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I wrote last time about Larkin's clothes, imagining her as a 12-year-old and what she might wear. This got me onto the much larger topic of thinking about the future generally.

I've never been very good at it.

To me, the future has always been the least engaging panel in time's triptych. The past, I can cherish and scrutinize and preserve. The present I can enjoy. But the future is a blank. I've always marveled at people who fix on the future with a steady bead, pondering their five-year plan, their ten-year plan. I'm way too backward for that.

For her part, a 2-year-old has no past, a gargantuan present, and a future that she is wholly incapable of thinking about. That, of course, is what you have to do. I sometimes feel pretty inept. For instance, I'll be at the park with Larkin, talking with another toddler's mother, and she'll mention the early-childhood learning center at the nearby magnet school, and do we have Larkin on the list yet? I'll think, Gee, what kind of irresponsible parent am I? I'm just out here playing with my girl, having fun, when I should be planning her future! And I'll rush home and go online to find out more.

Thinking about the future invokes a whole array of decisions like that, about schools and neighborhoods, how to plan for college. Then there are the thoughts about what your child will be like in that future of hers. Sometimes you think you can see an advance ghost of the adult; but for the most part, the personality of a girl of two is very much still under construction. Consider Larkin during the course of a day: now throwing a tantrum, now cackling with laughter, mumbling a melody to herself, or coming up with some mysterious comment ("Mama, you are a tiny little girl who plays like a teacher!") that may be a penetrating insight — or simply inspired nonsense. Who knows what Larkin will be like fifteen years from now, when we can't even predict fifteen minutes from now?

So really the question is: What do we want for her? What kind of person do we hope she becomes? And what do we hope she doesn't become?

As a high school teacher, Molly sees a lot of kids and gets to know the lives they're living. The private school she teaches at isn't a particularly ritzy one, but we both marvel at the houses her students live in – the three-car garages and restaurant-quality kitchens, the glitzy furnishings, the sheer size. An explosion of wealth over the last two decades has pushed expectations upward in the American upper-middle-class. Some parents have absorbed their kids into a lux lifestyle where the $700 stroller gives way to the exclusive preschool and later the summer spent in Barcelona or Paris.

Of course, everyone wants the best for his child; but there's an insidious way in which wanting the best can morph into a kind of status competition. A good friend of mine says he felt chintzy, only spending $10,000 on his daughter's bat mitzvah. Another friend is taking his entire family on a two-week trip to Uganda. And nearly everyone seems to have a summer home somewhere.

I don't want to turn Larkin, or her life, into a kind of status appurtenance. Neither do I want her to be spoiled, or preoccupied by money and acquisition – or unduly pressured by it later on. The other day another friend updated me on his son, a recent Ivy League graduate trying to make his way as a journalist, and how the son's longtime girlfriend (and fellow Ivy Leaguer) apologetically broke the news to him that "I want to be rich." Then there was the girl from Molly's school, daughter of a successful businessman, who bridled at having to do 45 minutes of school cafeteria duty once a month. "Oooo, it's so gross!" she winced, as if she had never touched a dirty dish in her life, which probably she hasn't. That's not how we want Larkin to see things.

Sometimes I look ahead and see a big struggle. Not because of Larkin personally, but just because of the way things are in the culture today. Thirty-five years ago, when I was a kid, children were still barely on the map of marketing, money, and consumerism, but today they're right at the center. A gigantic apparatus of marketing will soon be taking aim at Larkin and attempting, as it were, to be her co-parent, shaping her hopes and desires, guiding the way her mind works. As I write this column – to post on a parenting website run by an entertainment and media corporation – I'm aware how hard it will be to keep the co-parent a little bit at bay.

In the end, we want Larkin to have advantages, of course, but not to feel or act, well, advantaged. So far, her material desires are simple, mostly unbranded, and easy to meet. She wants a balloon whenever she sees one, and an ice cream every time we walk to Elizabeth Park. Thanks to PBS, she doesn't see commercials when she watches Clifford the Big Red Dog and Curious George on TV. Far from being blasé about a trip to Europe, she's still thrilled by a walk over to see the ducks at the pond, where she stands pointing and shrieking in delight.

So Molly and I have time to strategize about helping her form an identity, and not merely a bunch of brand loyalties. Meanwhile, I'm trying to cool my long-term worry jets a little, keeping in mind Emerson's remark that the best preparation for the future is a well-tended present. As for Larkin, the only future that matters to her right now is what we're going to do in the next half hour. "Dada," she says, "I wanna go to Abby Park." (She names the different parks by this or that child she has met there.) "I wanna go to Abby Park and ride the swing!" And that's a plan I can handle.