We live in Del Mar, and our kids don’t have that stuff. Yes, there’s tremendous pressure to buy, buy, buy, and have the latest and greatest stuff, but the pressure is only effective if we allow it to be. We do our best to ignore it and stay true to our own values and way of life. Obviously, we’re not immune to the pressure entirely (otherwise, this thread wouldn’t have hit home with me!)…it’s always a balancing act and a bit of a struggle.
For example, our 8th grader is mortified that she has the free flip phone that we got when we added her to our cellphone plan a year ago. Getting her the phone was more for our convenience than hers and there was no way we were going to actually spend money to get her a fancier phone than Verizon gave us for free. She also (horrors!) does not have a text plan…how old-fashioned of us! We will renegotiate that decision with her next year for high school, but for now, we don’t see the need for an 8th grader to be text messaging along with emailing and chatting on the phone…no, we’re not as mean as we sound, but we try to set our own boundaries. Believe it or not, she’s generally a happy, popular kid.
Still, we are out of the norm for our area and among her friends. We try to keep true to our beliefs, but we really don’t want to cop some holier-than-thou attitude about our way of parenting. It’s hard to understand how other parents don’t get the connection between giving their kids all this stuff and seeing that their kids later feel so entitled, but c’est la vie. The irony is that while these parents feel they are “giving” their kids so much, they are probably doing them a big disservice, the results of which will show up later when their kids are, at some point, forced to cope in the real world.
By the way, what is this thing with CV high schools expecting laptops? Sounds like something else that we’ll find out when our daughter attends next year!
