The Best Gift You Can Give Your Child?

When it comes time to pick out a gift for someone, I feel as if another “necessary” has intruded upon my otherwise active and more interesting agenda. Truly, what is so important about a gift? If we're honest, the gift is often an imperfect match for the recipient, and is returned or exchanged. Others eventually break, or are consumed or lost. The best part of receiving a gift is that first moment, realizing there exists an attractively packaged item with something mysterious and uncertain within.   And that brief moment is the peak of the intended pleasure. The gift itself is almost always a disappointment. When you come right down to it, gifts represent junk.   

Someone reading this just thought, “What’s junk?”   

My response: “It’s anything that does not have enduring value.”    

Specifically, the point I'd like to make refers to children and gifts. While a child myself, and growing up, I received gifts from my parents. They were pleasing for a period of time, but didn't last. But something else did, something inherent in the very process of gift-giving. In fact, the real value of the gifts I received came from the realization that my parents were generous people. And that realization is enduring, unlike the gifts. I believe my parents made sacrifices—doing without “junk” they might have enjoyed, in order to give "junk" to their child in order to make their child happy (at least briefly). The qualities my parents expressed through their choices and behaviors is what left the real gift—the enduring awareness of sacrifices. I understand, now, that this represents love. My parents gave me the best gift of all: they taught me what love is and what it means to love another person.

This topic is more complicated than this little piece here. Because equally as telling, some parents give children a lot of gifts and even allow privileges the children don’t deserve. In this case, the child senses the behavior is not loving, but rather selfish. It’s an attempt to palliate the child, to have the child pacified. This way the parents can go about doing whatever it is that consumes them more than the well-being of their child.   

What is the best gift you can give your child? It is not a thing. It is your example, your principles, a sense of morality, a reason for existence, and what it means to love.