It’s About Making Babies!

Dr. Michele Borba writes about Teaching Kids to be Appreciative, at Parenting Solutions.

Dr. Borba discusses how to role-play and explain, before the gift exchange, to prepare the kid to act appreciative enough not to embarrass the parents or Great Aunt Edna. And this is great. But if you stop there, I fear you might enable a surface veneer of mere politeness covering a core personality of crass materialism. Children need to understand that the culture of the home, the traditions and definitions of right and wrong, expectations about behavior, all combine to explain and inform gift giving and gift receiving.

In the family, gifts are part of meeting needs, and grow out of family life. They may represent traditions and family lore.

I read in a novel, that the responsibility of one that receives a gift, is to use it in a manner such that the giver doesn’t regret the giving. (Balance of Trade, SF novel, Sharon Lee, Steve Miller)

Some see receiving a gift as a responsibility, a responsibility to then present the giver with something of greater value *to the giver*. That is, a transaction of honor.

There is a reason that an unappreciated gift is embarrassing. A well chosen gift is difficult to achieve – it requires the giver know and understand who the recipient is. A gift, properly, is a very personal transaction. Giving something expensive, or popular, when you don’t know the needs and wants of the recipient, is part arrogance, part conspicuous display of affluence.

Presumably Great Aunt Edna knows that the teen won’t (or shouldn’t!) use shaving cream – used with a razor – with an electric shaver. But a shaver and other accessories or complementary products, that might fill a need. By the way – how often did the teen attend visits to Great Aunt Edna, so that she might know him as a person, not just a name on a gift list? If he knows Great Aunt Edna as a person, he shouldn’t actually be surprised at what she would give as a gift, be it a garden rake or some heirloom tool from the family past.

And that should be the first thought, on opening a gift – Does it fill a need? Filling a desire or want, that is a small part of filling a need. A blanket and pillow, or soft or just new sheets? A plain, simple (huggable!) doll? Socks and underwear? On opening the gift, the thought should be, “Wow! Great Aunt Edna is helping get me the things I need!” The words then come easier – “Thanks! I can use this!”

Commercially-derived expectations, TV ads, even catalog listings – these are engineer-tuned and salesmen-tweaked to mean “You have to have this” – with no alternative. The message to kids is often “If your parents loved you, they would have bought this for you!” Please, teach your children other values that what TV gets paid to display.

I think TV ads, the way they interrupt a story, and convey a message engineered to be bright, loud, memorable, and unrelated to anything around it, destroy concentration, and likely contribute to ADD/ADHD. The messages they convey about gifts and toys is mass marketing hype at its worst. There is no perspective about gifting to meet real needs (as opposed to marketing fads). That is what parenting and families are for, to fill in how gifts are part of life – and life is behind and within each gift.

Families that involve kids in crafts to make gifts for others have a head start on teaching how and why to gift. They teach a value of gifts beyond asking Daddy to buy something from some anonymous source of dollars – time and effort to select and make something, to prepare it and create a presentation for the gift.

Even when you gift by shopping – make sure that the children understand why you select one gift over another for each recipient, how you decide who to gift, what role that gift should play in the recipient’s life. And share the fact that some times a gift is intended to spark joy (a first Barbie doll), and other times just meet a simple need (a hug, a couple pairs of socks, a visit to a neighbor in an old neighborhood).

A child that participates in the way gifts are related to who visits who during the year, what letters get written or forgotten, etc. then opening the gift won’t have the drama of a situation comedy.