Holiday Survival Guide: What Gifts Do Children REALLY Want?

0:01 my name is dr. Vanessa Lapointe I'm a registered psychologist parenting educator and mom to two growing boys and we're gonna chat a little bit about what kinds of gifts do your children actually want with the holiday season fast upon us all of us have our list that we're checking twice and going through and trying to make sense of figuring out what is it that we should put under the tree for our children this year to really make sure that they have that

0:27 best kind of holiday that they'll remember forever and we have all of this pressure on the materialism of the holidays rather than focusing on other kinds of gifts and so let's go through what some of those other kinds of gifts might involve one of them really is going to be the gift of your time as modern-day parents we have a lot going on oftentimes we have households where both parents are out working we've got the demands of our lives the demands of

0:57 the extracurricular schedules and all of the things happening all of the time and what if we could just create our own silent night our own peace on earth and give our children the gift of time by pressing pause on the other demands of life and showing up for our kids in a more present more available kind of way and maybe that gift of time is something like baking some holiday cookies together maybe it's simply going for a

1:24 walk together so everybody can take a big deep breath and their own kind of pause in the midst of the busy holiday season so really think about the gift of time the other kind of gifts that I want you to be mindful about is the gift of experience so often when we think about what are we going to give our children we think about a thing like a guitar or like a toy or like something that they

1:50 can actually tangibly touch with their hands but what if we started to recreate gift-giving around the tradition of giving experiences things that you might do together as a family and it doesn't need to be a giant lavish trip or some kind of experience along those lines but it can be simple little things like the gift of you know the certain kind of bedtime story for every night for the next month or the gift of a certain kind of breakfast

2:19 every Sunday morning for the next month whatever it is that you might think about ways that you can give the gift of experience rather than the gift of things and finally what your children really want they want the gift of your presence not presents but your presents be here now for all there is is this moment and this moment is perfect so take the pressure off mums and dads grandmas and grandpas and aunties and uncles and let's really rethink

2:50 gift-giving this year and land on what it is that our children actually want in their heart of hearts and not get swept away and all of the commercialism of the holiday season