When you start to embrace a frugal lifestyle, you look at the world in a whole new way. You see lots of empty consumerism, sneaky marketing tactics, and waste everywhere. Throw out the toothpaste tube before squeezing the last possible spot of toothpaste from it? I think not!
Unfortunately, there’s a negative side to this… something that I realized when I was writing a post on frugality last week My strong desire to prevent wasting things, may have me wasting an opportunity for kids to grow.
You see, I tend to be quite conservative with finite resources – sometimes it’s money, sometimes food or clothing, sometimes it’s kids’ art supplies. I tend to avoid letting the kids do a lot with one-time use items like stickers, glitter, paint… It freaks me out when the kids destroy crayons, use 1,000 pieces of paper, or combine the rainbow pack of Play-doh into one blah color.
I realize that kids need to express themselves. They need ample resources to learn how to do things (like using scissors or pasting things). They need to have all of the sensory experiences associated with getting messy.
And all of that is hard for a frugal gal to take!
I think the solution to this issue is to strike a balance. I need to loosen up and let them have fun. I will still try to teach my kids that there is no such thing as unlimited resources… but I won’t let the lesson curtail the creativity.
I’ll search high and low for cheap arts and crafts supplies and continue to do things like making my own play dough.
What do you think? Do you ever find your frugality crimping your kids’ creativity? What do you do about it?
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