A letter to her daughter

A few days ago, there was a post in the Huffington Post Parenting Blog where a mother is writing a letter to her 8 year old daughter explaining why she works.  Apparently, her daughter was giving her the guilt trip.  There was one line from this post that struck me:

I work because this nice house and those gymnastics lessons and those sneakers you need to have are all made possible by two incomes.

See, I wonder if that nice house and new sneakers, etc are more something the mom would want her daughter to have.  It's our materialistic, keeping up with the Joneses mentality...consume, consume...