My husband and I have recently vowed to have more adventures with our children. We want to plan some type of road trip for next year, and we’ve been trying to explore more museums and attractions around here with our
My husband and I have recently vowed to have more adventures with our children. We want to plan some type of road trip for next year, and we’ve been trying to explore more museums and attractions around here with our kids.
We want to give them gifts of experiences.
Well, actually we also want to curb some behavior that we’ve contributed to and are now really starting to resent.
Shortly after Christmas, and just after his birthday, my 8-year-old started bugging my husband and I to take him to the store. He wanted to buy this spy watch, just like the one we had given his friend for a birthday present.
He begged and pleaded, even though he had just received a small fortune in Christmas presents AND another treasure trove for his birthday a few days later. Had all those “must have” items been tossed aside and forgotten already?
I put my foot down.
Our basement playroom is already stuffed with stuff my kids just don’t use. There’s toy cars, action figures, doodads from McDonald’s Happy Meals, broken plastic swords, foam bullets, torn superhero capes and more. We try to clean the room out two or three times a year, but as soon as it is emptied of the old junk, new junk seems to accumulate.
No more.
Have you ever watched two kids fight over one toy while sitting in a room full of stuff that they really, really wanted three weeks or two months or a year ago? Inevitably, the winner of said toy abandons the stupid thing within 10 minutes.
We came to the realization that our children are simply too materialistic. We get that all kids want stuff. But for our 6- and 8-year-old boys it had started to become an obsession, and they expected to have everything everyone else has. It was like they believed they could only find happiness in new toys.
The whining for a new toy in January was a big, fat red flag for us. We sat down to try and come up with a way to stop it, without the constant “no” mantra.
What we decided to do was give our children our time and new experiences.
Since then, whenever we have a free Saturday, we’ve been going on a family adventure. We’ve gone to museums, an ice cream shop, Discovery World and the movies. We walked away from each without any new purchases, except for the lunch in our bellies.
And there was no whining either. Maybe we’re on the right track.
So, this weekend, I’m going to have the kids help me clean out the playroom — again. We’ll get rid of what’s junk and donate what’s still usable.
Then maybe we’ll sit down and plan our next adventure together.
• Mommy Talk is written by Marci Laehr Tenuta and Janine Anderson. Mike Moore writes Daddy Talk. Laehr Tenuta has three children, two boys and a girl. Moore and Anderson each have one son.
