The Parents Who Don’t Give Their Kids Gifts
April Jackson has three rules for her 4-and-a-half-year-old twins: no screens, no sugar, and no gifts. “I don’t do any gifts. I don’t do birthday, Christmas, or whatever,” the 37-year-old restaurateur and former Miss Jamaica Universe told me. “I want my girls to value people, not things.”
A 2024 survey found that 49 percent of parents said they expect to go into debt to buy holiday presents, spending an average of $461 per child. Some families scrimp all year to buy; others charge purchases to credit cards and AfterPay; others pick up loads of end-of-the-year overtime. While working- and middle-class parents scramble to give their kids a “good Christmas,” many well-off ones are opting out.
“Around this time of year, people are going to be buying the latest iPad for their child,” Jackson lamented, only to “sit with the child at dinner stuck to the fucking screen. And my heart breaks.” Fervent anti-gifters like Jackson want to be heard this holiday season — even as online commenters call them cheap, selfish, and cruel.
The internet flame war over gifts highlights the tremendous pressure parents face to meet impossible expectations: to provide for kids while spending time with them; to give them everything without spoiling them; to shield them from the world’s corrupting forces without producing insular weirdos.
It’s become clear there are two types of well-heeled millennial parents. First, there are the Paris Hilton types who shower their little Eloises in treasures and post the haul on RichTok. Then, there are the minimalists who strive to teach their tots character by forgoing holiday handouts. These are the Park Slope parents who agree with President Donald Trump on just this one thing: A kid needs one doll, maybe two; who beg grandparents for “no more plastic Amazon crap” and whose shelves are full of wooden Montessori blocks and more Yoto cards than they can count. In the tradition of crypto fraudster Sam Bankman-Fried’s professor parents, who reportedly did not celebrate holidays or give gifts, these moms and dads will pat themselves on the back on the morning of the 25th for the beautiful vast emptiness under the tree, assured that their children will grow up to be model citizens. Step aside, Santa: This year, Scrooge is driving the sleigh.
“Kids do not need gifts. They need zero gifts,” said Michaeleen Doucleff, the author of Hunt, Gather, Parent and a mom who strives for a toy-free home. “For millennia, kids have thrived with very few material objects.” Before the Industrial Revolution, the concept of “buying a toy” didn’t really exist. Neither did the idea of childhood. Kids spent their time helping their families and working. Gifts were largely utilitarian: perhaps a new dress to replace the ratty one you’d worn all year or a handmade bow and arrow to teach a toddler to hunt. The dawn of mass manufacturing enabled doodad production at scale while also separating parents from their offspring, who once toiled side by side.
Anthony Graesch, a professor of anthropology at Connecticut College who studies household possessions, said that today’s dual-income parents spend so little weekday time with their kids and feel so guilty about it that “purchasing toys or other child-focused goods becomes an accessible way to compensate.” Of course, more spending means needing to earn more money, which becomes a vicious cycle.
Graesch warned that “relentless commercial pressures equate good parenting with continual consumption” even when it crushes your budget, cuts time with loved ones, and stuffs your home with crap you do not want and your kids do not need.
To many parents, though, Santa’s bounty is the point. In one TikTok haul, a mom sits in a room completely filled with presents for her daughter’s third birthday. On r/DavidRamsey, a personal-finance sub-Reddit, posters discuss how they spend $1,000, $1,500, per kid on Christmas gifts. One dad bought his son an ATV and his daughter a snowmobile, totaling $11,000. Posters insist they are not flush with cash: “I work my ass off to get my kiddo gifts each year.”
For those who can afford it, going gift-free is a bold, countercultural flex that elicits praise for raising non-greedy kids who probably meditate. For those with fewer means, forgoing gifts means facing harsh judgment that you cannot provide for your deprived spawn.
In an “Am I the Asshole?” Facebook group, a mom who struggles to pay child support asked if it was okay if she left the shopping to her kids’ dad and stepmom. Heather Hull-Williams, mom of two grown kids and former high-school teacher, replied, “I’d sell plasma to get them gifts if I had to. Parental love is supposed to be unconditional.”
To Hull-Williams, material lack makes grand gestures matter more. She told me that poor kids “appreciate” that “my mom and dad pulled extra shifts or sold something that mattered to them because I’m important.”
When others claimed this is materialistic, she quipped, “To raise a kid who’s emotionally and psychologically well-adjusted, you fall in line — more or less — with societal norms.” Besides, Hull-Williams asked, “What will you do when the teacher asks what Santa got them?”
If working parents shop to compensate for our absence, it’s no surprise that social media’s most passionate anti-gifters are with their children full time. April Jackson homeschools her twins and made a TikTok about why she will never use day care. Madisun Gray, a YouTuber whose channel focuses on “creating a slower, softer, more intentional life,” made a video called “the ONE THING your kids DESPERATELY NEED for christmas.” (Spoiler: It’s “less.”) For $1,000, “wives, mothers, creatives” can buy Gray’s e-course on how to “slow down, simplify and strip the excess away.”
Like Instagram reels of tranquil chicken co-ops and roasted birds that somehow stretch to feed ten, the zero-gift lifestyle is part of a fantasy: that your kids won’t beg for another Labubu because they have all they need — you.
In this fantasy, you might, like Gray, craft an Advent calendar out of paper and a stick, each day revealing a new family experience. In your pared-down home, your kids’ nervous systems will finally reset and they will learn how to play quietly and ask for seconds of eggplant. Instead of one-click ordering a Bluey supermarket on Amazon, you will thrift a vintage Brio train set.
Blank space under the Christmas tree is the ultimate luxury because it implies so much abundance that your children lack for nothing. These kids don’t need Santa to bring the PS5 because they already have it.
Rachael Kaighin-Shields, a Brooklyn mother of three who doesn’t give her kids gifts, said it’s primarily “a values thing” but admitted, “There’s a big class component.”
Although Kaighin-Shields never earned a lot as a social worker and said she “couldn’t afford to work” after the birth of her now-4-year-old, her house is valued at $3.5 million on Zillow. “If my daughter really wanted a doll, I can buy it. I choose not to.” But that’s different, she said, than not being able to afford it.
For many without means, the holidays are the most stressful time of the year. Wish lists aren’t the only pressure: Parents fret about gas money to visit relatives, extra groceries for a big meal, child care during school closures, and rent that comes due just seven days after Christmas. When President Trump publicly waived away fears about trade-war inflation with his insistence that children don’t need “30 dolls,” Democratic representative Marie Gluesenkamp Perez one-upped the Grinch-in-chief by replying that she doesn’t give her kids toys, period: “I’m a big believer in dirt and string and sticks.” But dirt, string, and sticks don’t lighten the load of precarity.
While Christmas nominally celebrates an anti-materialist’s humble birth among livestock, Santa’s questionable morality rules the day. The jolly old man brings gifts to “good” kids only and teaches that those who go without are bad.
“I met a lot of people who speak about the pain of not being able to provide. I know that pain exists,” Kaighin-Shields said. “I feel grateful that I don’t feel that. That gratitude is what I want my kids to feel. Distracting them with flashy gifts detracts from that.”
Some parents I spoke to were shocked that eschewing gifts is even a trend or is something you’d make a big deal about. “We don’t do Christmas gifts,” my nutritionist, Jennifer Nickell, informed me, deadpan. “Christmas isn’t about gifts.” (Instead, she and her daughter do a celebratory outing; last year they attended a concert.) Several Jewish friends were appalled to learn about many gentiles’ consumerist Decembers. Rebecca Goldstein, who grew up receiving a $1 coin on each night of Hanukkah and does something similar for her daughter, laughed, “Being a Christian is so stressful!”
“The problem isn’t with giving,” Doucleff insisted. “Giving is great.” Doucleff argued that involving kids in thoughtful, sane giving can teach generosity and empathy. “But parents think gifts make kids happy. And they don’t.” A recent New Yorker cover features a baby surrounded by dozens of toys, gleefully playing with an empty Amazon box.
Research suggests that toddlers play more creatively with fewer toys. Meanwhile, clutter spikes mothers’ cortisol, a stress hormone. In a paper called “What Makes for a Merry Christmas?” psychology professors Tim Kasser and Kennon Sheldon found that adults whose holidays revolved around gifts were more stressed and less happy than those who focused on family or religion. Overgifted kids started to believe that “getting stuff” is crucial. Materialism correlates to more depression and less empathy.
But gifts are not just objects; they are symbols. Holiday marketing promises that we can heal the year’s failures in a few grand gestures: that we can convert our spoiled brats into grateful citizens or that we can erase the sting of lack with the heroic purchase.
“Anything that separates kids from materialism is a good thing,” opined Doucleff, who gives her 5-year-old daughter only books, tools, and supplies for admittedly “trad” hobbies like sewing and paper quilting. But she’s skeptical of these no-gift policies. “So you don’t give your kids a gift at Christmas, but how much have you gotten them all of December?” She mocked the trend as, “For this one day a year, I won’t get you something.”
Indeed, Avital Schreiber Levy, a mother of five who gives her kids a photo album for their birthdays, explained that necessities (including clothes, shoes, and school supplies) do not count as gifts. “I also buy books on tap.” Levy doesn’t give in to nagging. But if one of her kids sees a toy they like, “If we come home and we talk about it and it fits in the budget, I’ll get it for them.”
April Jackson and her gift-free twins are currently in Bali, 11 months into a trip around the world. To all the haters who accuse her of being “abusive” for denying her preschoolers bow-wrapped boxes filled with Nintendo Switches and sweets, she replies: “Most people can’t afford my lifestyle, babes.”
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