Lost in Neverland

A recent New York Times article chronicled the plights of American families who feel compelled to go into debt to offer their children—or themselves—regular Disney vacations. The feature led off with a Connecticut couple in their late 30s who earn $250,000 a year but had to pile up debt to take their first child, age 2, for the Disney experience that had been an annual ritual for them since 2015. We should not judge anyone too harshly based on a Times profile, but there are several problems with this picture.

As poster children for the DINK (“double income no kids”) lifestyle until age 34, this couple seem, like Peter Pan, determined to never grow up, chasing a fairy-tale world of perpetual youth and the habits of hand-to-mouth consumption that go with it. Their son, too young to ever remember any of this experience, appears merely as a prop for his parents’ vain quest to relive their own childhoods. In this, he is far from alone.

As birth rates plunge in America and worldwide, one would expect a theme park designed almost entirely around children to see steadily sagging revenues. Instead, after a temporary COVID-19 hit, revenue from Disney’s theme parks surged to a record $32.5 billion in 2023. Even as fewer children visit its parks every year, Disney has succeeded in getting more of its guests to think of themselves like children, charging extra for those without the patience to wait in line. And as Americans have fewer and fewer children, they seem determined to spend even more on those they do have; witness the fact that rising Christmas spending has significantly outpaced inflation since 2009, even as the number of children in each home has decreased.

It’s not hard to see that these trends are closely connected. Our declining birth rates testify to a society that has lost any faith in or care for the future and is determined to live in the present, a credit card lifestyle of “spend now and figure it out later.” But since the present passes away in an instant, it can never satisfy, leaving us yearning after its departed shadow, the past. More and more, American adults, trapped in childlike habits of immediate impulse gratification, seek to prolong or relive their childhoods and defer their own childbearing. When they do have kids, they are tempted to try and live vicariously through them, smothering their children in love measured chiefly in dollar signs. These children, in turn, spoiled from before they can remember, are liable to grow up as infantilized “kidults” who will repeat and deepen the cycle.

Clearly, these trends are bad news for our civilization, but it is also worth noting that they are also bad news for our market economy. Free-market theory is premised on the assumption that every consumer is a rational actor, making decisions that will maximize his or her self-interest over the long haul. This assumption, of course, has always involved some wishful thinking, but it worked well enough as an approximation as long as most consumers were adults and behaved like adults. With the advent of television and then the internet, however, companies were able to start marketing aggressively to children, thus earning outsized profits from pre-rational consumers. At the same time, as more and more adults have been conditioned to immediate impulse gratification, they also can be suckered into irrational spending habits, further distorting market incentives.

The New York Times article dutifully offers sage advice from personal finance expert Rachel Cruze (daughter of the well-known guru Dave Ramsey), who admonishes, “If you don’t have the money, and you charge it, then that vacation follows you home for the next few months.” However, nostalgia is a powerful drug, and for a society increasingly conditioned to live like there’s no tomorrow, the lure to escape to Neverland is likely to be stronger than any reminders about the power of compound interest.