Raising Kids With Less or Rather Without More

I have a bit of a reputation for re-purposing various articles and making do with less. I have been at times been considered tight.

I’m now considered fashionable. In these tight times, frugal has become cool!

This didn’t always extend to purchasing things for my child. But in the last few years as toys have slowly threatened to extinguish any semblance of living space in our home, I’ve found that yes, my child can make do and actually prosper with less or rather, without more.

And, not only are we conserving cash, we’re promoting creativity; finding ways to teach humility and raising a whole person, not just an aspiring consumer.

What do we do? Well, lots of things

1) I’ve always supported recycling, but recently tinkered with another of the 3 Rs – “reuse”. This started with saving paper towel tubes, and plastic containers and progressed to my drowning in recyclables.

But along the way the children who haunt our playroom have made plastic trays into paint palettes, paper towel tubes into swords and amazingly creative art projects.

2) I’ve always been a pack rat, so we tend to keep toys for years – not all of them, but many. And as a result, I’ve rarely bought a toy with which he didn’t play- eventually. He still has his toddler “button pushing” toys, now repurposed as space ship control panels. Stacking blocks are now used as counter weights in his latest “physics experiment”. What’ I’ve found is when kids don’t have the latest and greatest, they find new ways to use the old.

3) While I enjoyed shopping for my infant and toddler as much as any new mom, I’ve more recently become a fan of “pre-loved” clothes. Since my “suppliers” are all friends with older or bigger children, my son knows the previous owners and thinks about his buddies when he gets dressed.

It’s like wrapping oneself up in friendship.

4) Though our home is filled with books, most of them are pre-loved too. And they are frequently of higher quality than anything I would buy at my local mega book store. We buy at used book stores local and online, library book sales and estate sales, all of which tend to traffic in older, more interesting books. At 25 to 50 cents a piece we can afford to buy a lot.

5) Old clothes don’t leave the house at our house. While we still give boxes full to charity, the thrashed and trashed play clothes, the silk dress I accidentally put in the washer and the blouse with the ink stain, stay with us.

Some become rags, but others take on a new life. Some go directly to the dress-up box. Others are stitched together to make quick outfits for play figures and masks. Some replace the expensive and wasteful wrapping paper we used to buy and are used again by the present’s recipient.

We’ve “bought into” reuse. And I’d say, we’re richer for it.

This post is an entry into the TROP50™ Be a Guest on The Juice contest running over at Blogher.

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