When a treat is not a treat

When every day means a treat, nothing is special anymore. Photo by Mamaloco via Flickr.

This week I did something that I probably do only once or twice a year. I went to a mall.

My daughters, 14 and 16, who live a fairly spartan existence, were given gift certificates for Christmas this year from various relatives. So I planned a mother-daughters shopping spree not only so they could redeem their cards, but also as a kind of cultural experience for us all.

Because we shop so little, I decided not to be too picky about their purchases. I won’t say I loved everything they bought, but none of it was offensive or in poor taste, so this once I just let it be an indulgence rather than about necessities. We also grabbed coffee and hot cocoas at Starbucks on the way out, ate lunch and cookies in Nordstrom’s cafe, indulgently browsed Barnes and Noble, and got road snacks for the way back.

The day was, in every way, a treat. It stood apart from our normal activities in every way and so each indulgence made us giddy with anticipation and delight.

But if we did this every week or even monthly, it would be far from a treat. It would just be normal life. And if we went to the mall often enough, it would carry a hefty price tag too.

What is a treat?

What qualifies as a treat to us is the normal life for many Americans today, with gratuitous purchases and continual consumption a part of everyday life. Even those of us who don’t shop till we drop once a week, still live a life that, by any historical or cultural comparison to most of the rest of humanity, is rife with treats.

A few of of the definitions of the a treat are:

• A celebration, entertainment, gift, or feast given for or to someone and paid for by another,
• Any delightful surprise or specially pleasant occasion,
• Entertainment, food, drink, etc., given by way of compliment or as an expression of friendly regard,
• Anything that affords particular pleasure or enjoyment.

We all love treats, of course, and being treated to a treat by someone else is always fabulous. But it’s my observation that we have little shared concept today of the specialness a treat is meant to be. Our abundant lifestyle allows for the nearly continuous access to, and affordability, of many kinds of treats that have become commonplace and ordinary for all but the poorest of the poor in our society.

Take candy bars, sodas, fast food, chips and ice cream, for example. Once the domain of summer vacation perks, birthday parties, picnics and road trips, these foods are now everywhere, all the time.  These are not treats anymore for most people, but have become a staple of many diets, available in one form or another — at the office, with a friend, on the run — every week.

Now, holidays and birthdays are hardly distinguishable from other days given how often kids are “rewarded” by some well-meaning but misguided individual who thinks the kids “need something a little special for all their hard work.”

Too much of a good thing is still too much

It used to be that folks celebrated special occasions,  the end of the year or the end of a season, with a party or treat. Now, “the kids played a great game so we took them out for ice cream” might be heard once a week after a class, game, or practice.

It’s constant.

And not only does such constant rewarding, treating and indulging set our kids up to expect junk food and rewards all the time, but it also sets them up for the increased diseases of modernity — obesity, diabetes, heart disease, cancers.

Making every day a party makes party days inherently less magical, full of promise and spectacle. Halloween is now about super-size candy bars scooped up by the ladle-full to kids who hit the stores one day, the hottest Halloween neighborhoods the next. A week later they can just go buy the same stuff from the corner market, a gas station, or in the grocery aisle. And they do.

Clothes, sweets, electronics, toys and gadgetry of all sorts are cheap, abundant and ubiquitous in our commercialized common spaces, rendering them desirable, necessary, essential, obsolete, superfluous and inadequate all at the same time. Only more of the same can assuage our overly full empty bellies.

As within, so without

Our kids’ rooms are studies in gross abundance.

No longer is one doll or stuffed animal okay, but a new one is needed every Saturday from the boutique toy shop at the faux “town square” style mall, the only places many of us go to get outside.

We don’t just have the family cat or dog, but the Chia Pet, ant farm, Tamagochi, and Sims worlds to take care of, all of which hover on the precipice of ruin for our inability to manage all our possessions in time and space.

And as bad as all this gorging at the buffet of perpetual abundance is on our waistlines, moods, and living spaces, it’s equally destructive to our world — to our precious natural resources and ecosystems. The growth paradigm infecting our “every day is a treat” mentality leaves a wake of toxic debris littering landfills and the oceans, despoiled waterways, choked-off air, and stressed-out and increasingly desertified soil.

The answer to much of our current dilemma is simple: We need to redefine what it means to have a treat, and to give a treat to our children.

We need to fight back against corporate encroachment on our value system by supporting each other as parents so that if “all we have to do is turn off the TV” or all we have to do is “just not buy it” (which are actually superficial answers to a much deeper problem) at least we are not the one lone family doing it by ourselves.

We need to have a more prominent national conversation about our values concerning consumption, and concerning at what ages it is appropriate for kids to watch TV, see movies, use computers and social networking sites, and have personal possession of cell phones, smart phones, iPods and other electronic gadgetry.

And we need to help each other understand why holidays and birthdays and ends-of-seasons are special, and make them that way, preserving and supporting traditions, while making clear that every day or every Friday is far too often for “treats.”

As a people we’ve gone too far. On myriad levels we’re woefully out of balance. It’s time to treat ourselves to some self-correction. Our reward is our sanity, more money in our pockets for the things that really matter, and a healthier world to leave to our kids, rather than one in disastrous crisis.

–Lindsay Curren, Occupy Parenting