How to not raise a materialist a-hole
Help me figure out how to do that
I’m going to start right off and say I do not have a list of recommendations on how to ensure your kid isn’t some greedy little consumerist during the time of year where they’re guaranteed to be have gifts pouring in. But it is something I think about a lot, and of course especially this time of year.
Every Christmas, my husband and I do our best to hold off on buying the kid too much. He’s going to get stuff from his grandparents, aunts, and uncles. But then we justify to ourselves yet another gift because, well, it wasn’t that much. Plus we love the kid and it’s fun to buy him stuff.
However, this gift-buying season brings up a lot of privileged guilt. I wonder are we raising a greedy little plastic-consuming little capitalist? And the answer to that is quite honestly “yes.” He loooooves things. Especially tiny little plastic things that will be on this planet for eternity. Even though we’ve had countless conversations about how plastic is bad for the planet and finds its way to the oceans, when we’re faced with a toy aisle at the grocery store, he’ll linger excessively long and then when I try to pull him away, he gives me puppy dog eyes while he points at some little plastic thing he believes he neeeeeeeds at this moment.
It’s also a battle when we go somewhere trying to get him to find something for someone else. I’ll say this, at 7 years-old, my kid’s love language is not gifting. He’s making progress, though. When we went shopping to pick out a birthday gift for a friend, he really did make a thoughtful decision about which Lego set he would like. But then later when he was tasked with finding a Christmas present for other family members, he just kind of pointed at whatever and then whined about wanting to go back to the toy aisle.
It’s a constant battle. And truth be told, I’m not that much better. While we tried—and somewhat kind of successfully—did a no-buy year a couple years ago, I also like things. For me, that materialism has extended mostly to clothes (and apparently lately lipstick which for this makeup minimalist was never on my Bingo card for what I’d gravitate to in my 40s). I also remember when I was a kid counting all my presents and comparing that to the number my neighbor friend received. My point is, my kid (and probably yours, too) isn’t so different from any kid in America where stuff is kind of shoved in our faces every day. We’re privileged in that we can afford a lot of what my kid wants and that’s a discussion we try to have. But that only goes so far with a 7 year-old (or at least this one).
Anyway, instead of this being a list of how to not raise a materialist a-hole, it is really a question for all of you. How do you raise a kid not to be materialistic? How do we try to extricate ourselves—not just our kids but us—from the onslaught of capitalism around us? This time of year is definitely the worst of it, but it never goes away. There’s always that desire to buy crap.
So please, help all of us trying to get away from capitalistic consumption and let us know what is working for you.
My parents' tactic was to read to my brother and I from the Christmas chapter of "little house on the prairie" every Christmas Eve, so that we would have a frame of reference for how STOKED a kid used to be to get a tin cup, a penny, a peppermint candy stick, and a little cake made with white sugar and white flour!
Honestly I think it worked pretty well to give us some broader perspective. I know those books have their own elements that might make a leftist hesitate to share them with their children.
Maybe an alternative could be to storytell about Christmas's you had,.Christmas's your parents had, and other ancestors if you have the privilege of knowing those types of stories and learning about how people celebrate around the world?
every year, especially when my son was younger, before birthdays and christmas, we went through his room and identified items he no longer used to donate to other children who did not have toys. this worked well with him, he was able to keep items he really wanted and get rid of things he didn't (I did in fact actually donate anything that wasn't broken or gross). I also had a hard rule that no one could buy him shit that light up or made noise and directed people to non plastic items (books, wooden stuff, etc).
we also almost never bought toys or other things during regular grocery trips. the rule was, if I had a quarter, and if he didn't ask for it, he might be able to get something from the quarter machine on the way out. we didn't go to the toy section to "browse" because we were there to buy food (it helped that I was not in a position to afford anything extra).
currently he's 15, he hates "shopping", will wear his clothes until I forcibly take them for being too small or gross, and rarely asks for anything new.