Carolyn Hax: Environmentally aware parents want to rein in gifts for their kid

Q: My husband and I have become very conscious of our environmental impact as the amount of STUFF in the world keeps accumulating. Our local secondhand store is brimming with perfectly good things. We try to buy little new. We have an infant daughter, and I worry about her future.

What do we do about gifts? We detest the obligatory holiday gift culture. If going purely by our values, we would avoid gifts at holidays. On her birthday, we would put “please no gifts” on invites and have her pick a charity her guests could donate to. If there is a particular toy she wants, maybe we occasionally get it for her, but tie it to an accomplishment. There could be some allowance for holiday gifts from relatives.

But we live in an upper-middle-class neighborhood, where all the babies around us already seem to have more new things than we do. Our views feel extreme in this culture.

Also, my in-laws grew up with very little and are now excited to provide, which I empathize with. We are constantly fending off their offers to buy us things we don’t want, and nearly every week they bring smaller things without asking. We already had a conversation with them about this.

A part of me feels selfish, too, at the thought of depriving our daughter of the joy of receiving gifts that I felt as a child, especially with all the kids around her getting new things.

Any advice for where to draw the line? What I’d really love is for the culture to change.

— To Gift or Not to Gift?

A: This “too much stuff” issue is a microcosm of what awaits you as parents. You have years of decisions ahead that must account for (clears throat):

Your child’s needs; your needs; your values; your means; stakeholders’ various wants; stakeholders’ various feelings; traditions!; your influence, message and “footprint”; your household’s emotional health; miscellaneous unintended consequences.

And, really, sometimes you just want to buy a toy truck.

So while your specific thinking is not wrong — STUFF is a real problem — sometimes the biggest problem in child-rearing is when you frame something up front as a problem.

You want your daughter to have a healthy relationship with material things and not become another unfillable consumer void, yes. But if you become Those Parents “constantly fending off” gifts and consumerism, then you won’t just be denying a childhood joy; you’ll be handing your eventual teen her wedge issue, the counter-fixation for her hand-me-down anxiety, her Gucci habit to bludgeon you with the moment she’s able.

The moral of the microcosm is to keep your perspective. You will not save the planet, change the culture, enlighten the neighborhood, thwart the in-laws or perfect your daughter.

You can, however, make the decisions *within your reasonable control* as responsibly as you can, with an eye to emotional sustainability as well. Incorporating the secondhand store without fanfare, for example, is a statement in the form of a habit, which is the most influential kind.

Think of it as not deciding to go vegan but then — whenever there is a choice — quietly, boringly choosing the plant-based option.

Stay with me here: Cutting something out 100% eventually requires others’ participation, or merely awareness — and often push back comes with that. Hard. But cutting out 50, 75, 99% blends in, allowing others to volunteer to adjust. Which, counterintuitively, they tend to do.

You spoke to your in-laws, now just be. And donate things you don’t need.

• Email Carolyn at tellme@washpost.com, or chat with her online at 11 a.m. Central time each Friday at washingtonpost.com.

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