Navigating the Christmas Toy Minefield

Over at The Gospel & Culture Project, there's an interesting article on one parent's attempt in "Navigating the Christmas Toy Minefield." There are no simple, clear-cut answers here, and you may flat out disagree at points, but it's still worth listening in on someone who is really wrestling with how to shepherd their children through this time of year. It is more applicable to younger children, but you might find some principles for older ones as well.

You can read the whole article here, or this excerpt:

Undeveloped hearts require protection. The toy store was the wrong training ground for equipping them for this task. It is designed to work against that. I suspect my hopes would have been better served by my going alone to buy our toys for sharing and having my kids help wrap them. Rowan Williams is right when he suggests that part of the adult responsibility for childhood is in cultivating a space in which our kids can grow up free from endless consumer choices.

“Children need to be free,” Williams writes, “of the pressure to make adult choices if they are ever to learn how to make adult choices.” The sheer number of possibilities, some of them really lovely and some more pernicious, is more than young children are ready to handle. They don’t even have the tools to choose something they will really enjoy instead of a junk toy that will be quickly abandoned. Thrown into a roiling sea of consumer goods, they drown.

And the concluding paragraph:

I hope the toys I give will help shape them into adults who have the equipment to make good, holy choices. I pray that the trembling excitement of Christmas Eve, the knowledge that there is fun and beauty and joy in the morning, might somehow be linked in my kids’ hearts to the miracle of what God has done for us in becoming flesh and dwelling among us.