Kids Today...I'm Confused

So my children always fascinate me.  I never really know what they are thinking.  I believe having older children before I had the surviving quadruplets gave me lots of insight into raising children and what I was doing wrong (sorry older kids, I truly mean it!).  I think my oldest children, even though I mostly only let them watch educational programming, still saw a LOT of commercials.

The little kids do not really see any commercials.  We got rid of cable before they were a year old and got a ROKU to stream TV. We got an antenna to pick up local stations and the only channel they watched was PBS. Since PBS has no real commercials I was fine with them watching TV.


Over the years I LOVED I could take the children to McDonalds and the children were not begging to go all the time and they weren't even asking to eat the food.  They called McDonalds the "place where the kids play" or "Old McDonalds".  It was SO cute!  Most important is that there was no begging for the toys, food, or anything associated with the fast food giant except the play place.  LOL

Now fast forward to present day.  Since the children do not watch commercials they have no idea what's popular or trendy.  There is not a drive in them to buy toys or stuff.  I have been trying to figure out what to get James for Christmas that is NOT electronic and can hopefully be played by himself.  Joseph and Margaret are fairly easy to shop for but James is difficult.  So last night I sat down with James and the Chromebook and we went looking on Amazon for toys.  We were scrolling through pages of toys on the internet.  After about five minutes James asked me if we were done.  I said we had only been looking for five minutes. Do you like anything you see?  James hesitated and said he only wanted a Nerf Gun and a Kindle.  That was ALL he wanted!  I was proud that he does not want a lot of stuff, but dang, it makes it SO hard to buy things for him!

I remember when I was a kid and I couldn't wait until the Sears Toy Catalog came out!  I would scour that thing and mark all sorts of stuff that I wanted. Even my older children, Jerrin and Caitlin, would love to look over the ads from the newspaper on Thanksgiving and find stuff they would love to have. Now, I can't get the kids to tell me much of anything they want.  Margaret wants a Fuby and by default so do the boys.  Joseph wants musical things and so do the others. James wants a NERF gun along with a Kindle.  I know Margaret and Joseph would enjoy those too.  So I think that will be our Christmas.  I am going to see about getting an iPad Mini instead of a Kindle so we can take advantage of the educational and therapy apps available in the Apple store.