I was somewhat surprised when my husband bought a $180 cell phone for my stepdaughter this summer. But not that surprised.
My husband’s thirteen-year-old daughter has a laptop that is almost as nice as his and a digital camera that out-shoots ours. She energetically streams videos and downloads music onto her cell phone. And when she gets tired, she can relax on a special pillow that has an iPod speaker built into it. But she’s not unusual.
From cell phones and iPods to laptops and digital cameras, kids are demanding increasingly sophisticated and expensive electronics. This leaves many parents wondering what is really reasonable and whether they should cave in to extravagant requests or put the brakes on big purchases.
Meanwhile, retailers are cashing in. American families spent more than $128 billion on their teenagers in 2006, and teen buying power was estimated at more than $100 billion, according to MarketResearch.com.
But not everyone is buying into the craze.
Laura Calk, the mother of three kids ages twenty, eighteen, and fifteen, has tried to keep expensive electronics to a minimum in their Atlanta home.
“We just haven’t really gotten them that much,” Calk says. “If it is something they really want, they can wait until Christmas or their birthday.”
Take video games, for example. Calk resisted buying her oldest child any video games until he was in junior high and even then, he wasn’t given a vast collection.
“We didn’t get him a lot of games,” she says. “He could rent them or buy them used.”
Meanwhile, they limited their youngest child’s time on video games by requiring that he read for thirty minutes at home to earn thirty minutes of video game playing time.
She and her husband bought their children laptops for Christmas a couple years ago to eliminate the stress of everyone sharing the family’s crash-prone desk-top computer. They realized the children would need them for school and figured it would restore some sanity around the house during peak homework hours.
Calk’s fifteen-year-old son is currently saving up for a new cell phone—a sleek Samsung model that flips open both vertically and horizontally and has all the bells and whistles for a steep $130.
