Here is a short clip of Trevor Noah talking about promising his mom he would be rich so he can buy "two" (things from the menu I guess) and buy desert. He basically says they were poor and did takeout about once a month and trying to pick the one thing he wanted off the menu was such a big decision and very stressful, so he decided he would get rich enough to buy whatever food he wanted.
He doesn't say how old he was when this conversation occurred. I'm inferring he was fairly young, like four years old.
That's not really poverty. That's probably developmental and has nothing to do with budget. He kind of retconned that after he grew up.
When my oldest was two years old and I was pregnant with his brother, we were living in Germany and the American military grocery store was kind of kitty-corner across the street and I was in a third floor walk up. I think the grocery store was open six days a week and I typically went grocery shopping every single day it was open. I've talked some about that before.
We never had a lot of money but we weren't really poor. But I'm walking to the grocery store under circumstances where driving doesn't do much because the store is so close and whether I drive or not, I need to climb three flights of stairs with him while pregnant and carrying everything I bought.
There's no advantage to going once a week and having to carry groceries up the stairs from the car ten times in one afternoon. I don't want to leave my two year old alone in the apartment for that. I don't want to lock him in the car. I don't want to do a grocery marathon like that while pregnant and possibly lose the baby or induce labor.
He's two and we're shopping and he's doing what toddlers do and excitedly asking for anything he sees that he wants for two nanoseconds. So he does that and I stick it in the cart. And we go down another aisle and he does that and I stick it in the cart.
So we go down another aisle and he does that and I tell him "You can only have two. If you want THIS, one of those needs to go back."
It had nothing to do with money. This was about carrying capacity. I needed to get this home plus his diapers, food to make dinner etc etc.
He was overwhelmed. Oh. My. God. Asking him to decide what he wanted and limiting it to two was so stressful and I could see this was breaking his little brain.
It continued to be stressful for some time. This repeated regularly for some weeks or months because he's not good with numbers and he routinely asked for a third item and then got told "You can have this if you really want it but one of the others has to go back." And he would seize up with a blue screen of death moment when again faced with having to decide.
But he learned a lot about decision making. He learned to pick one thing he knew he would eat and one thing he was curious about but didn't know if he would like it. He learned to pick one that would last a few days and one that would be gone immediately.
And money was not part of the equation. I NEVER told him this was a budgetary issue and I never told him it was too expensive and I never had him compare prices.
This was entirely about carrying capacity for his pregnant mom and later his mom with a newborn strapped to her chest and a backpack for the groceries and I was highly likely to have him on my shoulders going home because he was a little hellion who thought it was enormous fun to run away from his pregnancy-impaired mother and go to the playground behind the apartment and start playing in the sand until I could catch up to him.
He didn't run off too many times before it just became policy to simply give him no such opportunity even if to other people it maybe seemed like it would be easier for a pregnant woman to hold her child's hand instead of piling his weight onto my shoulders on top of everything else.
If YOUR kid is easier to control than mine, good for you. Mine probably had undiagnosed oppositional defiant disorder and has half my genes, so I know where he got some of that, and I'm trying to keep him safe while not training him to defacto have a raft load of nasty habits that will make him unwelcome everywhere forever.
And carrying him on top of everything else was the lesser evil. (I typically held his hand going to the grocery store because he typically didn't run off at that time. But add in groceries and he knows I have no hope of catching him.)
So the restrictions he had while grocery shopping weren't about poverty and he found it stressful because he was two years old and that's a lot of cognitive load for a two year old. And he learned a lot that most kids never have the opportunity to learn.
So Trevor Noah should maybe be telling people "I'm rich because my mother allowed me to practice meaningful decision making from an early age and it was a huge growth experience and I highly recommend it for all parents trying to raise future adults who can actually successfully run their lives."
And I'm guessing he was a skinny little kid who got enough to eat but not enough to be fat and she's thrilled he can buy dessert and develop a pot belly because I'm a mom and my oldest son was underweight as a child due to a medical condition, not poverty, and I pointed out his pot belly when he finally got one because I'm happy he's healthy. It's got nothing to do with being critical or fat phobic.