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.

OK, so the movie “The Secret Life of Bees” opens Friday the 17th of October (in very limited release to only a few theaters). I saw the trailer this week at the Carmike four-plex theater in Ponca City (Eagle Eye – cross between the old “Colossus” movie and Gene Hackman’s “Enemy of the State” with a happier ending). What I noticed in the trailer was a happy Queen Latifah and what looked like a house full of love.

So I bought the book. Hastings, $14.00. “The Secret Life of Bees” by Sue Monk Kidd ($9 today at Amzon.com). I am almost 2/3rds the way through the book. And I have to wonder, “Where is she?”

Where is she?

The story, like Jenny in “Forrest Gump” by Winston Groom (different story from the PC slant of the movie, at least as good, though), like too many stories, begins with an unloved daughter. There are too many unloved sons, too, but this morning I wonder where the girl is that will fuel the devastating story of character and horror and blind arrogant bigotry five (5) years or ten (10) years or fifty (50) years from now.

My own personal revisionist history of the family

The protestant church I grew up in practiced communion – partaking of the official rite of adult-to-God sharing – for those that had celebrated the rite of “Confirmation”. About age 13.

The initial intent of compulsory education was not to educate individual children. It was to provide an educated citizenry, one capable of making reasoned decisions at the voting poll. The citizen – the adult, voting citizen – ceased to become a child with graduation from Grade 8, or age 16, whichever came first.

The average age of marriage, I am told, in the original colonies was about age 13. About the time of puberty and fertility – of ‘becoming a man or becoming a woman’ – when a child virgin crossed that threshold to partake of the adult rites of fertility and procreation.

In various times and cultures through history, children suffered horribly from lack of sanitation, lack of what we consider basic healthy environments. In some areas of the United States and the world, this is still true, and not all are homeless. As a result, infants and young children suffered appalling risks of childhood death. Note that other nations, for years now, have lower infant mortality rates than the United States.

The Roman Catholic Church at one time taught that children didn’t receive a soul until confirmation/puberty. That was one justification for abhorring child molesters, since and ‘unsouled’ child was akin to bestiality. The cultures through history that always cherished their children were few, and the modern perspective of caring deeply for each child is rather recent in historical perspective.

The stories

And so we have vestiges of the Biblical stricture that the purpose of marriage is to raise sons for God and for the army of God. We have practices, in various places, that infants are left to their mothers until “they become sensible” about age four or five, when the fathers start noticing the boys and maybe the daughters (today), to provide guidance and instruction. The ancient Greeks codified this practice, requiring each citizen to marry and produce sons for the army.

We have glimmers of enlightenment that hopefully are touching more children each generation, raising more children that are well adapted, emotionally available, compassionate and strong. But it seems this is easier to achieve for those with the luxury of time and freedom of stress – the well-to-do.

Jenny in Forrest Gump and Lilly in The Secret Life of Bees are not unique. Their parents are untaught about parenting, are hardened by life, or for some other reason – exhibited no compassion, nor mercy, nor discipline, nor respect for themselves nor the children they raise.

I try to recall, and I think it has been nearly four or five years now since the campaign got active, and subsequently replaced by other hot projects – reminding us that child abuse is passed down to future generations.

So, where is she?

Is she in an oppressed Venezuela? Is she trapped in a repressive Middle East?

Is she two houses down the street? In my nephew’s house, in foster care, working at a local store?

Where is the child that needs a refuge today?