The gifts we give children shape them and reveal what we expect of them

By David McElroy · December 25, 2011

For many children, the passing of years is marked by when they got for Christmas. There was the train set when I was 3 (which you see above), walkie talkies and a “spy kit” when I was 9, chemistry set and electrical experiment kit when I was 11, and books for most years thereafter. The things I got seemed to reflect who I was and how the people around me saw me. I wonder how much our childhood gifts shape us?

I’m thinking about this because of different presents I’m seeing for kids around me today. Two contrasting examples stand out, because they represent entirely different approaches, at least in my mind.

A couple of my friends have a beautiful and charming young daughter named Linnea. Among Linnea’s Christmas pictures this morning, there’s a whole series of her with her 36 new containers of Play-Doh. She looks happy, and it makes me imagine all the things she’s going to pull out of her little imagination and bring to life with those little pieces of modeling clay.

A 12-year-old neighbor of mine named Joseph came running over to me excitedly a couple of hours ago to tell me that he had gotten an iPhone 4S for Christmas. He knows that I have an iPhone and he’s told me about wanting one before, so he couldn’t wait to tell me about his.

Nobody could accuse me of not thinking the iPhone is a great gift. (An iPhone that I gave someone four years ago stands out as the Christmas present I’ve been most happy to give so far.) But as I thought about different things that kids can get — and what those things represent — that Play-Doh looked better and better.

It’s not really fair to compare what you give a 12-year-old and what you give a 3-year-old, but these still represent different philosophies, it seems. One represents being more passive — consuming content — while the other represents a blank slate that can become anything. Many of the things that kids receive today — smartphones, gaming devices, media players and so forth — are all about being passive. I wonder if that is going a long way toward creating a generation that’s more comfortable consuming content than creating it.

Linnea’s parents are both artists. They don’t do it for a living, but they’ve both made films and have creativity and insight about the world around them. It seems to me that the dozens of containers of Play-Doh reflect that creativity — and they reflect that they want her to create, rather than just be a passive consumer.

I don’t object to kids getting iPhones — although it surpasses everything I could have even imagined when I was 12 — but I wonder whether we help them in the long run with presents like that. Maybe I’m wrong. Maybe it’s not a big deal. But I just know something inside me says they’d be better off with someone that would encourage them to make things instead of consume things.

Decades after I got that train set when I was 3, I still have parts of it. The engine and tender sit proudly on a bookshelf near my desk. That’s it below. I used and abused it as a kid. I pulled the engine out. I broke parts of it. I fixed what I broke. The cow-catcher from the front is missing today. I learned to imagine it was something more than it was. I made up (and even recorded) stories that would embarrass me for you to hear today.

But that train and others that followed were things that required my imagination. They helped shape me. They made me a creator rather than just a consumer. I think that’s a good thing.

Linnea might not still have her Play-Doh decades from now. (I suspect it will have dried out by then.) But I suspect she will keep a sense of imagination that will be fostered by parents who want her to be creative. Joseph will be a consumer with his iPhone, but there will be no lasting impact. I know which one I think got the better present today, even if Joseph wouldn’t understand that.

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If you have problems with high blood pressure, I’d like to encourage you to consider making serious changes to your diet. There might be some people who don’t have any choice but to start taking prescription medications for high blood pressure, but I’d like to tell you that I have completely eliminated my issue by eliminating all sugar and almost all carbohydrates. (A couple of months ago, my blood pressure hit 185/144, which was dangerously high — considered stage 3 hypertension.) By completely changing my eating habits, I’m down 22 pounds and my blood pressure is now in the “ideal” range — without taking any medication. In addition, I sleep better and I have more energy. Getting away from the sugar-laden mess that we generally refer to as “highly processed food” has been a life-changer for me. Now my challenge is to avoid slipping back into old habits — by eating in the dangerous ways that almost everyone in our society has come to see as normal.

When I first heard about this, I thought it must be satire. When I discovered it was real, I was appalled, but I still thought it must be a one-time thing from some nutty activist. But it turns out it’s the latest bit of pandering to a bunch of far-left activists who believe that a man can become a woman if he decides to claim he’s a woman. As everybody knows, men have prostate glands. Women do not. Period. End of story. Men can get prostate cancer. Women cannot. But political activists are so eager to pretend that a man claiming to be a “trans woman” is really a woman that they are insisting that “women” be included in public health messages about the issue. This is nothing but political virtue-signaling. If you’re a man, you know which parts you have. You know that you ought to be screened. Nobody is made any safer by dragging far-left gender ideology into simple medical reality.

Every time someone tries to tighten requirements around the use of absentee ballots, I hear screams from Democrats and others on the political left that such efforts are nothing but “suppression of black voters.” These protests have never made sense to me, especially because it’s never been a secret that absentee ballot fraud goes on all the time in certain areas. (Everybody knew it when I worked in politics.) The people who engage in such fraud are rarely caught — often because the local political establishment approves of the crime — but a Democrat who won a primary election in Clay County, Alabama, last year has pleaded guilty to this sort of cheating. Terry Andrew Heflin was running for a place on the Clay County Commission. He was caught ordering seven absentee ballots in the names of various voters and sending them to his post office box — after which he used the ballots to vote absentee for himself seven time. Did he have other people cast additional fraudulent ballots? We’ll never know. But in a primary in which he was able to win with only 141 votes, it wouldn’t take many fraudulent votes to change the election. The next time you hear “civil rights activists” claim that it’s just “voter suppression” to hurt blacks which is at the root of efforts to stop this fraud, remember Terry Heflin. If you care about fair and honest elections, ballot security and voter identity should matter to you.

A state legislator in Maine has been stripped of the ability to speak in the state Legislature — and her votes are not being counted on legislative issues — all because she made a truthful social media post. Rep. Laurel Libby (R-Auburn, Maine) opposes allowing boys to compete against girls’ teams in school athletics and she’s become known for making an issue of it. On Feb. 17, she posted on Facebook about a recent example that she found outrageous. She posted side-by-side photos of a boy named John who competed last year in a state track event and won fifth place against other boys two years ago — and a photo of the same boy (now called Katie) who won first place in the same event this year against girls. Whether you find this outrageous or not, Libby is clearly being honest and truthful about the objective facts of an issue of public importance. But the state Legislature censured her. Democrats decreed that she could not speak in the House and that her votes would not count on legislation — until she apologized for the outrage of telling the truth. She refused and her constituents have been unrepresented in the state House since then. The people who promote this ideology are out of touch with reality and won’t rest until they force the rest of us to join them in this delusion. But even if you agree with “trans” ideology, you should be appalled at this heavy-handed attack on political speech.

The late Steve Jobs was at the center of our culture’s transition from analog to digital. He co-founded Apple Computer. He led the team that revolutionized personal computing with the first Macintosh. As CEO of Apple, he led the development of the iPhone and later the iPad. You would think the children of such a man would be surrounded by technology. But Jobs and his wife Laureen didn’t let their children use iPads. Their home had few screens of any kind. Even though Jobs spent most of his time developing and selling Macs and iPhones and iPads, he was home with his wife and children for dinner when he was in town. The family ate together at a simple wooden table in their kitchen — and there were no digital devices or focus on popular culture. Instead, he’s said to have guided his family toward deep discussions of art, philosophy and education — with no iPads to be found. If the man who guided the development of such products chose a different path for his own children, does that suggest that his digital experience taught him that children need human connection, not screens? And does it suggest the possibility that we might be better off if we made the same choice for our families?

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