When Love Equals Stuff
A meditation on breaking the cycle of expressing love for our kids with material things
Lydia Hyslop
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There is a myth that plagues American society: The more stuff you have, the more worthy you are. When you become a parent, you are susceptible to a whole new industry that preys on the very real love you have for your child. You will absolutely want to give them anything and everything that you’re being persuaded to believe they’ll need. It will be up to you to accept this myth or reject it.
First, you ford the mysterious waters of baby registries prior to the baby’s arrival. Curating your registry truly feels like the ultimate guessing game for a first-time parent, and, quite frankly, it is since no two babies are the same. (Stay tuned for the next installment of The Parent Trash when I’ll share a barebones, no BS list of baby must-and mustn’t-haves!)
You’ll undoubtedly receive tips from friends, family, and strangers about products they swear by, and in your bleary-eyed new parent state, you may buy them. Get ready for endless unsolicited parenting advice, too. I have found the best way to deal with it is just to listen, accept, and move on (as long as what’s being said is harmless). This advice usually comes from other parents, and who knows where they’re coming from. It’s possible they’re also running on a few hours of sleep and are beat down, and desperate for adult socialization. Try to be kind whenever possible. These are delicate days. Forming full sentences felt like a foreign task when I first reentered society with my new human. My point is that between oxytocin and waking nights, you’re kinda the perfect consumer candidate.
You will also have to choose your battles wisely when it comes to relatives who want to give your kid clothes that you hate and plastic toys that you hate even more. There is no perfect way to push back against this (remember it’s progress, not perfection!) You may get eyerolls from your parents or in-laws, and there may be hurt feelings along the way. It’s really hard to be a parent because now you’re in charge of keeping a person alive. That becomes your MO, so there simply isn’t enough time or energy to control exactly what enters your house or your child’s hands. You’ll never be able to intercept every. little. thing. If you have figured out an immaculate system, by all means tell us your secret!
Both sets of my son’s grandparents are similar in that they absolutely show him their love in the form of stuff. My mother-in-law has what I consider to be a shopping addiction where she must buy every cute toy, toddler outfit, body product, napkin set, stationary set, dish towel, and oven mitt with the motto “This is How I Roll.” The list is infinite; if they sell it at TJ Maxx, she’s buying.
The strangest aspect here is that she then hoards the stuff and doles it out as the year goes on. No matter the holiday, she’s got something—many, many things—squirreled away in the guest bedroom drawers. In fact, when we used to visit, she would empty one or two of the dresser drawers to make it appear as if there weren’t 7,000 items stashed there, but now that we’re onto how she operates, she doesn’t bother hiding the gift hoard anymore.
Similarly, my own mother raised my sister and me with a tradition of shopping on Fridays. We would frequent TJ Maxx as our end of the week mother-daughter excursion. I have this vivid memory of driving around my hometown in the rain listening to “Bullet With Butterfly Wings,” feeling pretty cool and sufficiently angsty, and then sitting in the TJ Maxx parking lot waiting for the rain to stop so we could dash across the stripmall pavement into the fluorescent shelter of discount heaven. To my mom, love meant buying us things. And we eagerly received the love she was giving. TJ Maxx was our love language.
I don’t think I felt totally overwhelmed with the grandparent gifting until my son was at least 1 or 2 years old. By then, I’d experienced the holiday cycle at least once and realized that our parents’ generation, for the most part, is the ideal consumerist generation. They were raised in nuclear America where you went to college, got a job, got married, and fed the 2.5 kids TV dinners because everything was Archie! When I step back and examine why my mother (and my partner’s mother) are so keen on gifting, I realize that it stems from trauma. I think it’s safe to say most people have experienced mild to severe trauma in their lives — birth itself is the first trauma, technically. I am positive that shopping is an easy way for our mothers to band-aid any pain that lingered. Our parents’ parents were Depression-era children, and their innate need to overcompensate and provide their kids with the things that they lacked became an expression of love that was passed down and encouraged. This helps me understand how we’ve arrived here in our consumerist culture.
What if the boldest thing we could do for our children is to be the generation that unlearns the idea of love equalling stuff? Let’s show our kids that a different way is possible.
Stuff-giving does seem to be the love language of grandparents, and in the spirit of picking and choosing battles, I’m not really going to fight ours too hard. There’s usually a finite time on this earth when grandparents and grandkids coexist, and I’m OK with letting them have their special, magical grandparent time. My grandmother was one of the most cherished people in my own childhood. For you, it may be vastly different, but I have found that it’s easier to gracefully accept the gifts, say thank you, and move on. If a toy sticks around, it’s because my child actually likes it and it entertains him. But if not, I know I will send it on its way sooner or later, as is the duty of a Steward of Stuff.
After five years of parenting, my partner and I are juuuuust now getting to the point where we’re about to have a small scale intervention about the unsolicited boxes of gifts that appear on our doorstep with every seasonal retail holiday. I am going to have to get specific with what is and isn’t appropriate for our child. Often if the toy/game isn’t age appropriate for our son, these gift boxes end up being a major source of frustration culminating in a one-way ticket to meltdown city. I’m more comfortable leaving this conversation with my mother-in-law up to my partner, actually. She is his mom after all.
I have made progress with my own mom. I haven’t banned her from buying our child stuff, and I will let him play with it, but nine times out of 10, it lives at her house. For a while, she was buying him these giant plastic toy sets, like a Paw Patrol spaceship. It literally wouldn’t fit in our toy box. We live in a small bungalow and don’t have the space for it all, which was also a convenient and understandable reason to suggest that these behemoths stay at her house. I honestly think this allowed her to see all the things she had already bought instead of perpetuating the out-of-sight, out-of-mind, repeat-buying cycle she was in. She is actually doing a really good job hiding and organizing the kid toys when our son isn’t there. What it really comes back to is setting boundaries. May you recognize when they’re needed, and may you execute them tactfully.
You will occasionally need to have a come-to-Jesus moment with yourself and check your own impulse to show love in the form of stuff. Unlearning is an active practice. I’m trying to give myself grace here, but I totally catch myself wanting to dote on my child in the form of a quick and dirty Target run, especially in pandemic times when it’s so damn easy to order a LEGO set online and have someone pick it off the shelf and deliver to your car (more on my love-hate relationship with LEGOs soon, I promise!) I have definitely gotten better with this impulse consumerism, but the satisfaction is just so instantaneous. It’s hard to deny that thrill of being able to provide something for your kid that totally makes them light up. Does love equal stuff? It’s a total mindfuck unlearning this stuff, and I feel myself in my mom’s shoes when I engage in that behavior. I do “get it.”
I have enjoyed leaning harder into secondhand life as my son has grown. The other day we scored a bag of puff paint and glitter at the thrift store for $3 and three disposable cameras for 50 cents at an estate sale. He loves these gifts, and it’s nostalgic for me to get to show him some of the same stuff I had as a child. But my favorite aspect of this kind of shopping is that my son doesn’t fully know the difference between a big box store and a secondhand store. I’m showing him that a $3 Beanie Baby from what he hilariously calls “that random store” can be just as fun and exciting (dare I say more exciting?) as a brand new $16.99 PJ Masks race car packaged in a mountain of plastic, cardboard, and zip ties.
There will be progress, but there may never be a definite way to end the steady trickle of stuff. Kids outgrow items quickly, both physically and developmentally. Before you get too swept away in your vision of an Instagram-perfect parenthood, remember that leaky boobs, spit-up and wiping butts are rarely featured on top 10 lists. The beautiful life that has burst from you (or from whomever they burst forth) came in a blaze of blood, pain, and glory and is about to change your heart and mind forever. You will never be the same.
If you can accept one of my tenets of parenting thus far — that stuff is a given — you will be more prepared than I was to curb the onslaught. When love equals stuff to your pre existing family, I have no doubt you will choose the best approach for your new self-made family
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