ENDING THOSE POSITIONAL ARMS RACES? Both Joanne Jacobs and Number 2 Pencil have had some fun with a recent Newsweek article on collective action undertaken by parents to tame the materialistic interests of their kids. Here's Ms. Jacobs:

The parents need a support group? What wimps!

When my daughter said, "I want" too much, her father would sing, "You can't always get what you want" till she begged him to stop. I just made it clear that nagging, whining and sulking never would be effective strategies. Keep asking and what you get is a mean, crabby mother.

Dr. Swygert's reaction is similar:

One of the best child-rearing skills is the ability to act crabbier, crazier, and more annoying than a whiny kid. The image of Joanne's daughter being driven mad by a father warbling old Rolling Stones tunes is just hysterical - not to mention effective.

The article made for some interesting reading on the return flight from London. The problem contemporary parents face, the article points out, arises from a combination of their current prosperity and their memories of less-affluent parents with their own recollections of depression and world war. My parents would react to any claim by me or my siblings that "everybody did X (or had X)" with the challenge: name three. In those days, we generally couldn't name three. These days, it's apparently easy to name three.

In the heat of this buying blitz, even parents who desperately need to say no find themselves reaching for their credit cards. Kechia Williams is a 32-year-old single mother of five who works as a custodian at Emory University in Atlanta. She rises at 4 a.m. to get to work at 6 in order to make $9 an hour. She has to work overtime to pay for basics like new school clothes and supplies. And yet, her children do demand and often get costly gifts. The oldest boys, Darryl, 15, and Kwentavius, 12, have a PlayStation 2 and several games that cost $60 apiece that they play on a big-screen TV. "They're always begging for brand names—FUBU, Polo, Tommy, Gucci, Nike—especially the ones the rappers are talking about," says Williams. "I constantly have to remind them my paycheck will go only so far," she says. "But that doesn't stop them from wanting it. The stuff is all over the TV, and the videos, then some of the other kids have it." Williams knows how they feel; she had very little growing up. "I can see it in their eyes sometimes, how bad they want something, and I want to get it for them."

It helps to be able to set limits and live within one's means.

Jenn Andrlick, a 23-year-old editorial assistant in New York, describes herself as a recovering "spoiled brat." As a child in Omaha, she says, she regularly manipulated her hardworking parents into fulfilling her every whim—special toys, dance lessons, fashionable clothes and a car. "I told them if they loved me, they'd get it for me," she recalls. Now, as a young adult perched precariously on the first rung of her career ladder, she's finding it impossible to live within her means and still relies on handouts from Mom and Dad. Once she was the envy of all her friends because "I always had more than anyone." But these days, she says, she envies her roommates who know how to stick to a budget. And her mother, Debbie Love, keeps asking herself if it might finally be time to "cut her off."

The talk of the extra pressures kids face today sometimes defies parody.

Families like the Villaverdes are in the minority. Few parents ask kids to do anything around the house because they think their kids are already overwhelmed by social and academic pressures; adding lawn mowing or laundry almost seems cruel. And who wants to nag a 12-year-old (for the fifth time) about taking out the garbage? "When parents have so little time with their kids," says Irene Goldenberg, a family therapist and professor emeritus at UCLA, "they don't want it to be filled with conflict." But kids who have no responsibilities never learn one of life's most basic lessons: that every individual can be of service to others and that life has meaning beyond one's own immediate happiness.

Why the parents have so little time the story doesn't tell us. Sometime's its broken families and the playing off of parent against parent ... a topic for another day? Sometimes it's work pressures ... but is the point of working to bring in more money to buy more toys? And when you put it all together, you do have a positional arms race in which parents literally don't know how to say "no" or how to compare notes with their neighbors.

But change doesn't come easily. The senior parking lot at Boulder's Fairview High School remains overrun with luxury cars, and many members of the most recent graduating class spent their spring break in Puerto Vallarta. Parents still feel they have a lot to learn about how to work with their neighbors to enforce the same values. At one network meeting, a woman raised her hand and requested that the speakers role-play what she should say if she called another parent to check on her kids. "I thought it was a joke," says Fran Raudenbush, a school administrator and a founder of the group. "But it wasn't. Parents are starving for information."

Cultural norms evolve, but that doesn't preclude people agreeing to give one set of norms -- perhaps less pressure on the kids and less indulgence -- precedence over another.