VISTA, Calif. — When my 17-year-old daughter, Cassandra, got her driver's license a year ago, she wanted to know when she was "going to get my own car?" I was surprised and demanded to know where it was written that "you get a car when you get a driver's license."

She was genuinely disappointed. After all, the senior parking lot at our suburban San Diego high school brims with luxury cars — belonging to the students.

When my American husband left us, my father sold a piece of land back in our Nigerian village, and sent me a check with this note: "Single parent or not, if you bungle raising those children, nothing else you do will have mattered. ..."

I took those words advisedly and determined to raise courteous, confident, and contented kids, just as I had been raised in Africa. Not self-indulgent, self-absorbed young adults like those you see on TV or the ones hanging out in malls across America.

Although I shopped at thrift stores when my kids were little, I made sure they had everything they needed and sometimes more. I kept the family finances private, except to let them know we were struggling just like the next family. And in order to ensure that my kids appreciate what we have, I occasionally took them to volunteer at homeless shelters and soup kitchens.

And yet, to hear "When am I getting my own car?" made it seem as if I was raising the stereotypical, overindulged American teenagers who have developed an inordinate sense of entitlement.

Of course, it wasn't just the car. Many of Cassandra's classmates spent spring break this year in Puerto Vallarta, and her best friend got a $1,200 Louis Vuitton handbag for her birthday.

So because Cassandra is a very high-achieving child — an early high school graduate with a 4.7 GPA, a star track athlete, and the president, vice president, and secretary of a few of her high school clubs — I thought I'd up the stakes.

Rather than using timeworn cliches about money not growing on trees, rights versus privileges, or the "When I was growing up in Africa" line, I decided to take the children home for Christmas.

The way that news hit, you'd have thought I'd just grounded my 12-year-old, Blake, for two weeks: What did I do? Africa, the Dark Continent; the jungle. I don't wanna catch AIDS, sleep in mud huts with goats and hens. "No way!" he replied. Blake would rather have had a new skateboard for Christmas. Cassandra was at once apprehensive and excited.

This bottom-of-the-world view of Africa came as much from the media as it did from me. All our old clothes were saved up for the "naked children in Africa." All the leftover food could "feed 10 slowly starving children in Africa." Didn't do the dishes, eh? Off with you to Grandma in the village where you'd have to wake up, walk two miles to the stream to do the dishes, fetch water, walk back — all before the cock crows — and then work in the farms until roosting time. There was, of course, a bit of truth in those mock threats — and seeing it firsthand would change their lives.