Making allowances for instant gratification

Why is it that some children hoard their weekly allowance, while others spend it as quickly as possible? I know that the general consensus at the moment is to applaud delayed gratification and discourage instant gratification, but before making a final judgment on this, I would like to understand where this behavior comes from.

On one end of the scale, you have children who prefer not to spend any of their money. Having been a bit like this myself, I can see several reasons for this.

1) you attach great importance to what you buy, and find it so difficult to choose that you end up not choosing anything;
2) you know that your parents prefer this behavior, and want to please them;
3) saving stuff has become a goal of its own.

This last idea is linked, I think, to the "collector instinct". As a child, I collected a lot of things - shells, insects, rocks, fossils, coins, stamps - but mostly only the things I could get without spending any money. And when I did spend my allowance, I would consider the purchase carefully in advance, and try to think ahead by imagining what it would be like to have the thing I wanted to buy.

The other end of the scale is much more difficult for me to understand, but I can imagine some reasons why money might burn a hole in someone's pocket:

1) you really want something, and have been waiting for it "for a really long time" (I put quotation marks because to a child, five minutes can be an eternity)
2) spending, for you, is linked with being "grown up", and you want to exercise this right
3) purchase pleasure (spending for the sake of spending)

I do not have "purchase pleasure" (defined by the urban dictionary as "The unexplained feeling of bliss, joy and satisfaction one gets following a purchase"), but I imagine it is linked to comfort buying which - like comfort eating - is something you do to chase away the blues. And if so, it seems to me that it is a bit like treating the symptoms of a disease (dissatisfaction, weltschmertz, call it what you like) instead of its cause. Sometimes this is necessary, but it should definitely not be a long-term policy. Apparently it is possible to fight fire with fire, but I am not sure you can get rid of materialist blues with even more consumerist behavior.

Saint Nicolas: from stern father figure to group therapist

As a child, I never really thought about it, but one fine day when I was all grown up it suddenly dawned on me that Saint Nicolas and Santa Claus are basically the same, namely a bishop that lived in Turkey in 3^rd century A.D.. In the Netherlands, Luxembourg and various other countries, he has his own day (the 6^th of December, or sometimes the 5^th). In many other countries, he has been lumped unceremoniously together with two very different celebrations, namely the winter solistice and the birth of Christ. My own personal theory is that someone, a long time ago, mixed Saint Nicolas up with the Three Kings, possibly because they all bring presents.

Which brings me to the past.

When I was young, we learned - by way of songs and stories – that Sinterklaas (like his copycat Santa Claus) kept track of how each child’s behaviour throughout the year, and would reward or punish the children on the night of December 5. Good children would get presents, roughly in proportion to how good they had been, and often accompanied by little poems in which Sinterklaas would comment on the recipient’s character or behaviour (both the good and the bad). Bad children would either not get any presents, or would be swatted by the wicker, or both. And really, really bad children would be stuck in a bag by one of Saint Nicolas’ assistants and dragged off to Spain. (What actually happened to these children was left to our own imagination, but if it were to happen today, I suppose we might think in terms of discpline training in a quasi-military survival camp.)

Over the course of the last forty years, the threat of punishment has almost completely disappeared from the celebration. The idea of dragging children off in bags has become so scary to parents that it is hardly ever mentioned, and corporal punishment is – ironically? – now punishable by law. Some parents apparently do still try to get their children to behave by threatening to tell Saint Nicolas not to bring any presents, but that only works in the short term. Shortly after receiving their presents and/or as soon as they lose interest in them, these same children revert to the horrible spoilt brats they are the rest of the year. Both most people just give the presents, without any real threat of punishment.

In the Netherlands, on the whole, the only vestige of punishment left is in the little poems accompanying the presents. Even adults exchanging presents on St. Nicolas day continue to respect this tradition. And to me, this still seems useful. In a sense (and this may be part of its appeal to Dutch people) these poems are like free therapy. You get to say out loud what bugs you about someone, and the other person is not allowed to get mad.

In fact, I think it is such a good idea I think we should introduce this tradition at the office. I already have some ideas of poems I could write about some of my colleagues …