The Best Gift Has No Price Tag

As the crisp cold mornings declare the approach of the holidays, retailers are bracing for action. Holiday catalogs and coupon booklets have been wending their way to our mailboxes for weeks, beckoning us to come and shop.

With four children of my own, I’m quite familiar with the December dilemma: How much to buy, and for which children, and will they really play with it longer than they play with the box it came in?

I scour educational catalogs looking for toys or games that truly seem innovative, worthwhile and sturdy. If the toy/game has fewer than 400 tiny pieces, that’s also a bonus! I know that eventually the children will tire of their holiday booty and may even forget about it after a time. Still, I love the squeals of excitement as they hungrily rip the paper from the plastic tool belt and exclaim that it’s “the best present ever!”

But the truth is, the very best present from a parent to a child doesn’t come in any box, bag or envelope. It needs no wrapping paper. It shouldn’t need a special occasion, such as Christmas or Chanukah, to be given.

And when it comes to sheer durability, nothing beats it. The present I’m talking about is, of course, the loving attention that our children really want and need. And it’s precisely this kind of exclusive attention that we are often most hard pressed to give.

Too often, we placate our kids with material gifts to fill an empty space in our relationship with them. Our lives are so fast-paced that there is precious little time to devote to our children.

I have been as guilty as anyone: During weeks that were frenzied with activity, and I paid less attention than I should have to my children, I bought them a new Lego set or some such gift that I quickly stopped for at the drugstore on the way home.

Of course, they were thrilled to get the present when it wasn’t even anyone’s birthday, but I knew it was a kind of a bribe: you sit and play with this so I can finish my work.

There’s no harm in these “kiddie kickbacks,” if they are rare occurrences, but when we as parents spend more time figuring out how not to be with our children than we spend with them, there’s a serious problem.

As much as kids love toys and games, they love and need us, their mothers and fathers, to be with them, hold them, read with them, build a fort with them, tickle them and play ball with them.

We need to just be there when they tell us about the kids at school or when they show us their spelling tests with only one mistake.

We parents are guilty of telling our kids “In a minute,” or “I can’t; I’m too busy now,” and wish they would go read or play so we can do something else. When we ask our kids to pick up their clothes or do their homework, we generally don’t react well to “in a minute” responses from them. Why do we expect our children to be satisfied with ours?

It’s true, kids will probably get bored with even the most “exciting” of toys, but they’ll never, ever get tired of a parent’s loving attention. So as December races by, and we budget for our holiday gift buying, let’s also budget for the most precious gift of all: time for them.

xxxx