With Christmas quickly approaching, the number one priority for many parents is the provision of gifts for their children.
The holiday season for many parents often involves a lot of spending. Every year families partake in this commercialized version of Christmas wasting hundreds and sometimes thousands of dollars on toys. To make matters worse, the Christmas holiday often falls between Black Friday, Cyber Monday and Boxing week. Subsequently, the urge to waste more money on holiday significantly increases.
According to reports by Forbes, just in the year 206 alone, the average parent spent just over $1,700 during the holiday season. Maya Kachroo-Levine, a personal finance writer illustrated how much exactly that large sum of money is actually benefitting the kids. This year, parents are predicted to spend at least $495 dollars per child. This is a $100 increase from last year’s predicted spending expense.
As a result of these figures, the UK’s best-selling psychological author, Oliver James, firmly believes that all that Christmas spending should be geared towards holidays instead of toys. He went on to further reiterate his point that children often do not want or either have any value for the gifts they often receive. He further stated that the tradition of providing children with gifts and more expensive material commodities for kids as they get older is only boosting the respective industry’s profits.
However, he believes that unlike meaningless toys, holidays are more valued by children at the moment that they occurred and also will be further meaningful in the future. Subsequently spending more money on a holiday is more valuable when compared to toy gifts for children. Thomas Gilovich, a psychology professor at Cornell University carried out a test study that was rather eye-opening. From the experiments, Thomas Gilovich was able to deduce the fact that humans derive happiness not from intrinsic objects but rather from experiences.
Article originally published on Disclose.tv: Parents Should Take More Family Vacations Instead Of Buying Toys, Scientists Say