I’ve been thinking a lot about a post I read from the blog Barefoot Five. The post was published in November, but, even though I’ve followed the blog for about a year, I only read this particular post for the first time a couple weeks ago. It is entitled “My Kid is a Brat” and details the family’s move from giving their kids everything they wanted to a more simple life and why they made this change.
The timing of when I first read this post is crucial to why it has stuck in my mind. I read it mid-January, just after the holiday chaos had subsided. I have a love/hate relationship with Christmas. Actually, I think it is more accurate to say that I have a love relationship with Christmas and a hate relationship with what some people make the holiday out to be. To many people it is all about expensive gifts and getting the biggest and best toy. They pay lip-service to “holiday spirit” and may even donate a toy or some money to charity, but the most important thing is gifts for themselves and close family members. If their not thinking about the expensive gift they will receive, their minds are occupied withe the task of giving just the right gift that proves (according to the monetary value of the gift) how much they love the recipient. The most intriguing part to me is that those who are the most selfish materialistic driven people during this time tend to be adults not children. (Sometimes I’m amazed at much better behaved children are than adults; it’s like their born with traits that we condition out of them until they’re just as nasty as we have become.)
I don’t have kids of my own, but I do get to be aunt to some pretty awesome kids, both my biological nieces and my “adopted” nieces and nephew. Because of the kids in my life, I get to see two very different parenting approaches. Now, because I am not a parent myself and I have no formal training in childhood psychology beyond Intro Psych, I realize that what I can say about better or worse parenting styles is limited. However, I think that even without being an expert in child development a person can recognize some things that work and others that don’t when it comes to children’s behavior.
My adopted nieces received expensive gifts for Christmas. This is also common for their birthdays. Their parents are by no means well off. In fact, they barely make it by and often have to forgo many things because they can’t afford them. But when it comes to holidays they spend amazing amounts of money relative to what they normally spend on their kids. This is, in part, due to the fact the my friend (the mother of the children in question) believes that these special experiences are essential to a good childhood.
In a way, I agree with her. I think that a parent should strive to make memorable experiences for their children because, in the end, that’s what most use as an indicator of the good and bad past in their lives. However, I disagree with the idea that good memories are made by having every want supplied. This is exactly what my friend thinks: that good childhood memories are produced by parents who give their children all they could ever want…or at least what is possible for the parent to supply. If her children ask Santa for a specific gift, she feels she has no choice but to get it for them because if they don’t get it, their holiday will be ruined and all they’ll remember when they are grow is how bad their lives were. She even told me that her and her husband had a talk with the kids about “not asking for expensive gifts” because when they do “Santa doesn’t have enough money to get other kids gifts.” Notice how other kids suffer, but her kids are never told they can’t have what they ask for. That is what causes me to wince. The lesson learned is “You can have whatever you want. Sure, someone somewhere that you don’t know might have to suffer but not you” instead of “Sometimes you don’t always get what you want and that’s okay.”
My sister raises her kids in a much different way. They don’t get big extravagant gifts. Part of this is because they are younger than my friend’s kids, but another reason for this is that my sister and her husband are careful about their finances so that my sister is able to work as little as possible and eventually stay home with the kids. Plus, my sister realizes that children are pretty happy when they get anything special, even if it isn’t the most expensive state-of-the-art device. My niece gets just as excited about getting a balloon to play with as she does for a toy that lights up and makes noise.
When I was growing up, my family didn’t have much money. Most holidays were modest affairs. I don’t feel like I missed much, and, in fact, I’m grateful that I had a childhood where I didn’t get everything I wanted. I learned that things couldn’t give me happiness. I learned that people were more important than the physical things I got from them. I have great memories of my childhood and few of them include any gifts that I received.
As a became a teenager and young adult, I found myself surrounded by more individuals who came from families better off financially than mine. One thing stuck out to me: so often they would complain that they never got anything nice or how terrible their parents were because they wouldn’t buy them something. These individuals received many more luxuries that I didn’t because my parents couldn’t afford them. They took piano lessons or dance lessons, had their own computers, or had their first car given to them. These were not things my parents could afford, although they would have loved to give them to me.
Hearing how much more these kids wanted when they already had so much more than me made me realize that I should be thankful for what I had. We didn’t have much growing up, but I never went hungry or had no where to live. I had a family who loved me and amazing experiences with them. Sure, we never went to Disneyland, but I didn’t really miss it that much. And today I hope that if I ever have kids I raise them to be grateful for what they have.
Some Things are Random 