Good Enough Page 21
Fast-forward to 2011 and it’s Christmas time. Like most mums, I’ve slaved all year to pay for this extravagant day, but now that the presents are wrapped and sprawled for what seems a 200-metre radius around our tree, my heart sinks a little. Once again, I have clearly overdone it. Okay, to be fair, I had only meant to buy her one large present and a couple of smaller items, but somewhere along the way, with all the work trips I’ve taken and the long nights writing in front of the computer, maternal guilt took over and I bought up big in an effort to appease my feeling of unease at not being around as much as I’d like. ‘Geez, do you think she has enough presents?’ asks Lee sarcastically as he combs through the gazillions of items with ‘Cella’ name tags. Possibly, but I’m not admitting to anything. ‘Teddy Ruxpin,’ I shrug as though this explains everything and promptly exit the room to fetch our toddler.
As predicted, when Cella sees the pile of presents, she is beyond ecstatic. Squealing, she runs towards the tree with her arms outstretched and my heart swells with love. I’m clearly creating seriously happy childhood memories for her to look back on one day. This kid, I tell myself, will not be kicking chairs and popping out for the aforementioned heroin any time soon. Cella picks up one of the larger boxes first, a crying, urinating Baby Born doll. I consider it my ace card because I’m sure she’s going to go mental over it. But curiously, she doesn’t. She rips open the gold paper with gusto then merely inspects it for all of ten seconds before discarding it to one side like one might discard a condom after a cheap one-night stand. ‘Next!’ she bellows and another present is immediately placed in her hands by her over-eager grandparents. I’m mute, too mortified to say or do anything. Cella opens the present – a beautiful jewellery box – and after giving it a cursory glance, dumps that to the side too. ‘Next!’ I’m ashamed to say she goes through her entire Christmas pile this way, only stopping to smile after Lee and I admonish her about not being grateful. But generally? She’s a bloody robot. Where’s the excitement? That giddy feeling of receiving something you’ve been hanging out for all year? ‘Oh my God – what if she’s a sociopath and not capable of feeling emotion?’ I ask Lee dramatically as I start knocking back the Christmas vino. ‘Babe, look at her cousins – they’re doing exactly the same thing.’ He nods in the direction of my niece and nephew doing their own version of A Clockwork Orange in the corner. ‘It’s obviously a generational thing.’ This does nothing to placate me and I make a mental note to hide the family cat before I leave lest the droids decide to strangle it and dress it up in dolls’ clothes.
Later that afternoon we drive over to my girlfriend Nicole’s house, where we witness the same scene unfold with her toddler, and we see it again an hour later when our respective friend Belinda arrives with her kids. ‘What the hell is wrong with them?’ I whisper as we lock ourselves up in the bathroom like naughty teenagers sneaking a cigarette. ‘We were never like that!’ I am indignant of course. ‘Well, no we weren’t . . .’ says Nicole, ‘but we didn’t get everything we wanted when we were kids. Things are different now.’ Well, I’ll be damned. All this time I’ve been bemoaning the fact I never got a Teddy Ruxpin but I never once considered how much more I appreciated everything else I received in place of it. Could it be that . . . the absence of Teddy Ruxpin has – gasp – actually taught me things like respect for material possessions, gratitude and regard for what’s right and wrong? I’m starting to get an uneasy feeling I’ve been going the wrong way about creating a happy childhood for my daughter.
‘Fuck yeah,’ confirms my inexplicably honest friend Amy when I bring the subject up with her the following day. Amy works in security detail for an NGO and has spent the past ten years working in the toughest refugee camps around the world. ‘Dilvin, day in day out, I visit kids living in the most deplorable conditions,’ she says as we sip tea in Cella’s bedroom. ‘We’re talking about kids whose parents have died, who are traumatised by war, and have absolutely nothing, but give these kids a stick or a newspaper and they entertain themselves for hours,’ she says. ‘They may not have much quality of life but in those hours while they’re playing they’re far happier than any kid I’ve ever seen playing here.’ Ouch. Listening to Amy talk, when I take a moment to look around Cella’s room I am struck by how much crap my daughter has. Clothes – many of them with tags still attached – spill out of her wardrobe and toys litter every surface, some still sealed and waiting to be played with. It would be easy to pass Cella off as some kind of spoilt brat – but it has nothing to do with Cella, who is not yet at an age when she asks for things. Long story short, this monster is my creation entirely and I know it, but it begs the question: Just how much ‘stuff’ does a three-year-old need, anyway?
Glancing at the stats regarding children and consumerism, things start to look pretty freakin’ grim straight away. According to recent research, the average Australian child now has more than 100 toys thanks to ma and pa who collectively spend more than $1.4 billion dollars a year acquiring them. And disgustingly, they only ever throw or give away less than five of these toys a year, which not only says a lot about the parents’ character but also speaks volumes about their superior organisational and packing skills. Oh, and the hundred doesn’t include any hand-me-downs a child may receive from older siblings, friends whose children are older, or that distant relo you secretly can’t stand but put up with because they pass on all their kids’ designer gear. No, social researchers are quick to point out most children are bought a set of everything brand new, such is the pressure of keeping up with other families. ‘It makes sense,’ says my friend Sophie, mother to the world’s most sullen 13-year-old. ‘There’s a real pressure for parents to buy things because every other kid at school has them and you want them to fit in.’ She’s forever buying new phones and Xboxes in an attempt to put a smile on her little Goth’s dial. Listening to her, I nod, but I can’t help thinking my parents never had this problem. As Nicole suggested on Christmas Day, we’re living in different times now.
According to all the research papers, what it basically comes down to is that kids are drowning in material goods because their ’rents are worried their little ones will be gunning down their schoolmates in years to come because their peers shunned them for not having the right gear. Interestingly, this is something felt more acutely in low-income families. But does the constant kerching! at the till make them any less prone to climb the clock tower? Is the kid with a replica Ferrari toy car and thousands of dollars’ worth of Dior dresses any happier than the kid who whiles away the hours playing with sticks and buttons? Hell no. Several studies reveal materialistic kids are less happy and some even go so far as to suggest unhappiness and materialism negatively influence one another, causing a downward spiral. As in, people who are dissatisfied with their lives may think material possessions will make them happy and when that fails, they become even more discontent.
Long story short, as parents we’re all screwed. First, consciously or not, it appears we socialise kids to become materialistic through our own behaviour. If you’re label conscious and constantly feeding a shopping addiction yourself, the more likely it is your child will grow up to be just like you. It turns out that when parents model materialism, their kids care a lot more about wealth and luxury – funny that. Secondly, the children of parents who are poor (the financially disadvantaged tend to be among the most label conscious) or emotionally distant also tend to become master of the ‘gimmes’ through the simple fact that when we feel insecure, unloved or that any of our own needs aren’t being met, we often try to quash our children’s insecurities by striving to own a lot of stuff. So if you’re not a brand slave yourself or not beating your kid every chance you get, the chances of having a consumer-crazed kid are pretty slim and even if they do act out, it’s worth admitting to yourself it’s not them – sadly, it’s you.
So the problem remains: how do I teach Cella that the world isn’t how she views it? That every toddler in the world doesn’t don her best Ralph Laur
en and hit the cafes to drink babycinos and play with all the toys her mother can carry? I decide then and there that my daughter needs perspective. And I’m going to give it to her. ‘Jesus, Dilvin, what are you going to do?’ sighs Lee as he spots me madly typing at my computer and circling information in a notebook. He’s obviously worried ‘perspective’ is a middle-class word for a good beating. We end up sponsoring two little girls in Romania and make a point of shopping for them and packing it all up together. We collect donations from organisations such as Fisher-Price and post them to overseas orphanages and local children’s hospitals, and when it’s bedtime, we go over David Mollison’s excellent Where Children Sleep, a coffee-table book depicting children’s bedrooms all over the world, from the pageant queens of the American Midwest to the slums in Brazil. Honestly, if this book doesn’t give a kid a dose of reality, I don’t know what will. It’s a hit and when I tuck her in and turn out the light, I know she’s grateful to be lying under her thick princess motif covers with a loving mum hovering above her bed.
I won’t lie that the urge to shop doesn’t still drive me. If Cella falls in love with a book and I discover there’s another 19 in the series, it’s ridiculously difficult to stop myself from jumping online and ordering every single one. But then I think back to Christmas Day and the difference between her behaviour that day and more recently when she’s packed charity boxes and I step the hell away from the computer. You might be able to spoil a kid by buying them too much stuff, but you can’t spoil them by loving them too much.
How do we stop our kids from becoming materialistic?
Professor Tim Kasser, author of The High Price of Materialism, has written extensively on this topic and believes whether kids grow up to be rampant consumerists or not lies entirely in the hands of their parents. To stop your child from becoming the kind of child who’ll pummel your head in with a crystal vase as you sleep because he or she was annoyed you didn’t get them the latest phone, he recommends you:
1. Fight the ‘gimmes’. Limit screen time (including TV and computers) to 30 minutes per day so your kids are exposed to fewer commercial messages. When they do encounter commercials, encourage your kids to ‘ad bust’ from an early age. The first step is to help your children understand the ad by asking questions like, ‘What are they selling me?’, ‘Why are they selling it to me?’ and ‘What are they claiming it will do for me?’ The second step is to help your kids make fun of some of the truly ridiculous ads out there by creating your own scripts that send up the ads. Doing this will help them become much more media literate.
2. Give time, not stuff. Most parents have at one stage or another bought their children ‘stuff’ to make up for working long hours. A present now and then won’t hurt, of course, but engaging in this regularly ends up teaching children that material things are more important than time spent with family and loved ones. Instead of buying something to salve your conscience and show your love, try letting your children choose a fun family activity for a day that you can all enjoy. During holidays, you can also volunteer together or give gifts of coupons for special days in the future. Make a point of collecting experiences rather than accumulating junk.
3. Spell it out: ‘You’re lucky.’ It’s important for your kids to know that compared with most of the world, they already have enormous amounts of stuff. Help children realise this by volunteering at your local soup kitchen or children’s hospital, and let your kids see how fortunate they really are. Encourage them to donate toys they don’t play with anymore or to save some of their pocket money to give to charity. They’ll soon realise that what they want isn’t really what they need.
4. Model it. You can’t expect your child to avoid the trappings of materialism if you’re spending your weekends carting around handfuls of shopping bags at your local shopping centre or shopping on the internet. You are your child’s biggest role model, so create a lifestyle that expresses the values you want them to absorb.
Children’s parties make me lose my mind
There’s nothing like an upcoming single-digit birthday to make most mums feel as though there’s a special place in hell reserved just for them. Regardless of whether you’re having a simple backyard bash or hiring a play space, you know you can look forward to endless chocolate crackle-making, late-night Thomas the Tank Engine cake tutorials on YouTube, and anxiously watching weather reports in the week leading up to it like it’s an Oscar-nominated movie. And not unlike weddings, you almost always go way over your budget.
‘You know what? I think we’ll just have five kids with a cake under a tree somewhere,’ I announce firmly to all and sundry each and every year once the topic of Cella’s birthday comes up. I say this with conviction, with gumption – believe me; there is weight behind these words. Not that it matters, because I have clearly become a laughing stock among loved ones. Some friends give me a tight smile as they hurriedly exit the room so I don’t see them in hysterics, while others cast their eyes downward and shuffle their shoes. ‘Um, yeah, Dilvin, sounds good,’ they mutter before an awkward silence takes hold. Their less-than-enthusiastic reaction is probably due to the fact that despite my assertive annual declarations, in the four years I’ve been a mother, my vision of a simple party has never actually eventuated. But, oh, how I wish it would and this year might just be my year.
‘What a joke!’ laughs Lee when he hears of my latest plan. ‘I know what your idea of a park party entails and it isn’t “simple”.’ Sigh . . . I know exactly where he’s going to go with this. ‘Need I remind you of Cella’s second birthday – held at “the park”?’ he continues. ‘Oh yes that’s right! You had balloons, sure, but let’s not forget you also had a professional stylist, a $500 cake, caterers, a professional photographer, a caricaturist to draw all the guests and to top it off – a two-page spread in a national women’s magazine!’ Lee is practically frothing at the mouth as he recounts the memory of the day where things went a little overboard. I cringe as I listen to him because really, how wanky and awful does that all sound? I mean, who the hell hires a professional stylist and caricature artist to entertain TWO-YEAR-OLDS? I’m with you. But for you to understand where I’m going with this, I need a quick moment to explain how it is I got to be this horrible person (and why I’m so desperate to get the hell away from it now).
After Cella was born, we had a pretty traumatic first year and early on Lee and I agreed we would have a big first birthday bash – not just for Cella, but as a pat on the back for ourselves for getting through the year without killing her or each other. That kind of thing deserves a celebration, doesn’t it? The party was due to be held in a park, but thanks to torrential rain we moved it to an old Scout hall nearby at the last minute and filled it with balloons, streamers, alcohol and a large buffet of fine Turkish cuisine. I cannot be trusted to bake anything so Lee took over and made a ridiculously good ladybird cake and every mini guest went away with a party bag full of choking hazards. It could not have gone better. That evening Lee and I crashed on the couch in an exhausted heap and high-fived each other as we toasted our success. ‘That was the best one-year-old’s party ever!’ exclaimed Lee, grinning from ear to ear. ‘Yep!’ I agreed, madly shovelling in handfuls of leftover ladybird cake. ‘But let’s just do five friends under a tree next year.’ ‘Done.’ And it would have been exactly that – had we not attended another one-year-old’s party the following day.
The invitation should have told me everything I needed to know; they very often do. Professionally printed, it was an ‘Admit One’ ticket for the circus experience of a lifetime – most definitely labour intensive, obviously expensive. Still, for the weeks it sat glued to my fridge with Vegemite, I was busy with preparations for Cella’s party and didn’t pay it much attention. On the way to the party, I was still riding high on the success of Cella’s killer soiree and the mood in the car could best be described as jovial – until we pulled up outside a large waterfront venue fit for a wedding and saw a massive WELCOME TO THE CIRCUS!
sign hung above the reception door, with red velvet curtains draped to each side. In front of the curtains sat two circus clowns eerily eyeing people as they walked past the woodfired pizza and slushy stations and arts and craft tables (where actual clowns were at the ready to assist the little darlings colour between the lines). Fuuuuuuuuck, I thought, as I unsteadily got out of the car trying (and failing) to successfully balance Cella, various bags and a gift. You have got to be kidding me.
If the outside of the venue was spectacular, the interior was absolutely breathtaking. Huge, hired canvas circus backdrops had been unfurled across walls and large hoops swung from the ceiling. Fairy floss machines, soda stands, coffee stations and dessert tables were shoehorned wherever there was space and people were dressed to the nines. It was a visual feast Baz Luhrmann himself would have been proud of. Taking it all in, I clutched an overwhelmed Cella by the hand and had two instantaneous horrible thoughts: 1) Holy crap, Cella’s party was complete shit, and 2) I need to up my game for future parties if Cella is ever going to love me. Needless to say, I spent the whole day (including during the halftime contortionist show) biting my nails with anxiety, wondering if this was how birthday parties were ‘done’ now. At the end of the day, all the kids were sent home with a large goldfish bowl full of live goldfish as their party favour and I had lost my will to live. As we drove in silence, I looked at Cella crashed out in her sugar coma and smiled sadly to myself. While she might be too small to care now, one day she will come to me and complain that her friends are having a runway party/carousel/performance by Elton John and I’m filled with horror at the thought. My insecurities getting the better of me, I decide then and there that I will give her an amazing second birthday. I may not be able to afford the contortionists or Elton, but by God, I will try harder. If I was to have any hope in keeping up with everyone else, I’d just have to.