by Sandra Lowen

Created on: February 06, 2010

BUYING CHILDREN’S LOVE WITH EXPENSIVE GIFTS

I still see Jana in my mind: gray Calvin Klein distressed jeans still crisp from their packaging, pink cashmere hoodie speckled with silver flecks, golden hair spilling in perfect tendrils down her cheeks, plastered to her face by her tears. She held a letter in her bejeweled hand, and she was trembling.

“It’s from my parents,” she said. “They’re going to Europe for Christmas. They’ve sent a check, so I can go wherever I like.” With that pronouncement she disappeared into her single room.

For a hot minute I wanted her life: to be free to trot the globe without the encumbrance of parents, with their rules and caveats. But looking at Jana, I could tell she didn’t feel the same. Her parents provided her with what they thought every seventeen-year-old wanted: freedom.

Jana wanted them.

She decided to go to the Bahamas. She booked a room on Paradise Island and bought some hats and a dress she could wrap six ways, but that would be useless back home until summer. She met a boy and pretended she thought she loved him long enough to lose her virginity and her self-respect to him. Back on campus, she made the requisite trip to the infirmary, where she discovered she’d dodged several bullets. She refused her parents’ calls for a few days, then spoke to them in that breathless way that should have indicated to them that she was terribly disappointed with them.

They thought they had given Jana a very special holiday. Jana, on the other hand, spent most of the rest of the semester trying to forget it.

Pushed Away

In this age of must-have gadgets, many parents lose focus. Many don’t worry too much that their children want things; all a parent has to do to get them is to work harder. Giving of a parent’s self, however, is another matter. Many parents insist that they come home tired and stressed, and cannot think of much that they want to do, other than ‘vedge out’ in front of the TV with a drink and a snack and let the world go by. Surely, they convince themselves, their children have friends, whose company surely they prefer to some wrung-out parent. And there is always the TV and its Wii and Blu-ray appendages. But in some other room, please.

It has become custom, particularly in more developed countries, to abandon children to their own devices early. All too often, however, this leads not only to a weakening of the family bond, but also

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