A gift that’s still loved in March

Joel Waldfogel, an economist, surveyed 86 Yale students of intermediate microeconomics in January 1993 about the Christmas presents they had just been given. In a second survey, 58 students put a cash value on 278 gifts, “not counting the sentimental value of the gift.” His paper that December, “The Deadweight Loss of Christmas”, reached a cheerless verdict: holiday gift-giving “destroys between 10 percent and a third of the value of gifts.”¹ It is a good place to start on a gentler question: what makes a good gift for a child?

The least efficient givers, by his figures, were grandparents. The students valued their grandparents’ non-cash presents at about 63% of what they had cost, the lowest of any group (presents from friends were valued at almost exactly their price), and grandparents were by far the most likely to give cash, about 42% of the time.¹ It would be easy to make that a joke about Gogo’s taste. It is better read as a clue. There were only 15 of those non-cash presents, the people valuing them were students aged 18 to 22, and the one thing they were told to ignore, sentiment, is much of what a grandparent’s gift is made of.

The part Waldfogel left out is what psychologists have spent the years since studying: why some gifts land and others don’t, and what that suggests when the person tearing off the paper is two, or five, or eight. Most of these studies used American adults, often choosing imaginary gifts, and none of them tested a personalised book, so we say what each one found and where it stops.

Did an economist prove that Christmas wastes money?

No, and economists spent years arguing about it. The famous “third” is the top of a range drawn from two small surveys of students at one university, about one Christmas, priced in dollars.¹ The American Economic Association’s summary of the debate reports that later studies, with other people and other methods, found many recipients valuing their gifts at more than the giver had paid.²

Waldfogel left sentiment out on purpose: both of his surveys asked the students to ignore it. A cash value can say what a jersey would fetch, not what it means that Ouma chose it. For that, and for what makes a present right for a four-year-old, the psychologists have better evidence.

Why do givers and receivers want different things?

Because they are looking at different moments. Reviewing the gift research in 2016, Galak, Givi and Williams argued that givers focus on “the moment of exchange”, the unwrapping, while recipients care about what the gift is like to own and use afterwards. Many gift mistakes, they suggest, come from that mismatch.³

Yang and Urminsky named the giver’s side of it the smile-seeking hypothesis. Their givers, across six studies published in 2018, often chose the gift that would get the bigger reaction on the day over the one the recipient would be happier with over time, and the preference weakened when they expected not to hand the gift over in person.⁵ We chase the smile partly because we want to be there to see it.

The moment of opening is a joy, and nobody should give it up. But a child lives with a gift for months afterwards, and the useful question when choosing is whether it will still be asked for in March.

Does the thought count, or the price?

“It’s the thought that counts” turns out to be half true, and mostly true for the giver. Zhang and Epley called the belief “exaggerated, mispredicted, and misplaced” in the title of their 2012 paper. In their experiments, a giver’s thoughtfulness raised the recipient’s appreciation mainly when something prompted the recipient to think about it, such as a friend handing over a disappointing present. In the final experiment, though, putting thought into a gift made the givers themselves feel closer to the person they were giving to.⁶ The hour you spend choosing is, in part, a gift to yourself.

Price matters even less than givers imagine. The givers in Flynn and Adams’s three studies expected pricier gifts to be appreciated more, while recipients “reported no such association between gift price and their actual feelings of appreciation.”⁷ That doesn’t mean price never matters, only that givers overestimate it. Children weren’t in these studies, but few of them read receipts.

Should you ask, or surprise them?

Ask. People appreciated gifts they had explicitly asked for more than gifts they hadn’t, while givers assumed the two would be appreciated equally: that was the finding of five studies of adults by Gino and Flynn. In one of the studies, givers also thought money would be less welcome than a requested gift, and recipients felt the opposite.⁸

Small children don’t write gift registries, so for them the person to ask is Mum, Dad or whoever does bedtime. The useful question isn’t what they need. It’s what they can’t stop talking about this month: dinosaurs, netball, the moon.

Grandparents with several grandchildren may face a trap of their own. Shopping for several people at once tends to make givers choose something different for each, even when one gift would have been better liked and the recipients would never compare: that was the pattern across six experiments by Steffel and LeBoeuf. They were trying to be thoughtful by treating each person as unique; focusing on what each one liked reduced the effect.⁹ The same kind of present for every grandchild is fine, as long as it suits each of them.

Is a sentimental gift worth the risk?

Givers think so less often than they should. One of Givi and Galak’s tests set a framed photo of two friends together against a framed photo of the friend’s favourite musician. Across their three studies, published in 2017, givers chose the gift matched to the recipient’s interests over the sentimental one “much more often than recipients would prefer”, because they felt “relatively uncertain” that the sentimental gift would be liked.¹⁰

In the university’s summary of the work, givers saw sentimental gifts as “home runs or strikeouts” and the other kind as “a sure single”: a six or a duck, a cricketer might say, against a safe single. Givers who first wrote about a time a risk had paid off were “much more likely to choose the sentimental gift”.¹⁰

A cash value can say what a jersey would fetch, not what it means that Ouma chose it.

“Sentimental” in these studies meant a gift that called up a shared memory or the relationship itself. In those terms, a book with a child’s name and face in it is about them. What makes it about the two of you is what only you can add: a few words in your own handwriting inside the cover, and the reading together. We make books like that, so weigh our enthusiasm accordingly.

Things or experiences: which makes a child happier?

For adults, the research leans towards experiences. When Chan and Mogilner studied real gift exchanges in 2017, experiential gifts strengthened relationships more than material ones. The improvement came from the emotion felt while the experience was enjoyed, not when the gift was received, and it held whether or not giver and recipient enjoyed it together.¹¹

Young children are different. Those aged 3 to 12, Chaplin and colleagues found, got more happiness from material goods than from experiences. Across their four studies of children and teenagers aged 3 to 17, experiences pulled ahead only in late adolescence, as they do for adults, and the shift tracked two developing skills: memory, and theory of mind, the ability to understand what other people think and feel.¹² An outing is lovely, but a five-year-old may not hold on to it the way you will.

So for a young child, the research points to a thing they can hold, with some of your time attached. We think a book read together does both jobs at once.

How many toys does a small child need?

Fewer than you’d think, at least in a short play session. Thirty-six toddlers aged 18 to 30 months, in a 2018 American study, each had two supervised 15-minute play sessions, one with 4 toys and one with 16. With fewer toys, they played with each toy for longer and found more different ways to use it.¹³

It was a lab, the families were recruited on a university campus, and the study doesn’t say what the right number of toys is: four was simply what the researchers compared with sixteen. But it supports an idea worth taking to the shops. One good thing can get more play than a pile of them.

Should a gift ever be a reward?

Gifts are a pleasure, and they seem to work best as one. Adults whose parents had used possessions to show love, or to reward and punish them, tended to be more materialistic, according to three surveys of Americans by Richins and Chaplin.¹⁴ The surveys asked adults to remember their childhoods, so they can show a pattern but can’t say what caused it.

A small lab experiment with toddlers in Germany points the same way: 20-month-olds given a material reward for helping an adult were later less likely to help than toddlers who had been praised or given nothing.¹⁵ More on that study, and on how sharing grows, is in sharing and taking turns.

And children may enjoy giving more than we expect: in a small Canadian study, toddlers not yet two were happier giving treats than getting them.¹⁶ A gift for a child can come with a gift from them, which is a good idea at Christmas.

Why do books make such good gifts?

The most striking evidence comes from sociology. In 2010, Evans, Kelley, Sikora and Treiman analysed representative samples of more than 70,000 people in 27 countries. Children who grew up in homes with many books went on to about three more years of schooling than children from homes without books, after allowing for their parents’ education, occupation and class. The pattern held, they wrote, “under Communism, capitalism, and Apartheid”.¹⁷

That is a correlation. Homes full of books differ in many ways, and no single gift adds three years to anyone’s schooling. Adults in 31 societies who grew up with a home library had better literacy, numeracy and problem-solving with technology, a later study found, and the effects were “loglinear, with greatest returns to the growth in smaller libraries.”¹⁸ In plain words, the first shelf of books is linked with the biggest difference.

In South Africa, that first shelf is often missing. In the 2023 National Reading Survey, 65% of homes with children under ten didn’t have a single picture book, and only 31% of adults said their oldest child had owned a book by the age of five. The hopeful number is in the same survey: 52% of adults who live with children read with them, up from 35% in 2016.¹⁹ There is more on what works in reading in South Africa.

Giving books is linked with small gains, though less than you might hope on its own. Among more than 5,000 American kindergarteners, children whose families had received a free book every month through Dolly Parton’s Imagination Library had slightly better letter knowledge and phonological awareness, with no difference in spelling, and the effects were “small in size”.²¹ Families who sign up differ from those who don’t, so even that small link may not all be the books.

The stronger evidence is about how books are shared. Across 19 randomised trials with 2,594 children aged 1 to 6, teaching parents to share picture books gave children small but real gains in language, and more when the training lasted longer than an hour.²² In one book-sharing trial in Khayelitsha, 13 of the babies’ carers were grandmothers.²³ There is more in reading aloud: what the research says.

So what makes a good gift for a child?

Put together, the research suggests three habits, none of them expensive.

Of course we would say a book. What the research does suggest is the shape of a good one: something a child can hold, chosen for who they are this year, that you’ll still be reading together long after the paper is gone. Our own attempt at that shape is The Golden Road, where the counting comes back on spread after spread and the last page asks how many stars they can count: a reason to open it again in March. The book is new, with no study of its own behind it; the counting it practises has plenty.

For ideas age by age, from two to eight, see the gift guide. For Gogos, Oumas and godparents, there is gifts from grandparents and godparents, and for a summer Christmas, Christmas gifts for kids in South Africa.

Sources

1. Waldfogel, J. (1993). The deadweight loss of Christmas. American Economic Review, 83(5), 1328–1336. jstor.org/stable/2117564
2. American Economic Association. Did holiday gift-giving just create a loss? Research Highlights. aeaweb.org
3. Galak, J., Givi, J., & Williams, E. F. (2016). Why certain gifts are great to give but not to get: A framework for understanding errors in gift giving. Current Directions in Psychological Science, 25(6), 380–385. doi.org/10.1177/0963721416656937
4. Rixom, J. M., Mas, E. M., & Rixom, B. A. (2020). Presentation matters: The effect of wrapping neatness on gift attitudes. Journal of Consumer Psychology, 30(2), 329–338. doi.org/10.1002/jcpy.1140
5. Yang, A. X., & Urminsky, O. (2018). The smile-seeking hypothesis: How immediate affective reactions motivate and reward gift giving. Psychological Science, 29(8), 1221–1233. doi.org/10.1177/0956797618761373
6. Zhang, Y., & Epley, N. (2012). Exaggerated, mispredicted, and misplaced: When “it’s the thought that counts” in gift exchanges. Journal of Experimental Psychology: General, 141(4), 667–681. doi.org/10.1037/a0029223
7. Flynn, F. J., & Adams, G. S. (2009). Money can’t buy love: Asymmetric beliefs about gift price and feelings of appreciation. Journal of Experimental Social Psychology, 45(2), 404–409. doi.org/10.1016/j.jesp.2008.11.003
8. Gino, F., & Flynn, F. J. (2011). Give them what they want: The benefits of explicitness in gift exchange. Journal of Experimental Social Psychology, 47(5), 915–922. doi.org/10.1016/j.jesp.2011.03.015
9. Steffel, M., & LeBoeuf, R. A. (2014). Overindividuation in gift giving: Shopping for multiple recipients leads givers to choose unique but less preferred gifts. Journal of Consumer Research, 40(6), 1167–1180. doi.org/10.1086/674199
10. Givi, J., & Galak, J. (2017). Sentimental value and gift giving: Givers’ fears of getting it wrong prevents them from getting it right. Journal of Consumer Psychology, 27(4), 473–479. doi.org/10.1016/j.jcps.2017.06.002. The study designs and the quoted summary are from Carnegie Mellon University’s release on EurekAlert, 25 July 2017. eurekalert.org/news-releases/734216
11. Chan, C., & Mogilner, C. (2017). Experiential gifts foster stronger social relationships than material gifts. Journal of Consumer Research, 43(6), 913–931. doi.org/10.1093/jcr/ucw067
12. Chaplin, L. N., Lowrey, T. M., Ruvio, A. A., Shrum, L. J., & Vohs, K. D. (2020). Age differences in children’s happiness from material goods and experiences: The role of memory and theory of mind. International Journal of Research in Marketing, 37(3), 572–586. doi.org/10.1016/j.ijresmar.2020.01.004
13. Dauch, C., Imwalle, M., Ocasio, B., & Metz, A. E. (2018). The influence of the number of toys in the environment on toddlers’ play. Infant Behavior and Development, 50, 78–87. doi.org/10.1016/j.infbeh.2017.11.005
14. Richins, M. L., & Chaplin, L. N. (2015). Material parenting: How the use of goods in parenting fosters materialism in the next generation. Journal of Consumer Research, 41(6), 1333–1357. doi.org/10.1086/680087
15. Warneken, F., & Tomasello, M. (2008). Extrinsic rewards undermine altruistic tendencies in 20-month-olds. Developmental Psychology, 44(6), 1785–1788. doi.org/10.1037/a0013860
16. Aknin, L. B., Hamlin, J. K., & Dunn, E. W. (2012). Giving leads to happiness in young children. PLoS ONE, 7(6), e39211. doi.org/10.1371/journal.pone.0039211
17. Evans, M. D. R., Kelley, J., Sikora, J., & Treiman, D. J. (2010). Family scholarly culture and educational success: Books and schooling in 27 nations. Research in Social Stratification and Mobility, 28(2), 171–197. doi.org/10.1016/j.rssm.2010.01.002
18. Sikora, J., Evans, M. D. R., & Kelley, J. (2019). Scholarly culture: How books in adolescence enhance adult literacy, numeracy and technology skills in 31 societies. Social Science Research, 77, 1–15. doi.org/10.1016/j.ssresearch.2018.10.003
19. Polzer-Ngwato, T., Shilakoe, L., Morse, K., & Huston, K. (2023). National Reading Survey 2023 Findings Report. Nal’ibali Trust (National Reading Barometer). lhg.cput.ac.za; launch summary: nalibali.org
20. Quote Investigator (24 February 2023), on “A room without books is like a body without a soul”. quoteinvestigator.com
21. Skibbe, L. E., & Foster, T. D. (2019). Participation in the Imagination Library book distribution program and its relations to children’s language and literacy outcomes in kindergarten. Reading Psychology, 40(4), 350–370. doi.org/10.1080/02702711.2019.1614124
22. Dowdall, N., Melendez-Torres, G. J., Murray, L., Gardner, F., Hartford, L., & Cooper, P. J. (2020). Shared picture book reading interventions for child language development: A systematic review and meta-analysis. Child Development, 91(2), e383–e399. doi.org/10.1111/cdev.13225
23. Vally, Z., Murray, L., Tomlinson, M., & Cooper, P. J. (2015). The impact of dialogic book-sharing training on infant language and attention: A randomized controlled trial in a deprived South African community. Journal of Child Psychology and Psychiatry, 56(8), 865–873. doi.org/10.1111/jcpp.12352