susan Berfield

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Parents, kids—we're all being stress tested these days. If talking to children about finances and our working lives was complicated before, now it is fraught with anxiety. Some parents are including the kids as they rethink their careers; others are trying to keep up the appearance of stability. Here are the stories of three families grappling with the disruptions and constraints of the Great Recession.

Reinvention Jitters
Adria Pearl-Belport carefully chose the moment for the talk. She and her 13-year-old daughter, Justine, were in her Lexus SUV on the way to a shop in Westport, Conn., one weekend in January when she told Justine about the unexpected and seemingly irreversible decline of her marketing firm, Van Pearl Associates. Bear Stearns, her biggest client, had collapsed months earlier; since then, other financial service firms had become wary of spending money on the promotional MP3 players and tote bags and polo shirts Adria had been creating for them over the years. She didn't know it at the time, but soon much of that branded merchandise would become downright gauche. AIG (AIG) umbrella, anyone? "It wasn't possible to recover quickly," Adria, 54, says. "This is not a good time to make cold calls. It's not even a good time to make warm calls. There's a very fine line between being present for clients and being annoying. I had decided to move on."

Adria told Justine she would reinvent herself as an agent of sorts, helping authors, consultants, and others brand themselves. Her daughter was skeptical. "I told her she couldn't change, that she didn't have enough connections to be an agent," says Justine. "I was kind of rude. I was nervous that she wouldn't do well." Adria, who has been raising Justine alone since her husband died eight years ago, was taken aback. "I wanted her to know that stressful financial situations need to be handled in a thoughtful way," Adria says. "She was very invested in my success. And she used to rummage through the merchandise I had in my office. She hated the idea that her life might change."

It has, though perhaps not as dramatically as Justine imagined. She's still going to summer camp in Maine. That's big. But she has to be more careful about what she buys, and her favorite café in Westport went out of business. The most distressing part of this new reality is that her mother had to cut back the number of hours her assistant, Sarah, works. Justine is very close to Sarah. "I come to the office a lot," says Justine. "I was really upset at first. Then Mom said I can call her and keep up on Facebook."

Now that Adria does have a few clients for her new business, Justine is feeling better. Adria is pitching herself as an experienced marketer who can use social media to help people promote themselves. Justine helped her figure out Facebook and Twitter. Afterward, Adria suggested Justine could make some money by offering other parents an introduction to Facebook. Justine thought that was a little weird. She might babysit on weekends instead.

An Upside to Downsizing
Nicole Tamson, a 40-year-old real estate broker in the privileged enclave of La Jolla, Calif., felt anxiety set in almost 18 months ago. As 2008 began, potential buyers of the multimillion-dollar homes she listed were hesitating, and then deals started to fall apart. By March there was no business at all. She didn't sell another house until almost a year later: it was in foreclosure, and her commission was $2,000.

The recession has been one long reckoning with expectations for Nicole and her two kids, Maguire, 8, and Payton Grace, 5. Nicole had been earning more than $250,000 a year for nearly a decade. She rented a posh three-bedroom condo with a yard. The beach was nearby. They traveled. It was a good life.

As Nicole's savings dwindled, she worked for friends off and on and even rented her apartment out on the weekends her kids stayed with their father. By June she had to let the nanny go.

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