Written by: Pooja Sardana
5 min readSep 17, 2022 11:24 AM IST
First published on: Sep 17, 2022 at 11:24 AM IST
I grew up in a middle-class family. I remember wearing hand-me-downs not just from cousins, but a number of clothes of my own mother, that my grandmother had preserved for years. My first set of new clothes in years, were a pair of jeans for my 16th birthday. I didn’t play much with toys, boardgames were limited to ludo or carrom. My indulgence was books and I had to wait six days to library day, choose my four books very carefully because I couldn’t go back and change any time before the next library day. I missed several of the dance parties because I couldn’t cough up the 200 bucks that everyone had to pool in. Then, I worked very very hard not to have to look at the price tag of anything.
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Much as it is fashionable now to tout one’s middle-class values, I cannot claim them anymore, and with that I have two kids who I can see do not value things as much as I did, or I would like them to. There is joy in seeing a child’s eyes light up when they see a new toy, or a book, or a dream room and our whole family craved this vicarious joy. Grandparents routinely ask kids “What would you like me to bring for you?”; well-meaning friends check what is the latest trend before birthday parties to make sure the kiddo gets a delightful new thing; parents of new friends make sure they send treats or toys as a gift with every playdate. And I? I can anticipate what newly advertised thing on Instagram will make my kids happy. I have a stash – cars, aeroplanes, Tom Gates books, shimmering new stationery – insta gifts that will wipe away tears, veer off a tantrum and distract from too much screen time. Or I should say, I HAD.
My drawer has nine gifts and five books for two kids and I have vowed not to open it till there is a well-earned gift occasion. My new mantra is ‘Scarcity Parenting’ – somewhere between deprivation and over-indulgence, lies this territory. I learned the concepts of scarcity and demand in economics and am now applying them in parenting. Scarcity is what separates the desires from the wants. For a desire to be qualified as a want – one must have the means and the willingness to pay for it.
Can we buy a remote-control car a day? Of course, but are you, dear child, willing to pay for it? The number of times I have seen a desire disappear when it has to be paid for in “pages read from a Hindi book”! I am now scarce – with gifts, with generic well-dones, with my availability, with my acceptance of badgering.
Gifts now have to be earned and they are valued much more. Also, my children are realising that they do not really want as many things as they think they want. Every pastel pen does not need to be in the daughter’s collection and she sees that eventually the older ones are going to waste. The son realises that he has too many cars to ask for more but he has some way to go before he stops.
Rather than saying “well-done” for a piece of completed work, I spend five minutes reflecting on what I like about it and what they enjoyed about doing it, or not.
My availability – sigh! With two years of no physical school, the need to soothe for the lack of social interaction, I had made them and myself believe that I was available at their beck and call. I am slowly redrawing those lines. I now have a paper clock on my laptop – that tells the kids when they can have my attention again.
When things are scarce, it helps you evaluate what genuinely holds value for you, and how much you are willing to do/bear/wait for it; and helping my kids understand these fundamentals about themselves is my core responsibility. So, here’s to scarcity parenting — for now!
Pooja Sardana is an entrepreneur, philosopher, traveller, passionate supporter of gender equality and the mother of two children, a girl and a boy aged 10 years and 7 years respectively
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