--- On Fri, 5/1/09, James Heartfield <Heartfield at blueyonder.co.uk> wrote:
> You have to get to enjoy being a
> Grinch when fending off your children's pester power - not
> that I can claim any great success a turning back the tide
> of plastic crap that my two daughters demand as
> tribute/proof of our undying love for them. Saying no is the
> civilising moment, when you bang some restraining taboos
> onto their little ids, to make them into proper egos.
>
> I like to say, 'I am broke' (usually accompanied with a
> turning out of dust-filled pockets: just as well they don't
> understand credit yet!)
[WS:] In my case "being broke" worked until middle school, but then peer pressure and commodity fetishism trumped any reason. Finally, my ex and I devised a strategy of taking our son to a mall (already a traumatic experience) and saying "I can spend an X amount of money. Why don't you look around what you want and we meet each other in an hour and we go and buy it, but the total must not exceed X." The result was that this effectively curtailed impulse buying, and we often bought much less than X worth of stuff or even nothing.
Later on, he became a punk and developed a "counter-cultural" commodity fetishism - buying in second hand stores. That provided a substantial relief to my finances.
Wojtek