Anonymous wrote:Toys are material things. Save money for more important things on your children's futures like college, fun family trips, karate classes, art classes. Like people said here, make experiences, don't shower kids with things. Make memories

NP here. This is a great suggestion but I'm telling you from experience, this doesn't fly with grandparents who like to shower kids with gifts. For them, it's the kids' excited reactions that they want and kids don't get excited about experience gifts at that age. My parents are equally as ridiculous as OP's and I have tried everything I can to get them to slow down on the gifts. It's constant. Even when they have birthdays or holidays coming up days and weeks later, they still bring them toys. Or take them to buy toys. Or books. Or games. Or clothes. It never stops. I've tried everything from asking nicely to being firm to basically throwing a fit and nothing seems to make a difference.

I stick with the one in, one out rule. I tell my sons that if they want something new, they need to get rid of something old. And it seems to work. I also throw toys out all the time--not the toys they love but things they won't notice are gone. And before the holidays, we do a huge clean-out.

People will tell you that this isn't a big deal and you should be grateful, etc. No, it's not the end of the world but for those of us who deal with this, it's annoying and a big point of contention so I get it OP. I feel like I have to scale back to the bare minimum on holidays because I just don't have the room. So, I feel your pain OP. I just don't have great advice on how to make it better.

Toys are material things. Save money for more important things on your children's futures like college, fun family trips, karate classes, art classes. Like people said here, make experiences, don't shower kids with things. Make memories

My ILs used to buy so much for our kids and it really bothered DH and me. We finally realized that step-mom's kids didn't have nearly as much and they felt they needed to spend the same on our kids to be "fair." We explicitly told them that we only wanted the kids to get one Christmas and one birthday gift from them and that it was fine if the other grandkids (who my kids don't know anyway) got more. Fortunately they were receptive to our feedback and the gifts become more manageable and appropriate. Good luck.

OP. We went through this. It did die down when he was a bit older. At least in our case, one of the big givers wasn't spending time with him. He saw the difference and knew what mattered.

I agree that this is hard, and makes parenting to your own values a challenge, my kid is now 17, and what I can tell you from this vantage point is that the grandparent excesses eventually didn't matter.

I was eventually able to redirect the giving into things that we needed as a family (electronics), or figure out ways to say thank you and then just not give my kid the gift.

I was also able to exploit the competition to turn some of the giving into things like theatre tickets, which meant an experience with grandma.