The Ultimate Gift-Giving Guide for Parents
The 5-Gift Rule to keep Christmas sane, how gift norms effect kids' happiness, and a look at what gifts open doors and what gifts slam doors shut.
Hello, good people! This is the third and final post about gifts. At the risk of under-delivering, these three posts combined comprise what I have billed as the “Ultimate Gift-Giving Guide.” If you missed the first two, check them out:
Today, rather than look at what to get, I will focus on a gift-giving rule that I’m quite taken with…
Too Much of a Good Thing
Most of us have been there. Christmas overload. Gifts everywhere. So much to assemble. Where will it all go? What are we even doing?
It can be hard to talk about gift-giving. This is an emotional topic. Some people’s primary love language is giving gifts. It is how they show love. And these are often some of the best people. Way better than me (picture my wife nodding in agreement). But, still, there is a reason for the phrase: a healthy limit.
In his fantastic book, Rules for a Knight (Seriously it is fantastic—get it for your burgeoning young-adult), the wise grandfather strikes at the problem with spoiling kids:
“There is nothing so helpless as the child of a rich man,” Grandfather liked to say. “The push and pull of the oceans, the sun rising and falling, the flow of the seasons, the waxing and waning of the moon, none of that is enough for them.”
Like an apple spoiled, those who have grown to expect too much have more trouble accessing the most simple and deep joys. Similarly, in Henry David Thoreau’s classic meditation, Walden, he writes:
“A man is rich in proportion to the things he can afford to let alone.”
This is a basic truth. When you believe you need something that you don’t have, you are less happy. The more spoiled a kid is, the more things they think they need in order to be happy. What they have is never enough. This makes life harder on them.
Unless we help our kids, they’re likely to be run by that oh-so-human phenomenon known as the hedonic adaptation or the hedonic treadmill.
Basically, this means that when our living standards increase, rather than become more content, we just raise the set point of our expectations—we come to expect more. I give an example of this in a short essay titled, Great Expectations May Prevent Happiness:
“Humanity has an amazing capacity to normalize our experiences… Think about your phone. You can hear the voice of someone across the world in real-time. From Texas, I can call my mother and immediately hear her voice in Seattle. As if that was not magical enough, I can click a button and see her. With a modest investment, I could use this very phone to purchase a plane ticket and FLY. Yes me, the human, Shane Trotter, will fly in the air to be with her in less than 5 hours. In that plane, I will have air conditioning and access to food that is made from ingredients assembled all across the world.
Our lives are inconceivably magical and, yet, entirely dull and normal to us. We are always looking for more. This quirk once ensured our survival but now, in our incomprehensibly comfortable lives, it demands some intentional self-reflection.
Cue The Greatest Showman…
“It’s never enough! Never! Never! Never!”
Gift Giving Sweet Spots
This shouldn’t be taken as a recommendation to sell all your possessions and live a monastic life. It does not have to be all or nothing. Giving gifts is wonderful, but, as with most things in parenting and life, a little more intentionality might be a good thing. Which brings us to the elephant in the room: quantity. How much is too much?
There is a basic economic law called the Law of Diminishing Marginal Utility, which states that, “...all else being equal, as consumption increases, the satisfaction derived from each additional unit decreases.”
Accordingly, giving too many gifts has a way of diminishing all the gifts. If I give the child version of you only one gift, that gift is super special. You’ll remember it and be more likely to really care about that gift. This is especially so if you can tell that I put a lot of thought and care into it. Intuitively, that seems to hold true all the way up to five or six total gifts. But, if I give you 20 gifts, we’ve exceeded the threshold of specialness. Each new gift simply diminishes the value of all the others. At 50 this is even more the case. A “what’s next?” fervor replaces any desire to savor and explore each gift.
My wife and I have begun to take a large number of gifts every year and put them in a rainy day closet. The kids never even remember that they got those gifts in the first place. Here’s your sign.
It would appear that when our kids get too many gifts, they appreciate them less and grow to expect more. As years go by, these gift-giving norms produce Bridezilla-type high expectations in them, which will only decrease their own capacity to enjoy each celebration. That’s what Thoreau and the grandpa from Rules for a Knight were talking about. The curse of expecting too much. It makes us less happy people.
The obvious qualifier here is that there are plenty of people who grow up in abundance and mature into amazing, happy people. I just think it’s harder to do. Too many gifts can be bad for the wallet and the child. Which is why my wife and I have embraced the 5 Gift Rule.
The Five Gift Rule
The five gift rule is simple… so simple it rhymes.
Limit yourself to five gifts for each kid:
Something they want (the big ticket, Red Ryder BB Gun sort of gift)
Something they need (you would have bought it anyway… double dipping is just smart)
Something they wear
Something they read
And something they DO (a game, adventure, outing, family experience, etc.)
This is also a great framework for steering away from those door-closing gifts and towards the ones that open worlds of possibility.
BOOM! That is it. A lot of preamble for a simple little structure. Hope it helps!
Thank you for reading and sharing with anyone who would find value here!
Have a wonderful week! Life is too short to be normal,
Shane