A bad case of the “I wants”
D. has a bad case of the "I wants."
We don’t let him watch commercials (thank you TiVo), but he still manages to come up with a long list of toys he wants, drawn from things he’s seen at his friends’ houses, the catalogs included in every toy he gets, and his imagination.
A few of the things he wants are more expensive than I think any toy for a 4-year-old should cost, but most of them are quite cheap, well within what we could afford. But we don’t want him to learn that he gets everything he wants just by asking (and asking and asking and asking) for it. And our little townhouse is already being overrun by stuff, which builds up faster than we can get rid of it.
We let him write everything down on a list, but that doesn’t satisfy him for long. (It doesn’t help that his birthday is in January, so there’s a long dry period between gift-giving opportunities.) He’s starting to say "I don’t want to put it on the list. I just want to order it." We do a lot of our shopping online, so he thinks that’s how to get goodies to come.
We’re actually pretty frugal, and don’t buy all that much, but I realized that he doesn’t see all the fun toys that I drool over but don’t buy. I’m struggling with how to make this process more visible to him. It may be time to start him on an allowance, but I really think he ought to be able to count coins first.
Any suggestions?
April 11th, 2005 at 10:22 pm
What we do is just say, “well, we have other things to spend our money on.” Then when he asks, we say “well, food, and food for the cat, and clothes” and the other sort of necessary things that kids don’t think of as being things we “buy.” I read that somewhere where someone was talking about how to tell their kid that they *can’t afford* something, and I thought it was an excellent way of handling the problem in an upbeat way without making the kid worry about money. It works for us.
April 11th, 2005 at 11:16 pm
We’ve started a “one toy in…one toy out” rule that seems to be working well to quell some of the “I wants.” Some of them. Not all of them. Everytime we bring a new toy into the house, we select one nice gently-used toy to give to Seton House (a transitional housing program for women/kids) or Goodwill.
About once a month, I try to make a big deal out of a special shopping trip in which the kids pick out a brand new toy that we buy for a charity (Ronald Mcdonald house needs DVDs…The nursery at church needs puzzles…The children’s hospital needs teddy bears, etc, etc.)
I guess what we are stressing is that while it does feel really good to get a new toy – (and there is nothing wrong with that, we all want new toys) – it can also feel really good to give a new toy to a child who couldn’t otherwise afford it.
At least that is what we are trying. So far, it seems to be working.
Until my husband goes away on a long business trip. Then, it’s all about “If nobody has a tantrum in the grocery store, you can pick out a special treat at Target.” Bribery is the temporarily single parent’s best friend…
April 12th, 2005 at 1:50 am
I was about to add my standard “I don’t have children yet” disclaimer to my suggestion, but I see that Kristen has already posted the gist of it so I feel more validated as an advice rather than assvice giver if an actual parent agrees with me. 🙂
When I taught 7th grade in Arlington, I had a lot of students who had more possessions than I ever accumulated in my entire life added together. I shuddered to think of what a few of these 12 year olds would become as adults when they already had a sociopathic adult billionaire’s sense of entitlement…but as scared as I was by some of the budding conscienceless materialists in my classes, I was even more inspired by the kids who grew up with great wealth but seemed to have a deep appreciation and gratitude for what they had. (When I went to those kids houses, I often found that although they were wealthy, they actually had fewer toys and gadgets and clothes, too.)
Wondering how parents raised kids with that kind of appreciation, humility, and generosity, I asked one of the mothers of one of these great kids what she did to teach these values, and that was where I first heard the “one toy in, one toy out” idea.
She started doing this with her kids when they were pre-school age (not sure if that meant 2, 3, or 4 to her) at a birthday party for her first daughter. After 25 equally wealthy kids at the party had left her daughter with a mountain of toys that filled up her already ridiculously overflowing playroom, the mom quickly made two rules:
1. For every new toy or gift of special clothing her daughter wanted to keep, her daughter must share one of her toys with another child as a gift. She would tell her daughter about other little girls who didn’t have any toys of their own and asked her daughter to choose a toy from among her existing toys and clean it or otherwise “make it look new” to share with another little girl so this other girl could be happy on her birthday, too. This project ended up being a really fun task of picking out nice “gently used” toys and clothes that her daughter didn’t use anymore, a useful way of developing a ritual for saying goodbye to clothes that don’t fit anymore, too.
2. No new toys or gifts could be played with until her daughter had “written” thank-you notes to the giver. (Even before she could write! She would “dictate” the thank you to her mom, draw a picture, and “sign” it with the letters she knew from her name.)
As her kids grew up, they had to adapt the system to make sure it was emphasizing the focus on gratitude, appreciation, and sharing. Her daughter was a good kid, but she was no saint, and she quickly figured a few ways around the “system” – like “trading” a really expensive new gift with giving a way a broken toy or one that wasn’t really comperable (like a free toy from a Happy Meal or something) to charity, so her mom tried to teach her to “shop” in her toy chest for a gift for a girl that was a year younger than her. If she was 8 and got a great new toy, she was to shop for a toy that would have made her just as happy as she was with the new toy when she was 7 years old. That also reinforced the idea that it’s okay to “grow out of” some toys and share them with younger kids.
And sometimes it forced her daughter to make tough choices of giving up toys she still liked but that another girl might appreciate more — but the other thing it did was make her appreciate the toys she decided to keep, too.
The other thing she tried to wiggle around was the “you can’t play with it ’till you write a thank you”…of course she’d quickly write the thank you for her favorite toy, but that just made it easier to procrastinate writing the thank-yous for the things she didn’t really like and might never play with, so there was some tinkering of the rules. Over the years, if her daughter received gifts she didn’t like, the ritual of sharing gifts with charity also helped her daughter decide “another little girl might love this doll more than I could, since I already have three dolls, so I’ll share it” — but of course she still had to write a thank you note for it, too!
Anyway, you don’t need all the details, but the idea was to grow a habit of mind that fostered a deep sense of gratitude for abundance, and it seemed to work.
(On an embarrassing personal note, I never once wrote a thank you note as a child – neither did my mother — and it’s only in adulthood that I’ve tried to develop this habit. Hearing this “you can’t play with it ’till you thank the giver for it” idea from a mom really helped ME be better with thank you notes, too!)
I love Kristen’s idea of going on a special shopping trip for new toys for charity. I’ve really enjoyed the shopping I’ve done for anonymous needy families at Christmas (when you get a list of everyone’s ages and sizes) and I think that’s a delightful thing to do with a child.
April 12th, 2005 at 10:34 am
I don’t know the answer to this one. We do little things, like occasionally clear out a slew of toys and possessions, getting the kids’ (age 2 and 4) advice on what things are prized possessions to keep. Another little thing is spending tons of time playing with things that aren’t really toys — we tolerate loud noises from banging pots, or sofa cushions piled all over the living room, or plant water squirters that get their clothes all soaked over and over again on the back porch, or a basement full of cardboard box forts, magic markers and crayons everywhere. I like these games better than the toys that were marketed as toys. But little things may not be enough. We also have the kids watch zero TV, even children’s videos, and because they have grown up this way and have plenty of fun other things to do, they have never complained. We also spend a lot of time in a church community with lots of other parents who are raising children in a similar way, so our children have many friends who also don’t get all the toys they want. When we lived in DC, our friends in a babysitting coop served much the same role. We have greatly cut back Christmas and birthday toy giving. Also, as parents we try not to orient our own lives around grownup toys — ancient stereo in the living room, old beat up compact car in the driveway for our family of four. And with that whole list, I have no idea at all if this will still be working when the oldest is age 6. It’s working now.
April 12th, 2005 at 4:30 pm
This is something I really struggle with. My daughter is only 18 months old, but she has SO much stuff. (I really identified with Geeky Mom’s post about the endless boxes of stuff that come from the in-laws. There’s a similar entry in the annals of my own blog…)
One thing we are planning to do when our daughter gets older is to get back in the habit of volunteering at the local homeless shelter (Carpenter’s Shelter on Route 1). For about 2 years, my husband and I helped run “Children’s Activity Hour” a couple of Mondays a month. The kids at Carpenter’s are only allowed to play outside on the playground or in the playroom when volunteers come on Mondays and Thursdays. So access to the toys and play areas was a big perk.
I think that exposing our daughter to those kids will be a way for her to see how well-off she really is and – hopefully – to learn to value the things she has. I’m sure it will take a lot of explaining, but I think it will be good to have actual living breathing children to point to and say, “Remember so-and-so from the playground? He lives in one room at Carpenter’s Shelter with all his family, and the only toys he can play with are shared by all the other kids there.”
Anyway, if memory serves, Children’s Activity Hour is 7-8 pm, so it might be something that you and D can do together once or twice a month that will help illustrate the concept of material goods.
April 12th, 2005 at 5:19 pm
Like Maura, I don’t have kids yet, but my youngest sister is a lot younger than I am, so I have some vicarious experience without all the responsibility.
Maybe everyone in the family can have a wishlist on the refrigerator or someplace? That way he can see tangible evidence that he’s not the only one that doesn’t get everything he wants. It does reinforce the wanting though, rather than the learning to want less.
I think there’s also value in just talking through the process of financial decision making and modeling that for him. “What’s should we have for dinner tonight? I’m tired. Let’s just go to a restaurant. But if we spend money on dinner tonight, then we won’t have enough money to go do XYZ this weekend. I guess I should make dinner instead.” I used to do a lot of this when I’d take my sister with me to the grocery store — deciding between generics, store brands, and name brands, scrimping on some things so that we could get a special treat, etc. When she was younger, I’d mostly just verbalize the thought process I was using, but as she got older, I started asking for her input on things. (Also gave her math tasks as she got older — rounding prices for me, keeping a running tally of how much money we’d spent, calculating unit prices, etc.) She hated going shopping with me at the time. She preferred going with mom who didn’t bug her about these things, but now that she’s in her twenties, she says she’s grateful.
Of course, no matter what, they’re going to test you. It’s just what they do. Heck, I still do it all the time to my husband!
April 12th, 2005 at 10:23 pm
I really like “one in-one out” for myself, since it keeps my closet from looking like a mad consumer explosion. I can see that leading to trouble, though, with toys with a little. If I were six, it’d be a super way of getting a new toy almost every day. Who cares about last week’s toy anymore?
We’ve started to run into “I want” (here in toddlerland it’s “have. Hand,” and our strategy in stores until it’s time for an allowance is “No.” (In toy libraries, it’s “One. One toy.”) When the “Takayuki has” creeps in, the answer will still be “No” unless it’s something she pines for over months and it’s affordable. Eventually, sure, financial responsibility, allowances, budgets, etc. Until then, though….Nope. Sorry, dear. Why? Because-I-said-and-one-day-you-will-understand.
The giving part is good. She’s actually pretty generous with most things, and we put money in the tzedakah box every week. Right now it’s just exciting for her to put coins in the slot, but as she gets older we’ll explain what this is for, and she’ll have some say in where the money goes. I’m not actually inclined to “make her” contribute once she’s got an allowance; I think we’ll try the moral suasion approach first and see how that goes, and let her understand that it’s hard to do.
April 12th, 2005 at 10:32 pm
I’m not a parent yet either, but this is what worked on me when I was a child: Teach him to windowshop. Share your own fantasies about grownup fun toys. Go into stores, compare and admire things, express your desire for them, and then conclude that you won’t buy them today. Choose favorites together among things you clearly couldn’t buy, like animals at the zoo and paintings in museums. The point is to break the connection between wanting-and-admiring and needing-to-have; shopping is a pleasure apart from getting stuff. Another strategy (that I still use as an adult) is waiting: if you still want it, and remember that you want it, a week from now, go back and buy it.
I never had an allowance; they tried for a while, but I refused it, leaving the money to accumulate in a pretty box, and just asked for the things I wanted.
I don’t know if allowances are necessary for teaching children about money — I turned out fairly prudent without, even erring on the side of cheapness. I’m with Jolie on grocery shopping: my grandmother did that with me.
April 12th, 2005 at 10:54 pm
I think allowances are a good idea, particularly if they’re tied to chores. Even if a child isn’t really interested in the money and lets it accumulate, at some point, when the child wants something, you can point to the box and say, “See if you have enough, and if you don’t come back and we’ll talk.”
I also like the lesson in what 50 cents is in _Farmer Boy_.
I talked today with an undergrad working at the women’s center; she’s 23 and preparing to file for bankruptcy. No money talk at home before she left for college; no help with college. She got herself a fistful of credit cards for whatever student loans didn’t cover, amassed some debt, then hurt her back and couldn’t work. The debt snowballed, and now she’s got some medical debt, too. She’s back to work, cancelled the cards, and did debt consolidation, but can’t make the consolidation payments.
She was not aware that she can probably work out something with the hospital or walk away entirely; not aware either that a bankruptcy stays on her record for ten years, and can lead to her being unable to find a place to live or get a mortgage at a non-rapacious rate. Hadn’t known either that the feds allow larger loans for grad school than for undergrad, and that, since she’s planning to go to grad school, she might be able to borrow some extra and strike a deal with the credit card companies for a lump payment. Or that she’d be wise to at least pay the interest on the credit cards.
Financial education=good. I’m all for it. Starting with allowances, chores, and negotiation. Can save lots of trouble down the line. I’m starting to think a “Bank of Mom” loan line might not be bad as a learning tool, either. Picture me as the repo mom, oh boy.
April 12th, 2005 at 11:11 pm
Thanks for the suggestions.
The one-in-one-out rule is tricky, because we do want to save the more expensive toys for N. to enjoy in a couple of years. We did give a bunch of stuff to the Campagna center’s sale a few weeks ago — D was ok with it, except for the big ride on car, which he pleaded for us to keep until we caved.
The problem with window shopping and shopping for charity is that I HATE shopping, especially during the insane holiday season. But it’s worth thinking about, and some of it can be done with catalogs.
I’m experimenting with letting him earn points towards things he wants by tasting new foods, since that’s something he resists.
Keep the ideas coming…
April 13th, 2005 at 11:30 am
I’m a parent of two kids — one almost four, and one 14 months (and too young for the gimmies). I’m not sure there really is a “good” solution to this (by “good” I mean resolving the problem so you don’t have it anymore).
I think kids have a lot of rough edges, and we as parents sand them down a bit. The sandpaper is No, applied liberally.
It’s completely lousy; I think my older son basically has a “No Budget” — that is, how many times he can bear to hear No from me in a day. So if he’s in environments that are challenging, like a toy store, and he has to hear NO a lot, he’s used up by lunchtime, and then everytime he hears NO he has a mini-meltdown (not tantrums for him, but crying). So I have to help him with his budget, but there are a lot of things I’m not in control of — for instance, what about when he goes to school and other kids have X thing that he wants?
Not easy. (But I believe in my heart (because I have to) not impossible
April 13th, 2005 at 11:39 am
One more comment — while natural kid stuff is only cope-able and not solvable, habits can in fact be abolished. For instance, my older son was starting to get a tendency to be a little whiny, and I realized I was kind of rewarding him for it — letting him sit on my lap, giving him attention — to make him feel better. But of course, it got worse.
Finally I had to stop engaging with him over it. I think kids get obsessed with certain ideas and strategies, and try to draw adults into them; in a way, it’s part of the learning process. It’s just a matter of *what* obsessions we tall people want to endorse.
Me personally, I’m not a Repo Mom (god I love that phrase) but more of a The Disappeared mom. I wait until they’re asleep and “disappear” the older toys. I, too, want to save some older toys for my younger son, and those go in those big plastic tubs in an out-of-the way place. I’ve got two in the attic. You know what really helps? My babysitter volunteered to help me do this; often if the kids nap and she has time, she’ll go through old clothes and toys and help me split up ones to save and ones to go to Goodwill.
Really, out of sight, out of mind. Plus, decluttering often reveals less-played-with toys that are novel because my kids haven’t played with them for awhile.
Advising relatives on toy purchases helps, too, especially if you can do it in a funny way. See Christmas Advisory Written After Cleaning Up My Living Room.
April 13th, 2005 at 11:40 am
oops no links. Christmas Advisory is at: http://www.cadence90.com/wp/index.php?p=3339
April 14th, 2005 at 12:11 am
The Disappeared is active around here, too. I was thinking of Repo Mom as being for older kids, now that every 18-yo seems to have at least one credit card. Goes with Bank of Mom and the I-wants. You really want that [cool thing]? Well, let’s see. You get $7.50 a week, you’ve got $10 saved, and this thing is $15. Tell you what. I’ll front you the five, but you’ll pay me 10% a (time period) on that after next week, and there’s a minimum.
So you let the kid get in good and deep at age 12 (or whatever) and let her reach some understanding of what credit and compound interest are. Let her get some idea of what it’s like if you’ve spent the next three weeks’ allowance and the interest clock is running, walk her through what sensible things you can do as the pressure mounts. And alongside it some education in healthier uses of debt might be helpful. I think it’s possible to take this kind of thing too far (ah, Mom’s Credit Scoring Service(tm)), but it beats the pants off finding out the kid went to the payday loan store at age 23.