There is a strange test we seem to have developed for children's gifts. If something keeps a child occupied for thirty minutes, it is good. If it keeps them occupied for two hours, it is even better. And if they can use it without needing a parent to sit beside them, we have somehow hit the jackpot.
I understand where this comes from. Parents are busy, families are becoming smaller, grandparents often live in another city, and the network of people who once surrounded a child every day is no longer a given. A mother handing her child a screen while she finishes an office call or gets something done at home is not doing it because she has carefully concluded that another hour on YouTube is the ideal childhood experience. Very often, she is doing it because she needs twenty minutes and this is the thing she knows will work.
So this isn't another argument about screens being evil. I don't think they are.
What worries me more is that the same logic has quietly entered the way we buy things for children.
We have started choosing gifts by asking how entertaining they are, how many features they have, whether they light up, make sounds, connect to something, respond to something, or increasingly, whether they can keep a child occupied for long enough. At the more expensive end, many of these products eventually lead back to a screen, an app, an account or some form of connected experience.
There is plenty happening. I am just not always sure how much of it requires the child to do anything.
And children, inconveniently for the gifting industry, have a wonderful habit of exposing this.
I have bought expensive gifts for children and inexpensive ones, and I have lost count of how many times the cheaper thing has won. Give a child an elaborate toy car and a simple balloon, and there is a reasonable chance the balloon gets more attention. Spend thousands on a toy and they may still end up in your kitchen playing with utensils. They will wear your slippers, open the drawer you have specifically asked them not to open, pick up some completely ordinary object and find a use for it that nobody designing a children's product would have imagined.
The "don't do that" part is more interesting than it sounds.
A drawer asks something of them. What is inside it? A utensil can become something other than a utensil. An oversized pair of slippers has to be figured out. A balloon moves differently depending on what you do to it. The child acts, something happens, and then the child reacts to what happened.
There is a loop.
A good gift, to me, should create some version of that loop.
It doesn't necessarily have to teach the alphabet, improve mathematical ability or arrive with a list of developmental outcomes printed on the box. I think we have become slightly obsessed with making everything "educational" too. A gift can simply introduce a child to a story they haven't heard before, a sound they haven't encountered, something they can build, a question they hadn't thought of, a piece of their culture they don't yet know, or a different way of looking at something familiar.
The point is not that every gift needs to make a child smarter. The point is that it should leave some room for the child.
That also means I am not convinced that asking children what they want and then buying exactly that is always the thoughtful thing to do.
Of course children should have preferences. Of course there is enormous joy in watching them open something they have desperately wanted. But children can only ask for things they already know exist. Their choices are inevitably shaped by what they have seen around them, what their friends have, what they have watched and what has been marketed to them.
If every gifting decision begins and ends there, we aren't really introducing them to very much.
Adults used to play another role too. Parents, grandparents, uncles, aunts and family friends brought different things into a child's world. Sometimes you loved those things immediately. Sometimes you didn't. Sometimes something that looked completely uninteresting became the thing you remembered years later.
I think there is value in that.
And this is also where the conversation around screens becomes more complicated than "screen bad, wooden toy good."
A screen used intentionally can show a child something extraordinary. It can introduce music, places, people, languages and ideas that would otherwise be difficult to access. The problem begins when the screen stops being something we choose for a reason and becomes the default answer to boredom, irritation, dinner, travel, waiting, crying and every empty ten minutes in between.
Intentional exposure is very different from exposure because we don't know what else to do.
Perhaps gifting deserves the same distinction.
We can give children things that do all the work for them, or we can occasionally give them something that asks them to participate. Something that makes them wonder what happens next. Something that requires their hands, their imagination, another person, a little patience or even a little boredom before they figure it out.
At HappyyNest, this is something we are still thinking through ourselves. We talk a lot about screen-free experiences, Indian rituals and the things children can discover through play, but I don't think the answer is to replace one rigid philosophy with another. Childhood doesn't need another set of adults insisting that they have figured out the perfect way to do it.
Maybe we just need to become a little more intentional about what we put in front of children.
Because if a child ignores the expensive toy we bought and spends the next forty minutes playing with the cardboard box it came in, perhaps the child isn't missing the point.
Perhaps we are.
