This holiday season, all your newborn needs is the warmth of your own body.
New parents are deluged by gifts from friends and relatives before their child is even born. Toys, clothes, candy, books, digital devices begin to flood into a new family’s life, and often continue to appear throughout childhood on birthdays, holidays and other occasions. These gifts are given with love and good intentions. But if you, like my husband and I, don’t want to raise your young child with artificial stimuli, enable addictions to sugar, screens or plastic, or model excessive waste and spending, you can resist!
In a holiday season long ago when our three children were young, my husband and I sent a letter to our parents, asking them not to give our children any purchased gifts – not at Hannukah, not at Christmas, not at their birthdays, and not on any given special day. It wasn’t just a directive for that year, but we were setting down a standard and a boundary for their childhood.
Daniel and I spent hours crafting our direct, passionate and, what we thought was loving, letter. We thanked them for how they raised us – without a lot of stuff. We made a plea that we wanted to raise our children with a version of these values – but with an increased commitment because the culture around all of us had become even more consumeristic than it was in our childhood.
We gave them options. We included a list of what we saw as truly valuable but alternative ways they could express their love for our children. Homemade gifts were allowed. Services, such as music lessons, or ‘experiences’, like a ticket to a performance, were encouraged. Objects of nature were celebrated. We tried to present these options as joyful alternatives, not as an exercise in self-denial.
We were disappointed that our letter was not well received. To this day, we don’t totally understand our parents’ attachment to impersonal, prepackaged and constant gift-giving. But while we may not have won over their hearts, we managed to get them, and other adults in our children’s lives, to mostly stop giving commercial gifts. One grandmother painted a portrait of prairie life for our pioneer-loving daughter; another brought our baseball-fanatic son to a baseball game; one grandfather brought a piece of lava from his foreign travels and another wrote birthday poems for them. And every time our children saw their grandparents, they were excited to see them, without anticipating material rewards.
As a result, our children played musical instruments and basketball on the street, built forts in the woods, and made toys out of cardboard boxes. Early on, they sometimes seemed to covet the video games, lego sets, and shiny clothes that their cousins had. But as time went on, they seemed very content with what they had, and now, while of course they all have challenges in their own lives, none of them show any inclination towards consumption or any resentment about this aspect of their upbringing.
As a midwife, I learn so much from newborns. They are such wise little beings, teaching us to slow down, be in awe, and be grateful. They also teach us something about what humans, at any age, truly need: our warm bodies, our time, food, sleep and cuddling. This season, consider that this little list is enough – better than any material gifts we could receive. ■