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"Holiday Present Price Creep" Plagues Parents

It’s been the year of the creep. We’ve had movie “ratings creep” where today’s PG-13 movie looks a lot like last year’s R rated one. More adult content has crept into the traditional family hour on TV. Images have crept into cell phones and we had the creep of the Adult Only content into the M rated Grand Theft Auto.

Now we have holiday present price creep. Since when did it become the norm for us to consider buying our children media devices that cost hundreds of dollars?

I became aware of this over the weekend as I stood hip deep in shoppers at my local Best Buy. Everyone grabbed for iPod Nanos, digital cameras, cell phones -- not just any cell phones, but ones that could take pictures, write grandmothers, download music and TV episodes. One mother systematically went from one flat panel screen to the next, measuring to find one that would fit in a picture frame opposite her 11-year-old daughter’s bed. Just to amuse myself, I investigated the new X-box. The very nice man told me, after I stopped choking, that I really didn’t have to spend $400 on the model he recommended. I could spend $300 but then I wouldn’t get all the wondrous new features that my son was sure to want. In other words, I could spend $300 just to disappoint a child.

This is nuts. Media content isn’t the only thing that has up-scaled; media players have too. This kind of consumer orgy can’t be good for our kids. Yet they tell us that “everyone” has a cell phone. “Everyone” has an iPod. “Everyone” has a computer to IM on.

Maybe “everyone” does. But that means that “everyone” is spending hundreds of dollars to bring something into the house that begs discussion. What happens when the iPod gets stolen, misplaced? Or when that first cell phone bill is $300 dollars? What happens when, because of the new gadgetry, the Xbox hours creep up and up and up and the games get bloodier and gorier? (For a great article on gadget overload, check here

As parents, we have the right to set our children’s expectations – about gifts and about what media is appropriate for them. We have the right to say “No, that movie/song/game isn’t right for you.” It’s hard to counter the pressures of peers and popular culture – especially during holidays time when we want to spoil our children and show our love. But we can show our love in ways that don’t wire our children even further into the media universe that already consumes more of their time than their school hours.

This holiday season, I’m going to make a stand against the creep. I’m going to buy something within my budget. If I don’t make the correlation between love and price tags, then maybe my kids won’t either. I will be buying CDs and DVDs and video games. But I will make sure the content is age-appropriate. There is no reason either of my kids has to shoot someone on a game, have porn spam on their phones, or watch movies where people drink and smoke for two hours. I’m sick of fighting price creep and content creep. I don’t want to be a fuddy-duddy, but isn’t the best gift I can give my children an extension on their childhoods?