What’s On Your Mind? – Is It Really a Gift?

By Bob Herman, LCSW

The turkey bones are in the trash, and the tangled Christmas lights have been exhumed from the basement. Excitement and stress are in the air, welcoming in the Christmas Holiday, the sacred rituals of which may include some worry over choosing the right gifts for our children or grandchildren. Selecting gifts used to seem a straightforward task: ask them what they want, decide if it is safe, morally acceptable (no video game named Armageddon, please) and within your budget …. and find out if Tickle-Me-Elmo is still in stock anywhere. As a therapist, I listen to thousands of stories from my clients, from both children and parents, and the subject of gifts comes up quite often. Over the years, though, gifts have come to seem more complicated, especially the stories of “failed” gifts. Gifts sometimes produce not just disappointment but even negative results – exactly opposite what was intended by well-meaning parents or grandparents. I was prepared for the obvious: grandparents (in the best tradition) “spoiling” a child with a gift that Mom and Dad find excessive, for example. But it turned out that there were many subtler hazards to be found under the Christmas tree or on a Birthday. I’d like to tell you just a couple of stories that impressed me. I hope you’ll find something useful in these examples of gifts-gone-wrong. These are lessons not from me but from my clients – gifts to you, in a way – and I hope they make a contribution to your gift list.

While talking with me about a variety of personal issues, a father mentioned a puzzling change in his son, which had left the father quite sad. The son was a young teenager who didn’t readily latch on to anything out of his own motivation or passion – quite different in temperament from Dad, a successful man who was unusually open to life and enthused by many things. But the father had recently made a discovery; one day he smelled something burning and went about the house to check. He found his son in the basement experimenting with an old soldering iron and a scrap of wood. Uncharacteristically, the boy had been exploring and had plugged in the iron and saw that it could burn the surface of the wood. [I doubt that he knew he was rediscovering an existing art form: creating pictures by burning wood with a hot iron.] For a couple of weeks the faint smell of burning wood wafted often from the basement. Though the teenager had little to say about his art work, Dad noticed that ever more wood scraps decorated with creative designs and pictures were appearing in the boy’s room.

Now, you’ll not be surprised to hear that the father wished to encourage and support this rare instance of his son’s sustained enthusiasm for something – anything! He did what any of us might do; he went to a hobby shop and purchased the finest wood burning set they stocked. It had an insulated electric iron “pencil” designed specifically for wood burning artwork, interchangeable tips the produce different lines and textures, many blanks of exotic wood waiting for the boy’s artistic hand to fill them…. and even frames. Strangely, the set was never used! But more disturbing to the father was the fact that the aroma of burning wood ceased. His son’s adventure with his craft was over!

The father had not realized that his intervention, rather than giving his son something, would take something away. His son probably had become excited by his sense of discovery, creativeness and innovativeness. After all, he had stated with junk found in the basement, and he, alone, had created something unique and attractive. He owned this idea. He was an inventor. He wasn’t competing with a classroom full of students; what he did was unique, original ….. until he saw the fancy wood burning set and realized that thousands of kids might be doing the same thing, and maybe they were more advanced or more talented. Because the teenager was insecure about his worth as a craftsman, he had to abandon his adventure. He was Christopher Columbus about to start a great voyage of discovery and uniqueness …. when King Ferdinand handed him a GPS and a map of the New World.

There are other stories. When a child client was still too young to really appreciate the fragileness of an exotic pet (an expensive South American frog, in this instance), she managed to talk her Grandmother into a visit to a pet store. Upon returning home, her parents, who had already vetoed this acquisition, felt caught, I suppose, and decided to make the best of it, in order not to deprive the child and the grandmother of this “bonding” event. For the child, this became a “gift” of guilt – the burden of responsibility for the almost immediate death of her pet. All intentions were good, but the analysis of probability was ignored by the only people who were in a position to see the probable outcome – the adults.

And there is the story of the teenager who asked for a very good leather coat – a warm, handsome and expensive coat that his mother could not really afford. But we often go beyond our limits for our children, and he got his coat for his Birthday. Within a few days the boy had given the new coat to a homeless man. What went wrong? We can choose from a long list of reasons why this gift didn’t work. The teenager may have felt he was undeserving of such a nice gift (especially if he wasn’t feeling good about himself or had been behaving badly toward his Mom). He may have realized, only after the fact, that his buddies were all still wearing denim jackets and freezing (a symbol of invulnerability for a teenage boy) and that his coat set him apart from his friends and made him feel “wimpy”. Or he may have felt guilty about having an expensive coat, in contrast to the homeless man who had no coat. We may never know, but we might get better at anticipating some of these scenarios. Best of luck with your shopping.

Next time, I’ll share with you some of the creative gifts parents and grandparents have come up with to foster the growth needs and/or best inclinations of their children and grandchildren.