“A child asks for an expensive gift for the New Year? Don’t be afraid to sound like a bad parent by refusing to buy everything. In the list of children’s desires, there will surely be something really important, ”advises psychologist Ekaterina Patyaeva *.
“Your six-year-old daughter, after watching a commercial on TV, declares that she expects a newfangled “baby-born” doll from Santa Claus. A second-grader son demands the same game console as the children in the class, and a teenager, flipping through the electronics catalog, asks for the latest laptop model. Is it worth fulfilling these externally controlled desires?
Many of us feel like bad parents if, for some reason, we cannot fulfill a child’s request. In fact, we are doing the child a disservice if we always give him everything he asks for. Now try to understand whether his New Year’s expectation is connected with an old dream or is due to the habit of getting what he wants from trouble-free parents. In the first case, it is worth looking for a way to fulfill this dream (but not necessarily it will turn out to be fast), in the second, it’s time to change your relationship with your son or daughter and start looking at him (her) not as a kid who you want to please by any means, but as for a person who has to live in our difficult world. Teach your child to be critical of advertising. Discuss TV commercials with him, expressing your opinion about the quality and benefits of the advertised items.
When it comes to a gift that will help your son or daughter feel no worse than others, it is probably worth buying it (of course, if this thing does not raise fundamental objections from you and does not make a significant gap in the family budget). Invite a child who finds it difficult to choose one thing to list their desires in a letter to Santa Claus (and older children to make a list). As a rule, Santa Claus may well satisfy part of this list. And yet, we should not forget that the feeling of New Year’s magic is created primarily by going beyond the boundaries of the ordinary: surprises, colorful design, joint ideas and a joyful atmosphere.
* Ekaterina Patyaeva — Senior Lecturer, Department of Personality Psychology, Faculty of Psychology, Lomonosov Moscow State University. Lomonosov, author of the book “From birth to school. The first book of a thinking parent” (Sense, 2007).