Parenting Problems: Birthday Presents and Spoiled Kids

I’m really excited to start this series: Parenting Problems with you. There are constant struggles of parenthood, and as we continue to share them with one another, we will all become better equipped to make it through each struggle as better parents. 

My goal for this series, is to share some of my personal struggles and how I try to handle them, as a way to give strength and support to other women and parents who are tackling the same issues. I also hope you will share how you manage the same problems, and we can all learn from one another! Here’s to stronger parents, raising kind human beings! 

The Problem with Birthdays and Presents:

As most of you know, January is the Birthday Season in our family. We have 2 birthdays, 2 weeks apart (to the day — M and A are 12 months and 2 weeks apart). As you can imagine, the kids get a serious influx of presents during this time. We usually have 1 joint birthday party for the kids, school friends and our family. This year, we did a kid party in the morning and a family dinner in the evening. Before the actual “birthday parties” we had a school celebration AND home celebration for Miri on her actual birthday, and we will have multiple celebrations for Azi on his birthday as well. So you can see, it’s quite a lot. 

Aside from the fact that it’s really a lot of parties, and we will likely reconsider the scale to which we celebrate moving forward, I want to talk about presents and how we’ve handled it until now, what I’ve learned and how I plan to handle presents in the future.

How we used to handle presents:

Until this year, I could very easily get away with opening all of the presents, by myself, while my kids napped. I would separate gifts into 1) put away for later, 2) play with now and 3) donate or return. This worked so nicely, because I’m fully aware that too many gifts at one time can be overwhelming, especially for a toddler. I highly recommend doing this for as long as you can. But I knew that tactic wasn’t going to work forever. M turned 4 this January, and was VERY into presents. So we tried something else.

This year for presents:

I decided we would bring all of the presents home, sit in the living room and open everything one-by-one. I didn’t really think about the aftermath of opening all the presents. So once we had unwrapped everything, the scene was something like 2 very hungry sharks surrounded by tiny fish. Eyes wide, screaming that they wanted to open everything, and my mind was quickly overwhelmed with all the screaming, and I could no longer process anything as far as good parenting goes.

I think it’s important to note that I don’t blame my children for this. Birthdays are overwhelming in general, and I never taught them how we handle presents and getting a mass amount of “things” in one day. So it’s my job, as the parent, to put lessons in play to teach them how we approach this topic. Just like I teach them table manners, so I must also teach them gift receiving manners.

The entire day basically turned into a screaming battle between the kids and me over opening more presents vs. not opening more presents. I didn’t even bother to hide them. What a rookie mistake. After consulting a parenting expert who I trust and look to as a mentor, a lot of things are going to change moving forward.

Presents in the future:

I think this tactic can only work for so many years, but I hope to somewhat be able to downplay the role of presents in our celebrations by the time the kids are older. Pre-birthdays, I’ll prep the kids for the influx of presents they are going to receive. I’ll tell them Mommy and Tatty (Daddy) have spoken, and we both agree that too many presents at one time is not good for the kids. SO “in our family” we will put away all of our presents, and every day following, the kids can choose one present each, to open and play with until we’ve opened everything.

After everything is opened, based on what they choose to play with or not, as time goes on, I’ll decide what can be put away, if it isn’t age-appropriate yet, or donated. I believe that this will take a bit of enforcement to really become engrained as “the rule” with our kids, but I hope that it will help them become more appreciative of the celebration and the people who love them vs. the gift obsession.

Saying “Thank You”:

Toddlers are going to be toddlers, and I’ve realized that they have no concept of gratitude whatsoever. It’s our job as parents to teach them about gratitude, hakarat hatov, and we pray that it develops as they get older. 

This year, I feel that Miri is old enough to begin taking a part in her thank you notes. I plan to have her “sign” her name on every thank you note that I write. Adam and I also continually discuss who gave us the present, and how nice it was and thoughtful. I hope that by talking about being thankful, the feeling will start to be engrained in them. But I think gratitude is a whole other post. 

I would LOVE to hear how you handle birthdays, presents and out-of-control toddlers. Please let me know in the comments below!