#13 Why do my kids have so much crap

When our son started going to preschool, the birthday invites rolled in faster than colds. Evite after Evite reminded me to RSVP or all the pizza and juice boxes would run out and all hell would break loose.

There are lots of pros to birthday parties. We can kill two hours on a Saturday. If there’s a guided activity like painting, we can kick back and relax a bit too. Usually, I connect with other dads and we play “Who’s More Tired and Not Dead?” 

Parties also give my wife and I a chance to be together too. We smile as our kids smash cupcakes and thrash in a moonbounce. After an hour of that, everyone gathers to perform a rendition of the Happy Birthday song. I love watching as the birthday kid stares awkwardly at everyone, wondering when the off-key acapella group will stop. It’s a lot.

But there are cons, too.

The more parties you go to, the higher the creative bar. When your kid turns three, what’s it gonna be? Pool party or dragon party? Skyzone trampoline or crafting experience? Or you go old school, with a classic party in a rundown park that hasn’t been updated since the 80s. Personally, I love a place with high ceilings and fresh air. We all have our favorites.

The biggest gripe I have with the party circuit is the gifts. The presents. The goodie bags. The stuff. 

There’s an unwritten law between parents that if you’re coming, you best show up with some typ

e of cheap, disposable $20 toy from Target and drop it in the toy bin. Ah, the toy bin. A waist-high cardboard filled with wrapped presents. For four-year-olds, that’s their version of the money-filled piggy bank in Squid Game. And they’ll go to war against anyone to get into that bin.

“Mom. Mom. Mommy. Aba. When can we open the presents? When? Not now? But I want them now! I can’t wait because I can’t!”

Meltdown in 5,4,3…

Two statistics I found on this subject of consumption.

According to the U.S. Bureau of Labor, households with children typically spend an average of $200 to $300 per year on toys and games. With fifteen kids in his class, that number sounds fairly accurate. Scale up with another kid, factor in inflation, and that number isn’t that small.

Just how powerful is Big Toy? According to the Toy Association, the global market was valued at $90.7 billion in 2020, with the US leading sales. How much of that is Spiderman-related? 90 billion ain't nothing - that’s twice the price of what Elon paid for Twitter. You could build 15 new Disneylands for that much.

The toy market is huge, and you take part in it whether you like it or not. Once you have kids, you accumulate a lot of crap.

I’m writing this essay from our living room, which also happens to be the play area. (We live in a modest house with an open floor plan.) I spent the last twenty minutes putting away their toys, and I still feel surrounded by their things. 

Play dough remnants. Puzzles. Tractor parts. Tiny sharp things I always manage to step on. Chutes and Ladders. Knock off Lego sets from Mexico. Coloring books. Bird-themed stamp sets. A stab the pirate in the barrel game. Buckets of donated Hot Wheels cars. An engineering kit, and a bunch of Montessori toys that are actually pretty cool.

That’s not even half the stuff. And this is AFTER we purged a bunch of toys.

But the onslaught of plastic keeps coming. Especially around the holidays.

Those beautiful times when we gather and laugh at the enemies of the Jewish people who tried to kill us. But they’re also nerve wracking. We end up taking home a trunk filled with so many toys to crowd our hybrid kid/adult play space. 

I’m of the Fight Club generation. I'm convinced that owning all this crap isn’t doing us any good. It’s not easy on the eyes nor the brain. When toy after toy gets pulled off the shelves and our kids are swimming in a sea of plastic, things can go south. Without warning, playtime turns aggressive. They’re overstimulated. They start to cry, and we start to clean.

My buddy Josh and his family is asking for no gifts for their son’s birthday. Instead, we can contribute to one big gift for him, which sounds wise and savvy. Instead of fifteen shitty things, how about one awesome thing? Quality over quantity. 

The dad also reminded me that his kid is not 12. He’s four. He doesn’t have an expectation that he DESERVES gifts from everyone in the group. He’s right, and I wondered: then who does?

I admire his strategy, but to be honest, I’m not sure if we’ll follow suit. There’s a sense of reciprocity built into the system. I brought your kid a stupid gift, so you better bring one to mine, or no cupcakes for you! 

But aren’t we supposed to be the self-aware generation? We’re the ones worried about climate change and turning our kids into spoiled, entitled brats. We’re witnessing Amazon taking over everything. Do we realize that we’re worsening the consumption problem every year, every weekend? 

Why are gifts par for the party? Can we celebrate with a homemade card or cookies or just share how much it means to be in a community with one another? I don’t know a lot, but here’s something I’m sure about. My four-year-old doesn’t need a miniature lava lamp to knock over, break apart, and try to eat.

The counterargument to all this is that kids are supposed to have fun. And some objects, like STEM experiments or analog toys, have educational value. If the intent is to have fun, and the shelf life extends beyond one year, I’m good with it.

But there’s an unseen cost with all this crap. Beyond the space issue, a steady flow of presents builds an expectation in kids. That they deserve them, without fail, all the time. And if they don’t get it, well, that doesn’t compute so well in the mind of a kid who still makes peepee in his pants. 

What I’m saying is this. Too many gifts leads to a world filled with too many entitled assholes, and that’s what we’re trying to avoid as parents. Our mission, in a subtle and smooth way, is simple.

To shape our children and help them become respectful people who aren’t pricks all the time. 

So this whole gift buying thing? Don’t buy into it.

4 things right now

Go: The Post in Pasadena.

Read: I listened to Same as Ever on Spotify. Instead of predictions, it’s a retrospective on personal and societal truths that repeat throughout history. If you like Malcolm Gladwell books, check it.

Buy: I shouldn’t buy a cedar barrel sauna from Costco. I really shouldn’t.

Newsletter: AI updates from this newsletter by Ben Evans.