The typical American child receives 70 new toys a year, most of them during the holiday season and birthdays.
This fact is astounding to me on some levels, yet, not surprising in many other ways. You can Google the phrase “typical child receives 70 new toys a year” and read article after article telling how the parenting generation has been working, spending, working, spending, all to get more and better things for themselves and their children.
I wonder about this.
Looking back at my childhood, things were much different. I am in no way saying that I turned out perfect. It couldn’t be further from the truth. I am flawed.
But, I’ve always known and appreciated the value of a dollar. I’ve never run up a credit card that I couldn’t pay off on its due date each month. And, most of all, when I had to work three jobs at once to make ends meet, I worked three jobs. To make ends meet.
Okay, back to my childhood. We were a family of seven children. At Christmas time, we’d get two or three presents. Sometimes, the “third” thing might be a homemade nightgown or new socks. But that was it. One year, I got “Rock’ Em, Sock’ Em Robots,” and life was good.
Birthdays came in the form of a cake and a song at supper. That was it. One year, I didn’t even get birthday candles. Mom just stuck a big taper in the center of some sorry-looking single-layer round cake.
But when we got a present, it was like Moses had come down the mountain and handed it to us himself.
Jump ahead to the now. A lot of people throw big birthday parties for their kids each year. They invite the whole family, from aunts, uncles, cousins, grandparents, and more. The kids are showered with gifts and money. Most of the time, the birthday kid tosses the gifts aside just to rip the paper off the next.
This is a great deal of fun for the kid and quite lucrative. And maybe that is the point. They are kids. A birthday is supposed to be fun for a kid. Kids should have some fun, now and again.
But perhaps there are other things to consider.
There have been numerous studies on this gift-giving and its adverse effects on children.
Researchers from the University of Toledo have recently published a study in The Journal of Infant Behavior and Development called “The Influence of the Number of Toys in the Environment on Toddler’s Play.”
According to their study, they say young children who “play in environments with fewer toys tend to display sustained levels of attention, increased imagination, perception, cognition, and motor coordination.”
In their words, “fewer toys may allow for deeper, sophisticated play, because of the opportunity to become creative with each object in the environment.”
It would appear, too many toys in the mix is not such a good thing.
And in my mind, this is only part of it. Right now, we see a considerable surge in jobless America. Not because there aren’t jobs available, but because people don’t want to work.
This is happening for many reasons, but perhaps, one of them is entitlement. In light of that, I completely understand that the minimum wage is much too little for many people to maintain a lifestyle above poverty levels.
Yet, on the other hand, this was true for me too at one time, so I found two jobs, and then three. It wasn’t a great deal of fun at the time, but nowhere does it says that life is a bowl of cherries. I mean, who made that whole bowl of cherries thing up, to begin with?
It is my observation that we have become an “age of entitlement.”
I think it is having an incredibly detrimental effect on society.
Life isn’t always fun either. That is the truth.
In the end, I think there need to be massive shifts in our societal way of doing things for there to be equitable circumstances.
It may be the best gift we could give anyone.
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“Any fool can know. The point is to understand.”
― Albert Einstein
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“Spoon feeding in the long run teaches us nothing but the shape of the spoon.”
― E.M. Forster
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“The more I read, the more I acquire, the more certain I am that I know nothing.”
― Voltaire
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