Kid stuff: raising children in a consumer culture

Christian Century, Jan 11, 2005 by Lillian Daniel

IN A WORLD in which children are both consumers and products, and people are indeed sold under sin, the confusion of adults is not so different from that of children. In focusing on the peril of children under consumerism, we are probably trying to understand ourselves, as like Paul we marvel at the tangled strands of our behavior: "I do not understand my own actions. For I do not do what I want but I do the very thing I hate" (Rom. 7:14-15). In an irony of carnal life, a moment of adult generosity toward a little one plays into a system that turns little ones into big spenders themselves.

Cross suggests that our concern about children's relationship to things is well founded, for in their longings we learn about our longings. "Without realizing it, children become a 'valve' for adults, both opening and restricting consumption," he says. We can shelter their innocence from the world, or expose them to the world in their still-wondrous innocence. But the pendulum ought to swing back and forth. In the end Cross advises, "History suggests that the balance between shelter and wonder can be struck if adults think seriously about children's needs for shelter and wonder, and less [about] their own."

Books like these, which delve deeply into both the human heart and the public square, can help us with the old struggle, the longtime call to people of faith to look not only inward and outward, but upward. For even in the struggle between the cute and the cool, between desire and restraint, between children and adults, we need not struggle as those who have no hope.

Amidst the detritus of Christmas excess, we may still return to a different story, one in which a meager stable becomes a house for a king. In a world in which children cry "Gimme," the gospel reminds us that grace is God's gift freely given. Between the cute and the cool, the Holy Spirit still intercedes with sighs too deep for words, and as we vacuum up the pine needles we are bold enough to hope and to sigh, "Next year, we are going to do this differently."

Lillian Daniel is senior minister at First Congregational Church in Glen Ellyn, Illinois, and the mother of two.