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A few weeks ago I received a series of pictures from my sister. Several shots in the series featured my six-year-old nephew displaying a wide, exaggerated grin proudly showing off a gap that was now a reminder of his first lost tooth. I quickly phoned my sister. “Wow! You didn’t tell me that Brennan lost his first tooth!” I exclaimed. “That’s a great big deal!”

“Well, you would think it would be a big deal,” my sister retorted flatly following with the details of the morning Brennan was visited by the Tooth Fairy. My sister explained how she had been talking up the reward-bearing pixie since Brennan first approached her wiggling his front baby tooth. From that point on, the first ever visit from the Tooth Fairy was a big deal in my sister’s household, gaining excitement and participation from each family member. The evening that Brennan actually lost his tooth, my sister sat at the kitchen table with her two oldest children and together they composed a brief letter to Mrs. T. Fairy asking her to take the tooth, but to please leave its owner a cash prize in its place.

The next morning, my nephew woke up and anxiously nudged my sister. “Mom, do you think the Tooth Fairy left me some money under my pillow last night?” he asked, giddy with excitement. Exhausted from a long night with her newborn, my sister sent Brennan to check on his loot and to report back to her.

Fifteen minutes passed with no word from my nephew, so my sister slipped out of bed to follow up with him herself. When she approached his room, she found a single dollar bill lying on his carpet and recognized it as the same dollar bill she had carefully placed beneath his pillow the night before. My nephew, she found seated on the floor in the living room engrossed in a video game.

“Brennan, did the Tooth Fairy leave you a prize last night?” she asked, hoping the dollar bill had accidentally drifted to the floor while he was researching investment strategies for his new fortune.

Without removing his eyes from the gaming screen, Brennan jerked his chin toward the direction of the bedroom and said, “Yeah, she left me a dollar,” in the same tone he most likely would have used to indicate that the Tooth Fairy, who was nothing but a penny-pinching old miser with wings, left him nothing in exchange for his prized first lost tooth.

When I was a kid, we typically received a quarter per lost tooth, and finding that quarter was the equivalent to striking gold in those days. It wasn’t about the value of the coin. I mean I’m only 31, it’s not like the quarter could buy much more in the 80s than it could today. It was the idea of a prize. The concept of a tiny little winged woman sweeping in to buy my tooth when anyone else would have advised it be tossed in the garbage.

So this got me thinking. Are today’s children overindulged? And how can anything be special in a world where the characters in video games are almost indistinguishable from real people, everyone gets a trophy at the end of the sports season, children are rewarded during shopping or long car trips just for “being good”, and anyone over the age of six owns either a Game Boy, iPod, cell phone or all three?

I am not a big television watcher, I mean who has that kind of time these days, but I do enjoy tuning into MTV’s “My Super Sweet Sixteen” from time to time. For those of you who have never seen or heard of this reality program, it features an incredibly spoiled teenager, the son or daughter of extremely wealthy parents, planning an elaborate party to celebrate his or her sixteenth birthday. These kids order around a team of adults working for them and scream at their parents when they don’t get their way. In planning a recent party for my mother’s retirement, the deejay told me he had never even heard of a Sweet Sixteen party, but that he now his provides the music for one of these galas at least several times per month. Can we blame television for turning our kids into spoiled brats? Or can we blame ourselves as parents for not knowing when to say no?

Joe and I are minimalists. We have to be – we live in an 840 square foot apartment. From the beginning we agreed to raise The Meemers with these same values so that she grows to appreciate all that she has and so that she understands how blessed she is to have even the basics in life, like love, good parents, health and shelter and that the rest of the material – clothes and toys – are just niceties in life – luxuries.

It isn’t always easy. A few months back we visited friends in Maryland, parents of a three-year old whose toys could quite honestly fill a small warehouse and overflowed into every room in their modest home, including the kitchen. There were so many bath toys that the tub had to be emptied of all its accessories before being able to fit the children in it! On the drive home I commented on the number of toys and Joe said. “Do you think that we need to buy The Meemers some more toys, she barely has any?” “It’s not that MeMo has too few – it’s that Evan has too many,” I pointed out.

As the youngest of 21 cousins, The Meemers has been given and handed down more toys than any one-year-old could ever know what to do with. When we placed a few of the new ones in her room to attempt to determine what she liked and what would be donated, she was so over-stimulated that she became frustrated and began to cry! This was enough proof for me. We packed up more than three quarters of the toys and brought them to a women’s and children’s shelter. We’ll continue to do this throughout MeMo’s life, carefully explaining the process and helping her to understand how much we actually need versus what American society and the advertising industry say we do. We also hope to teach her the concept of having “just enough” and the importance of giving and helping out those who have less than we do.

The Meemers is just getting her first set of teeth, so we have a long way to go before we can experiment with visits from the Tooth Fairy in this house. Hopefully a dollar will buy a bit more excitement than it did for my sister’s kid and The Meemers, without her cell phone, iPod or video games, will be able to better enjoy the simple joys of being a child, like we once did.

[tags]children, parenting, kids, questions, tooth fairy, teeth, gifts, toys, indulgence, abundance, ipod, cell phone, video games[/tags]
Photo graciously provided by Kaptain Kobold, through a Creative Commons license, some rights reserved