Hey parents – When you make a casual observation about your child’s play, do you often find yourself landing upon the desire to buy something?
Or non-parents, do you find yourself applying this logic to yourself? That every problem or situation require a purchase in order to somehow make it better?
Example – A Child At Play
Our kiddo LOVES scooping. He spends hours and hours dumping beans, rice or soapy water between containers. Playing pretend, making messes, and generally being his creative little toddler self.
The reactions I get when I post these kinds of photos are full of many of these comments:
You should buy him a water table!
He needs a play kitchen
You should get him his own set of dishes!
Think About It
I know these commenters mean well, but I wish that folks would sit down and really think about why that reaction surfaces at all.
Why do we think that we can buy a solution to every problem or purchase something to make every experience into something else?
Money Can’t Buy Play
Happiness, luck, faith, and future – the human experience truly requires we make these things, not buy them.
These experiences make us human!
When our first reaction to every problem or observation is to buy something, that is our internalized capitalism and consumerism speaking.
That’s okay. Don’t get stuck in a shame loop and find your safe unable to change. And don’t freak out that sometimes we just have to buy stuff! Such is life. We need things (heck, I promote plenty of “things” myself beause they help us to live more sustainably!) Just acknowledge that heck – we were all born into this capitalist world that we exist in, and we need to unwind some of these hyperconsumptive ideas.
We Can Change It
We can’t change the future if we don’t practice unpacking our past. If a child happily playing with pans and spoons is primarily an indicator to you that he needs a different thing – please just take some time to think about why that is, and maybe what other areas of your life you respond this way.
This post is a modified version of a Facebook post – it is meant to provide food for thought based on some musings and online discourse on the page, not to be a complete essay or wholly articulated idea. Not everything we post is as polished as our core content, and we’re okay with that 🙂