FTR, Wang-Ka, yes I have toys stuck all over my office, but that’s just because I’m a very slow developer (or maybe I have other issues but I won’t talk about it, no, I won’t, no I tell you NO!). I had an obscene amount of toys as a kid, so, perhaps there is hope for those kids to grow up to be responsible adults. Fortunately, I have avoided that fate through the past four & 1/2 decades.
What about games? Can they play board games and things like that? Toys R Us has games and some sport equipment, too - if they can’t have anything that they sell at Toys R Us that’s pretty restricted.
I can understand not getting toys like Barbies or mechandised cartoon characters or war toys, but what about the really good ones like blocks, games, and legos?
My children someday will have lots of legos so my husband can play with them.
My impression is the $$$ is to go right back into the hand of Mommy too. I just hope she doesn’t just spend it on bills. (Isn’t that a quote from ‘Working Girl’?)
Legos, I love Legos. Legos rule as the #1 highly over marketed but still very imagination-friendly toy (IMO).
Okay quietman1920, the teeming masses need to know, why can’t these kids have some gosh darned Legos? Well, maybe it is just me, but your thread has really got my curiosity piqued. You have a perfectly placed mole in your son and this is need to know information. Be brave, gather the information and if it turns out to be somewhat mundane, embellish man, embellish.
Ohioan here, I had toys. All my kiddie friends had toys.
Little side story here, one of my mom’s friends was a single mother with two early-teenaged girls who were kinda snotty and bad. Well they were REALLY bad one year, for like all of September, October and November. So for Christmas that year they got NOTHING. Not one present under the tree for them, and she instructed other family members and friends to NOT buy them ANYTHING. Everyone complied. I thought it was harsh, yet gutsy. Those girls shaped RIGHT up, though. She never had to resort to that again.
I was raised in Midwest City Oklahoma. I had toys, my friends had toys. Sounds to me like some completly out of controll PC bullshit.
As a child of Witnesses, I can assure you that we got to have toys.
FTR, I home school and am neither religious nor wacky. I am politically liberal, but many of my friends are politically conservative. None of my fellow home school families are wacky, though the level of religiousity varies. The exception is my sister-in-law, who home schools and is extremely orthodox Catholic, and yes, she is a little wacky.My guess is her wackiness has to do with her orthodoxy, not because she home schools.
My point is, the home school=wacky is an unfair assumption, and it pisses me off.
As for the toys–your neighbor might just be a follower of John Rosemond. He advocates little to no television and limited toys–and those toys allowed should be creative, like Legos and blocks and baseball bats and the like, and not crappy electronic toys that leave nothing to the imagination. I happen to share his view–though I don’t agree with him about much else.
My girls have plenty of old fashioned board games, bikes, blocks, Legos, art supplies, books, fabric, a wooden dollhouse, a set of pretend animals, musical instruments, and the great outdoors. We do NOT own any playstations, plastic toys or electronic pets. My kids spend hours reading to each other, looking for salamanders, building forts, and creating artwork. They sew, bake, play the violin, challenge each other to board games, write fiction, act out plays, and daydream.
You may consider me overly strict, and perhaps I am. But home schooling has nothing to do with it.
I certainly don’t think it’s harmful to not let their kids have toys–many, many generations were raised without the kind of multitudes of toys most of today’s kids have–though it is strange. However, I’m a little troubled by the fact thay they return toys given their kids as gifts for the money. They probably see it as a simple exchange, but it smacks of greediness to me, and I would probably be put out if I found that a parent had done that with a gift I gave their child. It would be better to tell those giving the gifts that they don’t allow their kids toys.
My kids, if I ever have them, are getting toys. If only so I can play with them.
Did you miss the part in which I said I already have 3 kids??? This isn’t some pie-in-the-sky plan I’m dreaming about before I have kids, but my real life daily reality.
As for where the money will go when they trade in the gift certficate, I suspect (with no more or less knowledge than most of you) that Mom will use it for something she considers appropiate, for example maybe a yearly membership to the zoo.
The kids are described in the OP as nice and overall good kids. So why is everyone so quick to condem the mom as doing something wrong? Anytime kids are raised to be nice, I’d be quicker to figure out what the parent did right/
I can relate to a parent who’s worried about spoiling their kids by giving them too many toys, and the dangers of encouraging materialism, but no toys strikes me as going to the extreme in the opposite direction.
If the mom was going to use it for something “better”, then why did the kid try to sell the receipt with the credit to quietman?
I’m tempted to ask my son about the legos…but he leaks secrets like a collander leaks water. That and their mother is Very suspicious…I used to kid with my wife that her nick-name should be ‘Madam DeFarge’ as she’s always on the front porch…watching…<chill>.
There was only one other item that I should mention…and I’m not sure if it constitutes a toy or an E*bay investment: They were quite interested in trading my boy for his Yu-Gi-Oh! cards. My son is just learning to read and I wasn’t comfortable that he’d be trading for equivolent cards, so I told him that he could not trade with them until he could read to and understand every word on the card. (I also told him he could not trade his ‘Exodia’ card(s) under any circimstances as I had to find & buy them)
I’m assuming that Toys-R-Us would only give them store credit rather than cash, and so they were trying to get cash instead.
I don’t see the problem with selling it.
If I had a $100 credit to ‘Ferret World’ and I don’t have any use for it and will never use it, but I know my neighbor has several ferrets and would love to have it, why not exchange money for the credit? I get the cash to use for something I think is more useful/fun/interesting. And the neighbor gets $100 worth of ferret supplies for $90.
I honestly didn’t see Ferret Herder’s post before I made up ‘Feret World.’ Weird coincidence.
Ferret World? Where’s that located? 
(A few times a year, I order toys… erm, I mean supplies over the net from “The Ferret Store.” It even has a big logo stating just that on the box. I’m such a sucker for my pets.)
But yeah, that’s a more-clearly stated version of what I was trying to say. I find it vaguely odd that they let the kids do the financial transactions, but that’s just me perhaps.
I wouldn’t assume it’s greediness, and I wouldn’t assume these parents did not in fact request no gifts for the kids. Some parents simply won’t honor requests like that.
My mom felt very strongly that Barbie dolls were bad for girls’ self images. She had a friend in psychology grad school who did a series of studies on how various toys (and adults’ reactions to them) affect how kids play, and how it all relates to what kids think about gender roles. (This was in the early 70s.) Some of her studies suggested a correlation between Barbie type dolls and self-image problems with girls.
So Mom let me and my sister know: no Barbies. She told all the relatives and friends’ parents.
I never got a Barbie and never really wanted one. But my younger sister wanted one, terribly. And lo and behold, she got two of them as gifts for I think it was her 7th birthday, both from friends’ parents who had heard my mom’s anti-Barbie speech. Mom didn’t have the heart (or guts) to take them away from her.
Incidentally and anecdotally, I never had body-image problems, but my sis did, and went through a few years of bulimia and related problems. She still has lousy eating habits.
So, long-story-short, these parents may not have had any luck preventing a Toys-R-Us influx, and dealt with it as best they could.
If the child is receiving a toy and the mother converts it into cash for paying her bills, she is a thief.
However, in fairness, there’s no evidence that’s what’s going on.