If you limit your children, as someone said they will eventually get older and out from under your control and do their own thing. If you want them to make good choices, they need to be able to make those choices just like adults do every day. There are real life limitations such as budget and if you get children involved in that as they can handle it, you might be surprised at how much they will understand. Unfortunately, parents place all these limits on their children and then send them out in the world and they can’t cope. Do you think all the credit card debt and bankruptcies are by people who were allowed to just consume as children? Hardly.

I also agree with the poster about those of you who limit the tv or worse don’t allow it. My experience is that those children will become sneaky or actually “binge” on it when they become adults.

Partner with your children so that they will be able to make choices based on available information. You can’t do this when all you try and do is control everything they do. Hide toy magazines? You are actually encouraging consumerism by doing that. Consumerism is not a terrible thing btw. Yes, kids get bombarded but if you partner with your children to wade through all of the advetisements, then they can make choices and yes some of them will not be so great ones but that is how most adults learned too. Can’t learn if you aren’t allow to even make a choice. My children have purchased plastic stuff that fell apart and that is how they learn that some things that look great on tv or in catalogues aren’t necessarily all that wonderful. They can’t learn this if I am controlling their choices. When they are very young, I take them to the dollar store and they are quite happy selecting toys and being satisfied this way.

I love the toys as much as they do and we are a cash only family. No debt at all.

I had a LOT of fun going through those as a kid. I’d spend hours “researching” what I wanted for Christmas – documenting it, comparing similar items, adding things up, etc.

I had relatively little hope of getting more then 1 or 2 things but it was still fun.

What we are doing is collecting them all until we get some snow or at least cold weather – then we’ll give them to the kids.

They will be good reading projects for the older ones and I suspect the younger one will see again that books can be fun.

After they have gone through them 200 times they will cut them up – each selecting a page full of things they really want which we will carefully fold up, slip in an envelope and then I “take” them to the mail box to send to Santa.

Then we buy them what we were planning to all along. We are the parents after all.

And since when did Sears become the new Santa Claus?

We had the envelope around all year — and used it for birthday and just because gifts too. But it kept the list down to the things that were the most important to the child at the time.

Now my boys both have amazon wish lists, that they update regularly throughout the year — some times they save up money to these things themselves, sometimes they delete old things they don’t want any more, and occasionally someone buys them something off the list.

For older children (and adults!) magazines are just as bad. Any more, magazines are just catalogs with a couple of short articles tossed in (except for a few like Times or Newsweek).

If you can find the time to do it, browsing a catalog with your kids may represent as much a Teaching Moment as watching the idiot box with them. Sit down with them over a catalog and make some fun of the hype, point out the misleading messages, remind the older ones of the toys covered with poison (!) our Chinese trading partners have so kindly sent us, show them how to find product reviews on the Web, and guide them toward making intelligent buying decisions about all the bait being thrown their way.

The Sears catalog doesn’t seem to fall into the same category as a toy catalog, which marshalls every sophisticated psychological and marketing trick known to personkind in a deliberate campaign to target children. When I was a kid, we got the Sears catalog because we lived overseas in a remote area where no normal U.S.-style shopping was available. I loved looking at it, and learned a lot about tools, clothing, and gadgets I’d never seen. But then, that catalog was not aimed and kids…even the toy ads addressed parents, not children.

Too bad advertisers aren’t required to do the same these days. When hucksterism goes out of control, it calls for regulation.

If we have kids we’d like to do something similar but with some store-bought gifts, too (I remember the fun of a little excess, after all). Catalogs we never saw as kids but we were inundated by T.V., that’s for sure.

All that said, materialism at Christmas isn’t a problem if the rest of the year you don’t raise materialistic kids.

I would argue it is better the teach your child, from a young age, to cope with the urge to acquire material possessions – it exists within all of us. Help them to learn by asking them to limit the size of their list and explain why. Get them thinking about these issues – and they will deal with them that much better when you are no longer able to shelter them from rampant materialism.