The Whole Parent Podcast
The Whole Parent Podcast
Gift Overload, Meltdowns, And Real Gratitude #48
Episode Summary
Jon unpacks why kids often look “ungrateful” or overwhelmed during gift-heavy holidays—and why it has nothing to do with entitlement and everything to do with biology, routine disruption, and emotional overload. Through real parent questions, he explores what’s happening underneath the behavior, why forced gratitude backfires, and how parents can set expectations, model appreciation, and protect connection without trying to manufacture a perfect holiday moment. Listeners walk away with clarity, self-compassion, and grounded tools for approaching gift-giving in a healthier way.
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If you've ever watched your child tear through a pile of gifts, get overwhelmed, meltdown, and suddenly seem straight ungrateful, you're not alone. Maybe it looks like entitlement, maybe it looks like disappointment, maybe it's just a total sensory overload disguised as bad behavior. But today we're going to talk about what's actually going on beneath all of that. The psycho psychological, the emotional, the even biological layers that explain why kids struggle with gifts, and why gratitude is not something that you can simply turn on because we want them to. And most importantly, how we can navigate as parents without guilt, without shame, without trying to manufacture the perfect holiday moment. I'm going to share some simple expectations to set before gifts are even opened, some practical ways to teach gratitude without guilt or performative matters, a realistic picture of what gratitude looks like at different ages, why force thank yous often backfire. I'm also going to give you some tools to manage your own, that is to say, our own as parents, expectations, so that we're not carrying the pressure of making that perfect reaction or getting that perfect reaction out of our kids. Okay, let's dig into it. I dug back through the last year's holiday podcast episodes, which if you didn't know this, the last year's podcast, season two, was a little bit different than this. So season three is live. It's just kind of off the cuff. And I'm answering questions from people, whether that's like TikTok comments or Instagram DMs or emailed in. And if you have a question, you can always email it to podcast at wholeparentacademy.com. Um, and I just answer the questions and try and figure out like how is this all gonna work? So I dug back through last year's, which were more scripted out. I did like a Santa episode, it's really good. You should go listen to it. And I found out this, like, kind of I found these like painfully relevant ones. Some of them were actually comments on videos that I made about last year's podcast episode. But anyway, the first one comes from Megan, and it this was an Instagram DM. And somebody offered me this last week. They said, Hey John, we'd love to know where these come from so that we know like how we can get in touch with you. But the best way, again, is to submit them podcast at or at podcast at wholeparentacademy.com. But sometimes I pull them from other places, like when I'm trying to do an episode about something specific. And this one is if it wasn't clear, about gift overwhelm. How do you handle kids who are just like super overwhelmed by the Christmas morning experience? Okay, so here's from Megan, it's an I uh Instagram DM, and she says, John, please tell me that my four-year-old isn't broken. We did Christmas with my in-laws last night, and he legit melted down after opening like three gifts. My mother-in-law kept saying that he was being ungrateful. I honestly kind of snapped at him too, because it did look bratty in the moment, but then later he was totally normal. I don't get what that was. Am I missing something? Okay, Megan, I love this question to start off with, and this is just like so brutally relatable because I feel like so many of us sit in that moment with our kids where they're opening presents on Christmas morning or whatever, and they're like, wait, they're not doing any of the things that I'm you're supposed to do. They're not saying thank you, they're not like seeming appreciative enough. I remember like when my kids open a gift in front of the person who got it for them, and I feel like they have to, even if they don't like it, and I know that they don't like it because I just know them so much better than whoever got them that gift, they like don't like it, and I'm just like, just pretend like you like it. Like we can throw it away, or we I'll get you something else. Like, I don't even care, but just like pretend in that moment like you like it. Our kids just do not at all do what we're what we want them to do. And so the first thing I wanted you to tell to want to tell you is that your four-year-old is definitely not broken. Um, gifts are super overwhelming to receive. I know a lot of adults who don't like to receive gifts. There are adults that I've worked with in therapeutic or counseling environments who talk about like terror at getting gifts. I have multiple people in my family who we just don't do gifts because we just like the whole exchanging like, do we really want to do this? Can you just, you know, have your money and buy your you yourself stuff? And can I just have my money and buy whatever I need for me? And so it's not broken at all, but I think it does speak to how overwhelming and how our kids are not conditioned socially, unless we condition them to kind of do that thing that we're asking them to do or that we expect them to do. And so they're new humans, they have new brains, and so they don't really know like how they're supposed to respond or how they're supposed to do this, that, or the others, other. So the first thing that I hear when your kid melted down after opening three gifts is number one, what else was going on ahead of that? Right? Because you're you're saying that it's Christmas, okay. So what does that mean? So you're with your in-laws, it says, and it's last night, this is when the comment was left. First thing that comes into my mind is are you with your in-laws or are you at your in-laws' house? Because if your kids in a completely, I don't want to say completely unfamiliar, but if your kids are not in their home turf, they're not in their home environment, then a meltdown becomes way more likely. Now you said last night, and I'm reading between the lines in this comment, maybe this is bad on my part. I'm I'm assuming things, but I'm this is all I have to go off. The second thing that I would say is we often will tell kids, and I saw this like scroll, I was scrolling across my feed the other day, waiting for something to post, and I saw somebody post that like a lot of time what what the equivalent of what we would be doing to an adult when we do this to kids around the holidays, when we push back their bedtime, because just like the socially appropriate thing to do is to go to the holiday party, even though it doesn't fit with their specific schedule or routine. It's kind of like saying to an adult, like, hey, you know, Christmas dinner is gonna be a little bit different tomorrow than than usual. We're gonna we're gonna eat at 10, or we're gonna eat at midnight, or we're gonna eat at 2 a.m. And that's what it feels like to a kid. Like it's so overwhelming. What do you mean we're gonna eat at 2 a.m.? Well, don't worry, I'll give you a snack. No, I want to be asleep. I want to be in bed. And your kid has no words for that at four. But I'll tell you, like, my three-year-old, who's almost four, so he is one month away from being four right now. He goes to bed at six o'clock p.m. I know that that's pretty extreme, but when I think about like doing having him open presence in an unfamiliar environment at eight o'clock, nine o'clock at night, because that's when the holiday party was happening, or that's when it ended, or that's when gift exchange happened. Like, of course he melted down. He would have melted down if I had given him a cookie at 8 p.m. at somebody else's house when he wants to be asleep in his his own bed. So it doesn't surprise me that your kid melted down and has nothing to do with like even if there was no gifts involved. We take kids, we pull them out of routines. A lot of times we put them in like really scratchy clothes, which I'm I mean, this is kind of like a silly thing, but but I think about like when I was growing up, my parents would put me in like a like a wool sweater to go to the family Christmas party. And like that was never comfortable for me. I mean, sure, they make like really comfortable wool sweaters these days, and I wish I was wearing one right now because I'm freezing. But they they would like put me in the scratchiest, most horrible clothes. I would always have to wear like khaki pants because I was going to my grandmother's house and like we had to like look presentable for her. We were often asked to perform, literally, perform if we played a musical instrument, especially if that musical instrument, if the private lessons for that musical instrument were being funded by my grandparents. This this was actually a vestige holdover of their holiday tradition. So when my dad was growing up, his grandfather would pay for every kid in their family was allowed to pick an instrument, and their grandfather would get them that instrument. So if you pick the trumpet, he would buy that kid a trumpet. And it's a beautiful, wonderful thing, and like it goes with it's there's so much good in that. But then there was this expectation that every Christmas they would like perform a Christmas song on this instrument that had been purchased for them. So like literally sometimes I had to bring my upright bass. I just imagine this, just picture this for a second. Like, here's this, let's say, 10-year-old John, right? I'm not four in this picture, but I'm with this 10-year-old kid, and I'm carrying an upright bass, which is bigger than I am, wearing like a wool sweater and maybe like a Chicago Bulls jacket in snow boots and khakis into my grandparents' house so that I could perform a terrible rendition of Silent Night with every adult in the room watching, while then I was going to stay up late and eat junk, like just mostly sugar, and then like after all of that, then the presents were opened. Is there any scenario in which that is an environment where a kid is not going to melt down? So that's part one of this is we put kids, and I'm not saying you, Megan, but we put kids, all of us, into positions where they are not set up to thrive around the holidays because we pull them out of their routines, we pull them out of their norms, and kids are so routine-based. We've been talking about this on the podcast for the last two weeks or the last two episodes, which were actually both published this week. If you're listening live as I'm recording this live tonight on Instagram and YouTube and Facebook, you would know that the other two episodes, one of them was posted today, and one of them was posted on Tuesday. So this whole week we've been talking about routines, and I've said it over and over again, and I'll say it one more time, just for the peanut gallery, and that is that kids cannot predict the future well because their prefrontal cortex is not developed enough to do that. And the brain is basically just a prediction machine. And so the one of the primary functions of their brain is to is not functioning well, which is to predict the future well. And so now we've pulled them out of all their routines and they can't predict what's going to happen next. And they feel vulnerable. And the way that they get that need for control met is often by melting down. And it's not that they're being controlling or being narcissistic or being selfish, it's that they're literally like they're so out of sorts that they don't know what else to do. And so here they go, melting down because everything has led them to that point. But it just happens at the most inopportune time because it's happening during this time when we've all collectively said as a society or as a family, you're getting something right now. I'm giving you a gift right now. I I bought this and I wrapped it and I spent my money on it, and I thought of you, and now you're gonna be ungrateful and you're gonna be, you know, I forget all the other words that she used here, or maybe I'm just like thinking of the words that I would use, like ungrateful Braddy. That was a now you're gonna be a brat while you're opening this gift. And the answer is like, no, kid is just doing what kids do, which is trying to get their fundamental needs met. And right now the need is like, hey, the fire alarm's going off. This is not okay. I don't understand what's going on. And then grandma just gave me like a train. This is one of the presents I'm I'm outing myself. My grandparents are are dead, so they're not here to be upset. A train alarm clock, right? And they thought that was gonna be like the greatest gift ever. They like thought that I was gonna like fall in love with this train alarm clock. Like, you just open a train alarm clock, and you're just like, what do I want a train alarm clock for? Like, and it's everything has has led us up to that point. So even if the gifts were great though, we would still be on that like hair trigger. And that and and so all of that all comes up later, and it and it just it feels in those moments like like everything is coming to a head. And you said later he was totally normal. My guess is later when you got home, later when he was back alone with you, later when he was in his pajamas, later when he was feeling more in control of his surroundings. Not surprising to me that then he felt within his own semblance of control or whatever. And then I want to say one more thing before I move on to the next question, because we got two questions or or three questions, four questions. We have four questions today. I might not even be able to cover the last one, actually, now looking at the clock, because we're already we're already deep into this episode. But I want to say one more thing about this one before we go to the next one, and I'm just gonna kind of fly over it here. But when you said I honestly kind of snapped because when I looked at him, he did seem kind of bratty to me. When we get in front of our families, we go back to that person, that child that we were around them. So I can be the most regulated person in the world, and I'm not always be totally transparent, but I can be like the most regulated person in the world around my new life, which is my wife, my kids, my job that I have, uh obviously social media stuff when I have to travel. I can be very regulated. I get around my mom and my brothers, and like holy smokes, I'm just that kid again. Like, I'm that little kid who who's feeling all of those little kid emotions, but now in an adult body. And so it's unsurprising to me that you snapped because you're also out of routine, you're also not in a perfectly um catered, you know, curated environment. You're with your mother-in-law and your father-in-law. Like, I don't know when you met them. I met my mother and my father-in-law when I was 17 years old. Like they still see me as a kid in some ways, and so I can't help sometimes but act like a kid. And so it's not surprising that we got to this point. And I just want to say, Megan, you didn't do anything wrong. And how I would frame this in going forward is I would say, okay, number one, can we rehearse ahead of time before we go into these environments? Can we game plan? Here, this is what it's gonna be like. Let's make a plan. This is what it's gonna be like. Here's when we're gonna open presents. This is the point in the night. Here, you know, I'm gonna bring some like an extra sweatshirt for you in case you get annoyed with what you're wearing. Um, when you open the presents, you can you literally practice this. I I I'm not opposed to like literally wrapping boxes and having your kids practice opening presents and then like looking at you and being like, okay, thank you. And you just tell them this is like the social thing that we do. And I don't like forced thank yous. I like real gratitude, but I also appreciate that while I can allow for real gratitude and I and I can not force thank yous when it's me on Christmas morning with my kids. There are certain times where it's easier to just say, hey, so grandma, grandpa, they're gonna have this expectation that you say thank you. And you don't have to, but like this is the way that we can kind of get around this. And this is harder to do with an old with a younger kid than with an older kid. We're gonna talk about a six-year-old and a seven-year-old later. It's much easier to do with them to just say, hey, so this is what we do because like their grandma's old school or grandma's old school, and they really need to hear you say thank you, no matter what. And we can talk about why forced thank yous aren't good, but but ultimately, like that's that's where we want to go. We want, we want to at least game plan out because there doesn't need to be additional just like panic mode for us in that moment when we feel like our kids being bratty. And and honestly, maybe you wouldn't even have felt that way if it had not been, well, they're being bratty in this environment because I have all the emotions coming out at the same time. So all of that to say, I don't think your kid's broken. I think that your kid's very normal. I think this is a very normal experience. And if if all you needed to hear this this this year before you go with a five-year-old to Christmas is validation that your kid is not broken or bad, um, you're there's the validation. And what I would be doing if I were you now, we have 20 days before Christmas, is practicing, practicing how that response can be, and then also set your own expectations of it might still not work out. And that's okay too. Okay, my second question came from Ashley, another mom, and this one was a TikTok comment. So the first one was an uh Instagram DM, this one was a TikTok comment. I think I kept saying that when it was a comment, but it was a DM. This one's a comment and says, Okay, I don't want to sound like that mom, but how do you actually make kids appreciate stuff? My daughter's six, she just rips through presents, doesn't look at even look at the people. I'm assuming that she means the people who got her the gifts. She doesn't even look at people. My mom keeps whispering that she needs to learn manners, but yeah, how? I feel like she should be old enough to be grateful. I don't know. Maybe I'm just doing it wrong. Okay, Ashley. Perfect setup. I forgot that we were gonna answer this question. Otherwise, I probably wouldn't have talked so much about the force gratitude. But let's let's get into it. So, how do we actually make kids grateful, right? The first thing, the first way that we can make kids grateful is we can give them less stuff. And I know that that sounds like a Grinchy thing to say, but I've been posting a lot about this lately, and uh what I'm receiving back is a lot of affirmation that this is right. And I knew that this was right because the data supports this conclusion, but it's it's good to hear other parents also say, like, yes, me too. So, first, first things first, let's just call this what it is. We give our kids stuff to make ourselves feel better. We give our kids stuff because we have been sold a myth, a lie in Western culture that the more stuff we buy our kids, the more presents that are under our under the tree, the more time we spend rapping, the more time we spend working to buy those things, the bigger the gifts are, the longer Christmas morning takes, all of these things are directly correlated or tied to or evidence of how much we love our kids. And that's ridiculous. Point blank, full stop, that's ridiculous. How much money you have to spend on gifts or how many gifts you choose to get, even if you have more money than you choose to spend, have nothing to do with how much you love your kid. We have taken this all the way back from, you know, and we do this not just with kids, we do this with everybody in our life. When we have a consumerist-driven mindset, we say, Well, how good of a life you have is how much stuff you buy for yourself. How much you love your fiance is how big of the ring is, right? Like all of these things are evidence of your love, affection, caring, success. That's nonsense. I would use a much more crass term, but I keep my podcast non-explicit, but that's bull, okay? You don't have to get your kids a lot of stuff. And in fact, they're going to be less grateful if you get them more stuff. Give you the example of what I did last year before I talk about how we can get our kids to be grateful in general. And by the way, I also hear my mom keeps whispering she needs to learn manners. I don't know if you're saying your mom is literally there whispering, or if your mom is in the back of your head whispering. Either case, the fact that you identified your mom tells me that we also have the same thing going on that was going on with Megan, which is the holidays are the time when we bring out our families and we have to parent in front of them, and all of a sudden, all of our best impulses, right? You can read my book, Punishment Free Parenting, and you can love everything inside of it. And then you get in front of your in-laws or you get in front of your own parents. It's probably worse with your own parents, to be honest. And all of a sudden it's like, no, I just need to like make sure that they think I'm a good. I don't even care if I think I'm a good parent today. I don't even care if my kids think I'm a good parent. I care if my mom thinks I'm a good parent. And I care if my mom thinks I don't even care if I think my daughter's a good kid. I care if my mom thinks my daughter is a good kid. Because for your whole childhood, that person defined your reality. They defined when they said something was good, it was good. When they said you were being kind, you were being kind. When they said you were being grateful, you were being grateful, whether or not you were. And so because their statements define your reality as a child, when you get back in front of them and you go back into your childhood mode, to some extent, right? I'm not calling us children. We're obviously all adults and we have the ability to transcend this and we should. Why? Because everything my mom said between the ages of zero and 10 at least was gospel to me. Right? My mom used to literally say, Mom is never wrong. And my mom is not that type of person. That was just culture. I don't even know if she said it. Actually, now that I say this out loud in front of however many thousands of people, that might be not even true. She may not have even said that, but that was a very clear message. Mom is never wrong. Mom is always right. And that's we got to deconstruct that. So, okay, so what did we do last year? What where I was going with this before I got sidetracked by my own ADHD. We decided last year that we're going to do one gift. And when I say we, really, it was, I kept saying, I think we're doing too many gifts, I think we're doing too many gifts. We don't need so many gifts. And my wife said, Great, let's just do one. Because she is the I can say a lot of stuff, but my wife can really come in and be the hero. And so she's the hero here. She said, Let's do one gift. We got them. It was a TikTok comment, so I'll just call out TikTok shop. We bought them on TikTok shop. There were these three cars, all three of my kids who were eight, four, and two at the time, all got the same present. There were these little drivable cars, weren't super expensive. I'm not like the I would say that they're probably 40 bucks a piece, maybe 50 bucks a piece. I don't know. But not like we weren't spending$300 a piece on these cars. Okay, they were not super expensive by any means. And they were just these little three-wheeled cars that they could drive around, they could turn real sharp so you can drive them in the house. And that was kind of our goal. We just want to get them all one thing. And I will tell you without a doubt that because they weren't ripping through present after present after present, which is what you're describing for your daughter, because it was one thing, they really got to experience joy and gratitude for that one thing. And it's not like the whole holiday season we didn't give them anything or get them anything. Like we did little knickknacks here and there. We tend to not be super like, no, you can't have that wait till Christmas, just in general, because it builds up this level of expectation and anticipation that's just not healthy in our family, at least. But my kids opened that thing and then they drove them around for a while. I had assembled them so that they could just and charge them so they could just go right then. They drove them around for a while, and then after like half an hour of playing with them, they like got their stickers out and got their markers out and tape out pictures and stuff and just drew all over these things, like drew all over a piece of paper and taped them up. And they got like they had like name letters and they like named them. And then they started marking on scuffing up the walls and like they denting the refrigerator, which was like brand new. We never ever buy new appliances, we always buy our appliances used, and we bought like a new refrigerator because our our house is weird and built of concrete, and you only one refrigerator would fit. So we had to buy a new one, and like within a month of getting it, is Christmas, and my kids are just dent putting dents in the bottom of it with their cars. So then they took duct tape and pool noodles from the basement that we cut and they like built bumper cars, and they then it was a whole new gift. It was now bumper cars, and then they like one of my kids attached a box with a with a string to the back, and he pulled around like beanie babies, and he was like a driver, it was like a train. And literally every kid in the neighborhood came over to our house in the first two weeks, and they like everybody wanted to play with these, and we had the best Christmas. Guys, we spent so much less than other people on Christmas. We probably probably other parents in our neighborhood got those cars. They like were out of stock by the time we had my wife not ordered them early, like they would have been gone. But it was all about the context. They only got one thing, and so they truly could be grateful for it. Your body, your brain, and this is where I'm gonna get nerdy neuroscience here, but like your brain does not have a capacity to be more happy than the happiest that it can be. I'm gonna say that again. Your brain does not have a capacity to be more happy than the happiest it can be. This is why we have billionaires in this country, and I don't want to get on the soapbox soapbox here, but a billionaire is not a billion times or a million times more happy than a person with a hundred thousand dollars. A billionaire is not a hundred or a thousand times more happy than a person with a million dollars. A hundred billionaire is not a hundred times as happy as a person with a billion dollars. You have a limited amount of dopamine and serotonin that your brain can experience. And so the only way to be less happy is to divide up that dopamine and serotonin amongst more things. This is why billionaires and people with massive amounts of money are actually less happy. This is actually why people with even who are multimillionaires are less happy. We know that money in one as it relates to one's happiness has a diminishing marginal returns after, like, I don't remember what the number is today. I don't even know what it is today, but but 15 years ago, it was like it was like$120,000. Like after$120,000, you're never gonna be as happy as you were, or you're never, you're not gonna get any happier for every dollar more that you have. And in fact, at some point it becomes negative return. And this is because when we take our happiness and we divide it up amongst more things, just imagine that you have 20 units of dopamine in your brain, right? And it's obviously this is not, this is just an analogy. This is not actually how it works, but you have 20 units of dopamine in your brain, you get one gift. That break, that gift is worth 20 units of dopamine. If you get 20 gifts, each one is only worth one unit of dopamine, but you're not gonna divide it up evenly. So actually, a couple of those gifts that you really like are gonna be worth five. And then some of them are gonna be worth none. And those are the presents that when you get them as a kid, and this was my experience, and maybe I came from a very privileged household. I didn't think of ours as extremely rich, but we did open a lot of presents on Christmas. My parents didn't get us stuff with for the rest of the year most of the time. But there were definitely presents that I never took out of the box, right? Like, I don't even know if they they made it into my bedroom. Because if you open too much stuff, like you don't even, you're not gonna be grateful. And as parents, we don't have the same reaction to our kids opening those additional things. And then when there's other people involved, right? You you have family members, aunts, uncles, grandparents buying gifts, and they're not gonna be as good at buying gifts for for kids as we are because they don't know their kid, our kids like we do. So now theirs are automatically gonna be relegated to the lower tier. And so why are we not thrilled with what grandma got us? Because we're we're already spent in how much we could be happy. And now when this additional thing comes through, it actually becomes more of an addictive pattern of behavior rather than like an enjoyment pattern of behavior. Kids literally get into this like ripping through the paper and then throwing the gift aside and then ripping through the next paper and then throwing that gift aside and then ripping through the next paper. And it's this like slot machine, right? It's like they're just pulling the slot machine. What's gonna be in the next one? What's gonna be in the next one? What's gonna be in the next one? And that is why our Instagram feeds and our TikTok feeds function the way they do. We swipe them down so that they give us that dopamine hit of, oh, I don't know what's gonna come next, what's gonna load first? In the same way, I don't know what's gonna be in the next box, and so I'm gonna rip it open. And so the way that we make kids grateful actually is to get them less stuff. And then again, we can talk to them after the fact, after the chaos of that morning, right? That is never a good time to teach in the midst of like paper flying everywhere and like this coffee spilling, and like everybody's overwhelmed. Not a good like our kids are literally on like a high. Not a good time to be like, let's talk about gratitude and let's think about how grandma got you this thing and what it cost for her to get that, or what it, what the amount of time that she took spending to think about that and why she got you that never a good time. So, what I would do in that case is I would take again the principles for my book, Punishment Free Parenting. I'd go, okay, the time of dysregulation is not the time to teach. In the same way as the tantrum is dysregulation, ripping open a bunch of presents on Christmas morning is dysregulation too. It just looks different. So I'm not gonna try and teach then. I would rather line up all the gifts, you don't have to physically line them up, but just think about them to keep track of them. And I would sit with your kid a day, two days later, and I'd go, let's let's just spend some time being appreciative about the things that we got this year. And then I would do one other thing, and this is actually the hack for gratitude. I would make it extremely clear to my kids that I was grateful, not when I was a kid, but right now. If you want your kid to apologize, apologize to them. If you want your kid to be respectful, respect them. If you want your kid to be grateful, be grateful to them and in front of them. Modeling is the best and most important type of teaching that we do. And so when we are not people who live in gratitude, if we're constantly looking for the next thing and the next dopamine hit in our lives, if we're constantly not spending any time doing gratitude practice ourselves. And by the way, you can't fake this stuff. Like your kid picks up on the signals. So you actually have to learn to be grateful. And here's the good news for all of us learning to be grateful is probably one of the most advantageous and adaptive things that we can do with our brains. We know people who are grateful, who experience gratitude on a daily basis, have better immune health. They have better, and this is not me, woo-woo. I'm not gonna sell you supplements. Be grateful. Write down the things you're grateful for every day because it's actually gonna make you give you a better life. You have better immune health, you have better longevity, you have better relationships, you don't long and seek for things that are not gonna be that are gonna be destructive patterns of behavior. You don't even long and seek for things that are gonna be net neutral, right? You you save more, you don't spend as much because you're grateful. And so gratitude is the key to a healthy and happy life as an adult. And yet we don't do it so frequently. We live in a culture, again, going all the way back to the first question and the second question, a culture of consumerism that does not ever practice gratitude in a real way. Ironic, right? Because we just came off of Thanksgiving, where Thanksgiving, it's like, let's sit down and all think about what we're grateful for, so that immediately as we're driving home, we can load the Black Friday sales and buy all the things that'll make us happy. We just sat around a table and said, Here are all the things that make us happy, and my life is so good. And here are my family, and if I had nothing else, you would be enough. And then we load on our phones that, oh my god, Beats headphones, and this was it for me this year. I didn't buy them, by the way. Beats headphones are cheaper than they've ever been. And I've wanted these since I was 19 years old. Maybe I should just buy them for myself, just give myself that little dopamine hit. And our kids see that. They experience that, even if they don't physically see it. They see it in the packages that come to the door from Amazon or wherever else, they see it in the things in the checkout cart at Target, they see it in how much time we spend online shopping, and most importantly, they see it in our body language. And if we practice gratitude and if we model gratitude, so this is funny because the first question really tracks perfectly with chapter two in my book. So if you don't know my book, there's 13 chapters. I know, unlucky. Chapter one is called The Problem with Punishment. It's just all about what punishment doesn't work and how brains work when they're dysregulated. Chapter two is called Curiosity, like cure get curious, not furious. And it's all about rather than looking at your kids' be misbehavior or maladaptive behavior or problematic stuff that they do as them being bad. We look at it as what is this behavior telling me? What what's what's the curious what how can I be curious about this? That was Megan. How can I be curious about why my kid is melting down after three gifts? Right? Chapter three is about modeling. What's mirrored is model what's modeled is mirrored. The things that you want for your kids have to be the things that you do yourself. Monkey see, monkey do. Do as I say, not as I do has never worked and it never will. Not with kids. Ashley, that's the advice for you. Yes, everything that I just said about presence, everything I said about consumerism, everything I said about neuroscience and not getting your kids too many things, and dopamine and serotonin and all that, and being in front of your parents and all of that. Also, if you want your kid to be grateful, be the most grateful person in the world in front of your kids. Kids see that, they absorb it, and they become it. Okay, I have time for one more. Um, but okay, and you know what? The last question that I have was kind of going right off of the one that I just did. So I'm gonna do the third question. I'm gonna do one more. That's what I have to have time for time for. And this one was an email. Jordan, I have to give you your props because you sent it into podcast at wholeparentacademy.com, even though I wasn't responding to emails in that way. I wasn't doing parent questions at that point, but they had already sent it in. So it says, Jordan says, My husband grew up super poor, so he goes nuts with gifts like Amazon type nuts every at our house, every hour type nuts. Then he gets mad when our kids aren't reacting like the commercials. Literally, last year he said, Why aren't you excited? Then they were just kind of overwhelmed and staring. I know how I don't know how to tell him that maybe it's too much, but also I get it. I don't know. I'm just curious how other families deal with this. Okay, so I've already kind of covered why it's too much, but I want to get to the how do other families deal with this? And I want to go beyond just get your gives one gift. Because for Jordan and her husband, who may not be a whole parent follower, right? Maybe a household where you have two people who parent different ways, and that's okay. That's actually sometimes good for kids to have different approaches to parenting. That may not be a solution. So here's what I would offer to you. I think the best thing that we can do for our kids on a holiday is to make a memory. And the lie that we are sold is that that memory has to be made in the way that other people make that memory. You said they're not reacting like the commercials, right? The amazing thing that we often forget is memories are those times often when things don't feel like what we expect. They are different. If all of us had a picture perfect holiday where we did exactly the same thing and we were little robots, right? Who just did Christmas the same way or whatever holiday we celebrate the same way, the result would be that those would be incredibly unmemorable. I think what your husband is longing for, and I think what many of us long for, is for our kids to have long-term traditions and memories of joy. And so I would ask the question how can we make those joyous memories outside of gift exchange? Let's just take the gift overwhelm, let's put it on the side. How do we make those memories in other adaptive ways? So one thing that I like to do, you don't have to steal mine, you can do another one. We do a scavenger hunt on Christmas, and sometimes it's like for a piece of candy or something, or sometimes it's for like a family gift. But we do a scavenger hunt where our kids literally go around the house and they find clues. It it costs us more time than wrapping an additional couple of pieces of plastic junk. But we'll like hide clues, and our kids will have to go around and search. And as our kids are getting older, I've started to think like, oh man, should we hide one outside so that they have to get all their stuff on and like go trumping out into the backyard and tromping out into the backyard and you know, wading through the snow to the shed to find one of these, like a lawnmower type clue. And as they do that, as they so it becomes a memory, right? Like, like what they win at the end, who cares? But it becomes a memory of a thing. Another one, really easy. We do Swedish pancakes. This is actually a tradition that goes back to my parents and and actually, I think my grandparents. We do Swedish pancakes as like a fancy meal instead of like a turkey dinner or something like that. We're vegetarians anyway, but we do like fake turkey on Thanksgiving to like kind of do the thing, do the Thanksgiving thing. But on Christmas, we just abandon that and we're like, okay, we're gonna get like Swedish pancakes and lingen berries and and powdered sugar, and basically it's just gonna be like a sugar rush, uh probably a bad better way to put it, but like it's just gonna be this feast of things that kids actually like. That becomes a Christmas memory because it's not what other people do. Think about Christmas not as like, well, if my kids could show up to school on Monday or whatever after Chris, you know, after New Year's, and they have to compare what they got compared to their friends, that they're winning. That's the consumerist mindset. That's probably where your husband is operating from. He probably grew up feeling like it was a competition between him and his friends and feeling like he was losing. And he's like, My kids are never gonna lose. And if they're not excited enough, then they're not gonna show back up at school and and and you know, not be losers like I was. I think that's a bigger part of it than we're willing to admit to ourselves. I think that's a huge piece of all of this, is that we don't we don't want our kids to feel left out, we don't want them to feel disappointed or whatever. And so instead we just make it about the competition. We're just gonna compete for the massive amounts of stuff that we can give to our kids. And I don't think that that's healthy. So instead, I want you to think about whether, as you're processing how you want to do Christmas, what are the things that not on Monday morning, but someday with their future. Spouse, they're gonna be able to say, This is what we did on Christmas, and it was really unique and it was of strong memory, and their spouse is gonna go, Oh my gosh, that's that's so cool, and that's so novel, and I like I love that. I think that those are the things that we should be focusing on. And I've heard time and time again people talk about these things, and there's so many of them, and you can just like Google them of just interesting Christmas traditions and make it quirky and make it fun, and and move the goalposts away from the gift exchange piece of it, and instead focus on the other ways that you can make that day special. And if you can do that, I think that you're gonna go way further than you think in the memory making thing. So that's what I have for you. I've already recorded a super, I think, full episode to talk about gift exchange. And I just want everyone to to kind of experience or just sit for a moment and think about like what do you really want for your kids this Christmas? Do you want them to have a Christmas morning that mirrors a Hallmark card or whatever, or or a Hallmark movie? Or do you want them to have the experience that they were mem making memories and making traditions and they were growing together? And if it's that, if you're looking for that, then you have to start from a place that isn't just how much can I spend and how much can I wrap? And if you can do that, you're gonna be way better off. Okay, that's what I have for you in this episode. Thank you for joining me. Thank you for joining those who joined live. If you were listening to this live and maybe you had to leave and go do bedtime or something and came back and finished the podcast, I'm gonna keep keep trying to record podcasts live, but anyway, that's all I got. That's gift overwhelm. This has been the Whole Parent Podcast. Thank you again for listening to this episode of the Whole Parent Podcast. If you are listening to this right now, yes, you in your car driving somewhere on a walk with your kids. Perhaps your kids are melting down and you're listening to this on your headphones with the noise cancellation turned on. Whatever you're doing while you're listening, doing the dishes at night after your kids go to bed, I don't know. That would just be me if I was listening. Stop right now. I have three quick favors to ask you. I promise they're not gonna take you very long. The first one, very, very easy. Go in to wherever you're listening to this podcast and rate it five stars. That's one, two, three, four, five stars. The more five star reviews that our podcast gets as we accumulate episodes, the more likely it is to be pushed out to more parents who are searching for parenting podcasts to solve their problems. Whatever you got out of this episode, whether it was something that to try with your kids, whether it was a new way to think about parenting, maybe this episode was not specifically about a problem that you're having, but you're somebody in your life who's having this problem. Go in and rate it five stars. And if you have an additional 30 seconds, that first one only takes you 10 seconds. 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But I promise you, so many of the people who listen to this podcast listened not because they followed me on social media, but because they got a personal recommendation from somebody in their life who said, Hey, this guy has a way of talking about parenting that just works for me. You don't know if they listen to it or not, they might never reply, but maybe, just maybe, they'll love the episode so much that they become your new parenting partner out there in the world, doing things the same way that you are, and you might have just made your new parenting bestie. The last thing that you can do is definitely the biggest ask for me, but it is to go over to Substack. That link is down below in the bio, and to subscribe so that these episodes can keep coming to you. Paid subscriptions on Substack is the only way currently that I am being funded here on the Whole Parent Podcast. That is the only money that I receive. It is$5 a month. 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