My Son Spends a Lot of Time With My Well-Off Family. I’m Not Sure It’s a Good Idea.

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Care and Feeding is Slate’s parenting advice column. Have a question for Care and Feeding? Submit it here .

I am a single mother to my son, “Jake” (age 10). Jake and I live in a cramped two-bedroom apartment. I do my best to provide for him, but given my current circumstances, I can’t provide a lot. Jake knows we are poor. It would be pointless to try to hide this fact of life from him.

My brother “Edward” and his wife live in the same metropolitan area we do, but in a wealthier suburb. Edward is a lawyer, his wife is an optometrist, and together they are quite well off, especially compared to us. Edward’s daughters are similar in age, and they get along well with Jake. In fact, Jake often refers to them as his sisters. Edward often invites Jake to join them on family outings and vacations. I often have to work on Saturdays, so I’m not often available to join them. I probably see Edward and his family no more than once a month, but Jake is with them once a week, and more often than that during the summer. Edward has also paid for Jake to attend the same summer camps as his cousins.

Jake has started making poignant comparisons between our life and his Uncle Edward’s and his family. He notices that the meals we eat at home are plain and very simple—”struggle meals,” some might call them—and that we rarely eat out, while when he’s with Edward, they cook more elaborate meals or order in. Jake notices differences in the decor of our cramped apartment and the appliances we have as opposed to what’s inside Edward’s three-story house. I am truly glad that Jake is getting experiences he otherwise wouldn’t have. But I’m also worried he’s becoming resentful about what I provide versus his uncle. There have started to be hints (from Jake himself, who says he hasn’t asked Edward and his wife about it) that next school year Jake might stay at Edward’s house and come home on weekends, so that Jake can go to a well-funded suburban middle school and not the school in our district.

Is it too much for me to start putting boundaries on his interaction with my brother, or should I foster it more? Am I just too sensitive/prideful, ashamed at how much I contribute to his life versus his uncle? I feel really conflicted about what to do, particularly about the school situation.

When you say Jake has begun to “notice” the differences between life at home and life at Uncle Edward’s, I imagine you mean that he has voiced this to you. If your 10-year-old son is pointing out these differences, he is giving you the opportunity to have a difficult, but absolutely necessary, conversation about money, resources, economic inequality, and economic realities. Jake is not too young for you to talk to him frankly about your economic circumstances and Edward’s. Of course, you could have had (and can have!) this conversation with your son without his observations paving the way toward it.