Holidays and Children

Now that Christmas is over and gift cards have been spent, I can finally sit down and breathe and look back. Unfortunately, this was a bittersweet year, as my older child succumbed to tween age and left Santa behind this year. She tried to hold on, but more than enough comments were made by her on Christmas morning to have me sigh and know that she is leaving a phase of her childhood behind.

During this period, friends and I were discussing how our respective children were behaving and the Santa Claus toy lists. Somewhere our children have become too used to having what they want and when they want it. This has led to lists of toys and electronics that are EXPENSIVE and that they do not look forward to Santa and the required good behavoir that entails. Our discussion led to the following decisions:
1) We want our children to have it better than we did and thus we tend to buy them more.
2) As we all have to work 45 - 50 hours a week minimum to keep our frantic rat race employment, we tend to buy more to make up for not spending the time with them
3) Commercials have led to "no santa exists" with many inferences and inappropriate commercials....for example Santa being pulled over by a police officer and their saying "don't count on santa, go to radio shack instead" and our children are learning to be desensitized.
4) We are TEACHING our children it is all about getting and not giving and they EXPECT it of us. To this I saw a commercial for cell phones where dad goes "got this daughter this cool cell phone, got son this cool cell phone. what did dad get? kids "we got you cologne"....dad: "no, dad got hosed!".....and although I laughed, it was more the laugh of how true that is!!! and that is purely our fault.

So what do we do about it? Well, I know my kids aren't getting anything that they don't buy with their allowances or at birthday time. No more "just because i can do it for them". As for allowances? "Chore list will go up and for every item not checked off each day, that is a deduction from the allowance until there is no allowance that week. 2 weeks without allowance will mean additional penalties."

I am the parent, I can lament with other parents, but I'm the one that has to change it, not only for my children, but for my future grandchildren and all those my kids will interact with over the course of their lives.........guess I just made my holiday resolution!