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I was once an aspiring minimalist mom who believed that children should have very few toys. If they had to be given stacking rings or a baby doll, it should be made of high-quality, heirloom materials. I planned small-scale “no gift” birthday parties, bought expensive merino wool onesies, gave my daughter beautiful wooden toys, and browbeat her grandparents into my no-plastic-shit purchasing mindset. I did it all!
Then my child got older. It turns out my 8-year-old loves buying toys, thinking about buying toys, pocketing the free toys given out at the bank or the car dealership, and trading toys with her friends. A consumerist streak developed even though she has no contact with Online, except whatever happens when YouTube creeps into her third grade classroom. But when friends come over to visit, I overhear her unconsciously doing a very good imitation of an influencer showing off a haul, touring them through the various tiny Squishmallows and Mini Brands foodstuffs that sit in lined-up collections on surfaces in our living room.
I was told by Montessori, Waldorf, and Simplicity Parenting that children were natural minimalists, but whatever values I tried to impart by surrounding her with only the good stuff when she was a toddler and preschooler seem to have failed to take root. So I was in a good—bad?—position to get annoyed by the parents in the recent Cut piece by Emi Nietfeld who profess that they will not give their kids any gifts this holiday season. In the endless parental battle against plastic crap, these interviewees have taken a stand! Not just “less for Christmas” but nothing, or those gifts most dreaded by my own child: experiences.
All of the no-gifts parents Nietfeld interviewed whose kids’ ages are specified have children 5 and under. But I’ve realized something very important in my almost nine years of parenting in parallel with strangers, randos, and experts online. Before your kids are 5 or 6, you’re in a golden age for following parenting influencers, reading parenting literature, and building castles in the air. I too was once very good at making draconian plans for how I’d keep the world out of my home! My theory is that this has something to do with how new your parenting self is, how much the kids love being around you, and how much time you spend together in the domestic setting. (This is also a golden age for putting kids and home life on social media, because they’re cute, guileless, and unaware of what the internet is. Once that changes, watch out.)
After about 5, and increasingly as they get on to 7 or 8, your kid will—unless you keep them out of school (as some influencers do!)—have a peer group and will start to learn more about other kids’ lives. In school, unless you’re paying for Waldorf, they will be given sugar, trinkets, and videos, and you’ll find out about it only after it happens. They may start to voice a preference for packaged snacks—cute! Brightly colored! Predictable!—and shun your Instagram-recipe freezer breakfast muffins and protein waffles. They will definitely go to a friend’s birthday party at which gifts are given and twig that your “no gifts please” invitations for their own parties have been keeping them from ever having the chance to be the Person of the Day, the Chosen One whose friends bring them a pile of wrapped LOL Surprises and Calico Critter play sets, then watch them open it up. The injustice of it will hit, and they’ll let you know. As your child gets to this middle-childhood phase, they can argue their case in full paragraphs and have the brain to prosecute that case over months and years, displaying an uncanny memory of the boundaries you did or didn’t enforce the most recent time they asked for a toy, a treat, or TV.
Sure, you can keep on being the sentry at the gates, standing between your child and our fallen world of cheap delights. As people online really, really love to say: “You’re the parent.” If you enjoy perpetually donning a pinched expression as you type out annoyed emails to the school and your family, all while weathering the storm front of outraged desire coming toward you from a kid who lives in a world that’s got other, more enticing messages than “I just feel like it’s not good for the soul to have too many toys,” have at it. If you can persuade your spouse to guard the walls with you, even better. (If you can’t, extra good luck to you.) Maybe, as Nietfeld writes of those she interviewed who shared this mindset, all of this vigilant simplicity will produce a kid who truly doesn’t want things. (“The zero-gift lifestyle is part of a fantasy: that your kids won’t beg for another Labubu because they have all they need—you,” she writes.) Try not to feel as if you’ve failed when your child’s pleasure centers turn out to work just like everyone else’s.
Maybe, in fact, this difficulty of enforcement is part of the joy of decreeing No Gifts, then saying so, online. You are saying not just “I believe something deeply that I’m putting into action in my home.” You’re saying you’re ironhearted, disciplined, always on duty. You probably never indulge your own desire to eat holiday rocky road while reading Emily Henry and lying on the couch. You’re saying you repeat “asked and answered,” like a robot, as your child lies on the floor, begging you for an ice pop—and it works! You’re saying you haven’t “given up,” something we as parents are never, ever supposed to do.
Or maybe you’re just saying: “My child is under the age of 5.”
