Looking at my kids, you wouldn’t know their name brand shirt and shorts were purchased second hand.
You wouldn’t know that the expensive shoes on their feet were actually bought for a fraction of the retail price.
The book they’re reading and the backpack they are carrying were most likely purchased at a discount too.
I take my kids to shop at Goodwill and second-hand stores on purpose.
A friend sent me this viral Facebook post asking my take on it.
To me, this is just a typical scenario that happens to all of us parents, at one time or another. We react to our child’s bad behavior or disappointing character because we’ve never proactively made a plan to do otherwise.
We get so fed up with our kid’s lack of gratitude and reactively make desperate decisions to counteract what we have created. I’ve most certainly been there.
If we don’t want to raise entitled children, then what can we do today to ensure that we instead raise humble, grateful sons and daughters?
Shop at Goodwill now.
We don’t want to wait until the negative attribute arises and then scramble to figure out how to squelch it. I highly doubt that making her son pick out and pay for his weekly wardrobe at Goodwill was a planned consequence of entitlement. It was simply a reaction to it.
What if we parent proactively today so that the entitlement we don’t want to see in our children, doesn’t come to fruition tomorrow?
What if we look at the values and traits that we don’t want our kids to embody as an adult and begin to purposefully parent toward heading those off now?
Shopping at second-hand stores has always been a proactive part of my parenting plan.
I want my children to become adults who don’t place a high value on material items so I, in turn, must devalue materialism in our home now. I also want to raise people who understand that reusing and recycling are not just good for our wallets, but for our planet overall.
Don’t use shopping at Goodwill as a punishment for your entitled child, but instead as a purposeful way to build positive values that may just last them a lifetime.
Do you shop at thrift, second hand and bargain shops on purpose?
