Dani Garavelli: All they want for Christmas?

While adults fret about the future, their offspring want to get on with growing up

FOR a few weeks now, my children have been lobbying for an iPad for Christmas. I’m sure they believe they would be happier if they had one, the same way I believe I’d be happier with a new handbag or my husband believes he’d be happier with a Lamborghini. But that doesn’t mean they’re right. In fact, though I’m sure they’d enjoying playing with it, they’re at their sunniest when they’re outdoors playing football, cycling or climbing hills.

The truth is, they’re not as materialistic as they like to pretend. Sure, they’ll take what’s offered to them. They’ll nag for the latest gadgets and designer gear they insist everybody else in their class has. But if at the end of the year you ask them what they enjoyed most, it’s the doing rather than the having they remember; the impromptu parties, the days at the beach, the larking about in the snow.

That’s why I don’t buy into the latest survey from The Children’s Society. Its researchers asked 5,500 children aged between eight and 15 to come up with ten “essentials” of life for their age. Included in their final list were a family car, an iPod, pocket money, a satellite TV and the “right kind of clothes”. Children lacking two or more of the items were found to be “significantly more likely to be unhappy” than those given everything they wanted, while those without five or more were likely to have “low levels of well-being”. Cue much hand-wringing over a new generation of materialistic brats.

Except, like all surveys, this one depends a lot on interpretation; if you re-word the list you can see that all the things children consider vital are a means to an end rather than merely status symbols. They want their own money (to gain independence); an iPod (so they can listen to music); a family car (to explore beyond their own back yards) and “the right clothes” (to give them a sense of belonging). None of these seems so very greedy; and when you throw in a back garden and family days out (both of which were rated more highly than X-Boxes and PlayStations), it seems our children have got their heads screwed on very well indeed.

If anything, I think it’s the adults who have the problem, driving themselves harder and harder to buy their children the latest must-have, worrying they aren’t providing them with the best, even though, deep down, they know that “the best of everything” simply involves being there when they need you and saying “No” every now and again.

A more convincing survey, I would suggest, was one published by Unicef earlier this year, which suggested British parents were trapping their children in a cycle of consumerism by showering them with goods which they didn’t necessarily want, but came to regard as their right. It was commissioned after an earlier Unicef report ranked Britain as the worst country in the industrialised world to be a child. Curious that the UK should be below countries which were both more and less equal than it, they travelled to Sweden and Spain to find out what was going on. In both these countries, they discovered, children were getting fewer “things” but more attention from their parents. “Parents in the UK almost seemed to be locked into a system of consumption which they knew was pointless but they found hard to resist,” the report’s author, Dr Agnes Nairn, said.

This gnawing fear that everyone else’s child will have or be more than ours affects our attitude towards their development, with parents of younger children filling every spare moment of their lives with extra-curricular activities and pushing older ones to come out of secondary with a clutch of As, doubtless so they can get the kind of soul-sapping jobs that will allow them to buy an excess of goods for their own children. This despite the fact we all say – and at some level mean – that we don’t care what they do “so long as they’re happy”.

Looking closely at The Children’s Society report – in which interviewees place a garden and one family holiday a year above an iPod or satellite TV – however, it seems children have the same needs as they always have, though they’re sometimes played out through a different medium.

While adults fret about the future, their offspring just want to get on with the business of growing up. Some of them, admittedly, are obsessed with their computer consoles. But many others are out there contributing to society; taking part in the Duke of Edinburgh Award scheme or heading off to the developing world for their summer holiday.

Having said all that, I’m not sure how mine will react to the news Santa won’t be bringing them an iPad this Christmas. But I won’t be surprised if – far from rejoicing in the fact my husband and I have most of the festive season off – they urge me to put in a few more hours a week at the coalface in order to fund it. They’re not the most materialistic children in the world. But nor are they saints. And there’s only so many games of Monopoly you can play before you fancy a quick shot of Angry Birds.