Wealth & Money Quote by Barbara Coloroso

Coloroso’s line lands like a corrective to a culture that treats convenience as a parenting style. The blunt premise - kids who “don’t want for anything” won’t save - isn’t nostalgia for harder times so much as a warning about incentives. If every desire is pre-approved and instantly financed, money stops being a limited resource and becomes a parental atmosphere: always on, quietly managed, invisible. You can’t teach budgeting in a world where the budget never appears.

The intent is practical, but the subtext is moral. “Need” versus “want” is doing heavy lifting here, drawing a boundary that many families feel is impolite to enforce. Coloroso reframes that boundary as an obligation, not a deprivation. That’s a shrewd rhetorical move: it denies the common guilt narrative (“If I say no, I’m failing”) and replaces it with a competence narrative (“If I say yes to everything, I’m failing”). She’s also speaking to parents’ desire to be liked; calling wants “a special gift” preserves generosity while stripping it of entitlement.

Context matters: this is classic financial-socialization thinking filtered through modern consumer pressure, where kid-targeted marketing and one-click purchasing make “want” feel urgent and “no” feel like conflict. Coloroso’s prescription is less about money than agency. Saving isn’t just a technique; it’s a rehearsal for delayed gratification, for tolerating discomfort, for making trade-offs. By insisting kids can “save their money for it,” she’s quietly arguing that self-control is a learned skill - and that parents don’t teach it by removing every reason to practice.