Joshua Pederson is professor of humanities at Boston University and the author of “Sin Sick: Moral Injury in War and Literature.”
For her seventh birthday last year, my daughter got not one but two kids’ science kits. The bold print on the identical glossy covers promised that each box contained the supplies for 135 experiments. I could see from the look on the parents’ faces that they were a little bit embarrassed, but my daughter was nothing but gracious, thanking the givers and excitedly discussing which activity she’d try first.
When we got home, we put the boxes in the closet with the three other science kits she had received the previous year. My math isn’t great, but I’m pretty sure we’ll never get to all 675 experiments.
It gets worse. My older son loves drawing, Transformers, and Legos — not necessarily in that order. Over the past three or four years of Christmases, Hanukkahs, birthdays, and other celebrations, he has gotten well over a half dozen sets of art markers, exactly 17 Bumblebee figurines (that’s the yellow one that turns into a VW Beetle), and so many Lego sets that he doesn’t even build them any more, opting instead to just tear open the boxes and dump the pieces at random in the giant bin we have in the corner of his room.
All these gifts aren’t just so much excess stuff; they also represent a remarkable amount of money and time spent by well-meaning parents with already full to-do lists. I know their pain. I can’t tell you how many times I’ve raced through the toy aisle 20 minutes before a trampoline-park birthday rave searching for something — anything — to give to an elementary school kid I couldn’t pick out of a lineup.
Which is all just a long way of saying that while I love my kids and want them celebrated (and while I’m deeply grateful to all my friends and family for the presents), I’ve been looking to get out of the kid gift racket for years. As the Globe reported last year, I’m not alone.
But I think I’ve found the perfect escape.
My salvation arrived, as salvation often does, from Canada. A dear friend who grew up in Toronto told me about a north-of-the-border tradition that we imported tariff-free for my daughter’s rave this year. It went better than I ever could have expected, and it goes like this.
Instead of bringing a present, my daughter’s friends were given the option of simply Venmoing her whatever they would have spent in cash on a gift. We then took that pool and split it in half, one part of which went to a gift she really wanted while the other went to a charity she picked in advance. (There are websites that manage the whole process for you — notably the Canada-based Echoage — but some do take a percentage in fees.)
A few kids brought presents anyway, and I admit that my daughter first looked disappointed as she silently compared this year’s haul with last year’s. But then I reminded her that there was also the cash. “How much?” she said hopefully. The total was a little more than $200. A smile spread across her face. But that grin wasn’t the only benefit of our new approach to gift-giving.
Another was the meaningful decrease in our production of plastic waste. Most of the toys my kids have previously received are plastic, and most of that ultimately ends up in landfills — 80 percent, according to some estimates. As a result, 6 percent of the plastic in our landfills is from toys. And as we are all becoming uncomfortably aware, that plastic increasingly finds its way into our bodies, with health effects that remain to be seen.
A third benefit, however, is likely more important. Alison Body, an honorary fellow at the University of Kent with an expertise in children’s participation in charitable giving, and others have suggested that involving children in giving can increase the likelihood that they will be charitable adults — especially if they are actively involved in the process. My daughter was inspired to direct her donation to the Coalition for the Homeless after witnessing the plight of unhoused people on a recent trip to New York.
But the last advantage is my favorite. today I only have to put five barely used science kits on Facebook Marketplace this summer. Instead of six.
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