The week before Christmas in 2007 I was digging through the closets of my children’s rooms brutally reducing the number of toys my children owned.
As I stuffed toys into boxes and bags, keeping only a handful of toys for each child, I was plagued by the existence of another pile of toys.
There was a legitimate mountain of toys piled around our Christmas tree downstairs.
As I continued to stuff and sort, my two-year-old daughter laid on the floor nearby with her favorite silky pink blanket. I looked over at her sweet face and wondered what she thought of me getting rid of most of their toys.
She had been diagnosed with leukemia two months prior. Between the chemotherapy and cancer itself, she didn’t have the energy to even sit up for very long, let alone put up a fight as she watched me packing up all the toys.
But I thought giving away most of the toys would make me feel better about the obscene amount of presents piled up downstairs, so I packed away.
It didn’t make me feel better.
When you have a child that receives a cancer diagnosis, people want to help…and there isn’t really anything they can do.
They can’t take away the diagnosis or make cancer go away.
But they can do things like sponsoring your family for Christmas.
So we, unknowingly, ended up with three sponsors that year.
They all showed up with a pile of presents…which created the mountain of toys around the tree.
I was deeply grateful for the love being shown to our family. It was really overwhelming to find out how many people really cared about our little girl.
But I discovered something important about myself.
I am not comfortable with excessive amounts of consumerism.
I didn’t have a vocabulary for that term at the time…I’m not even sure if it was a term.
But every time I walked by the tree, I was embarrassed.
I contemplated opening all the gifts in the night, then re-wrapping the ones I thought would be the best fit, and donating the rest…but I was afraid we would seem ungrateful.
NO ONE needed that many presents!
I contemplated opening all the gifts in the night, then re-wrapping the ones I thought would be the best fit, and donating the rest…but I was afraid we would seem ungrateful.
Which drove me to start purging toys from my house.
That Christmas set me on a new path.
Never again did we accept a Christmas sponsorship, but the change that happened for me went much further than that.
I learned some important things about myself that Christmas that have continued to grow and evolve over time.
I realized that a life full of things was not the life I wanted, and it was not how I wanted to raise my kids.
I realized that what was important to me was for my kids to see the world, and learn things by experiencing them. I wanted my children to derive happiness from doing things, not from having things.
I recognized that I wanted a home with few things and many memories.
Unfortunately, I was alone in this personal evolution. I did not have support from my spouse to minimalize our gift-giving and scale down on our personal belongings…and the kids pushed back with ever-growing lists of things they wanted at Christmas.
It wasn’t how I wanted things to be…but life is messy…and it rarely looks the way you want it to.
For the last several years of being on my own, and having older children who have gone through a life-altering trauma, I have been able to pursue the path that has felt right for so long.
That’s not to say my kids don’t have things, they do. More often than not, they are things they have saved up for and purchased on their own.
My youngest still looks forward to new clothes every August. And after some failed experimenting with Christmas travel, we have decided that a traditional Christmas at home works better for our family.
But there are limited presents with a small budget.
I like to buy tickets to see a ballet or a theater production. I enjoy taking them to live sporting events. We go see hockey games, the rodeo, and baseball. And we go try new things like go-cart racing.
We go camping, travel to see family and friends, and sometimes we hit the road for a vacation to someplace really cool like the Redwood Forest and San Francisco.
All of this feels more natural to me, and it’s the kind of parent I have wanted to be for so long.
I decided that for graduations, I would take them on a trip rather than buying them a gift.
All of this feels more natural to me, and it’s the kind of parent I have wanted to be for so long. Plus, they have stopped asking me to buy them things! They will often ask how much something costs and then evaluate how much they have already and whether or not they want to invest the time into saving up for it. They are also very motivated to work and generate cash flow so they can have the things they want. This has also resulted in a greater appreciation for the things they have!
There are so many good things that have come from getting off the ‘things train”!
So today, I am going to give you four big reasons why you should consider replacing things with experiences in your family.
Better Academic performance
Children with few toys, but parents who spent time doing things with them, perform better in school.
Whether or not this is due to having more one-on-one time with their parents to learn things is unclear, but at the end of the day, I have never met a parent who didn’t want their children to do really well in school. It appears that one way to ensure that happens is to stop buying them so much stuff and invest that toy money into going and doing things with your child. Win!
More playtime
Children with fewer toys play more.
In other words, investing in few toys has a better return on investment in hours of playtime than buying a ton of toys…that you will then spend hours picking up, tripping over, and stepping on over the course of your life. Just think, buying fewer toys may save you from the agony of stepping on a lego on their way to the bathroom in the middle of the night!!
But honestly, how many times have you spent tons of money on toys only to pack them up and donate them in almost ‘brand new’ condition down the road because your child hardly ever touched it?
That money would be so much better spent taking them to a discovery museum, or paying for a week-long camp where they could learn more about something they love doing.
And the toys they have will be well-loved and much played with!
More gratitude and generosity
Kids who receive many experiences and few things demonstrate more gratitude for the things they have, and more generosity with other people.
This is counterintuitive. One might think a child who has everything, the newest toys and the latest video games would want to share all of that with everyone else. But no.
Research has shown that children who have very few toys are much more generous with what they have and grateful for the things they have, than the child who has been given a wealth of toys and personal belongings.
This is huge for me. I grew up in a family that gave generously and always looked for ways to help others in need, so it has always been very important to me that I gave that gift to my own children.
It is natural to want our kids to have more than we had and to have a better life than we had. But by giving them too much, you are actually creating children who are missing out on some of the best things in life. Gratitude and generosity.
Kids who receive many experiences and few things demonstrate more gratitude for the things they have, and more generosity with other people.
Nothing feels better than helping someone else because you want to help them! Being forced to give or do something for another person loses most of the benefits of giving. So why not set your children up to succeed at being generous and showing gratitude? This is the gift that will benefit them for their entire lives!
Happier Kids
Cornell University performed a decades-long study on thousands of children and found that lifelong happiness comes from experiences, not things.
You know that moment on Christmas morning when your child opens their presents and their face is filled with happiness and excitement?
And then by the afternoon they are grumpy and ill-tempered and don’t want to help clean up the mess from opening presents?
That’s because opening presents didn’t create actual happiness.
It was fun and exciting for sure! But it seems a lot of people get fun and excitement confused with happiness.
It took me a long time to understand this fully, even to the point I thought something was wrong with me for several years. I am a naturally happy person. I have gone through some agonizing experiences and still felt happy. It wasn’t fun or exciting, and sometimes it just felt like the challenges were too great to conquer…but I still found happiness and peace inside of me. I thought maybe I was broken and couldn’t feel things that other people felt, I even looked into whether or not I had an attachment disorder that prevented me from properly attaching myself to people and their struggles. But no, I don’t. I am just a happy person and I don’t allow challenging times to steal my happiness long term.
Here’s the thing, fun and excitement are temporary, fleeting emotions that only lasts for the duration of the fun and exciting activity.
Happiness is a lasting state of being.
You can be happy, even when you’re going through something really challenging.
…lifelong happiness comes from experiences, not things.
This is my dream for all of my children! I want them to be happy! Nothing brings me greater joy than seeing the happiness on my children’s faces. NOTHING. But, more importantly, I want them to have lasting happiness to carry with them through all the challenges they will inevitably face over the course of their lives.
By giving them fewer things and more experiences, we can create a best-case scenario for them to have exactly that, lifelong happiness.
There you have it! Four BIG reasons why you should stop buying your kids so much stuff. Reinvest the money you would normally spend on toys and things into paying for experiences and building memories with your kids. You will get a greater return on your investment, have better students, and happier generous, and grateful kids.
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