I’ve asked this before but I’ll ask it again – why do we buy our kids toys? Note this photo of my friends’ children cleaning the cat hair off of my kitty condo. I wish I had it on video, because they were actually arguing over who got to clean which spot. “No, I want the bottom!”

I was talking to someone awhile back about the Montessori school their child attends. They told me that the school does not allow fiction books in the classroom. They feel it inhibits children’s natural creativity. That could be considered an extreme measure, but I believe there is some validity behind it.

I don’t remember having an obscene amount of toys growing up. My best memories were of writing plays and acting out talk shows and cooking shows with my brother and sister. We were all about make-believe. I remember one summer when Kari and I made up play names and created our own driver licenses. Our grown-up characters lived in Pretoria, Illinois. (We had never been there but I heard about it in a song. “We are marching to Pretoria, Pretoria, Pretoria!”) We had wallets with fake credit cards and we would carry them around in our purses.  Oh, we were cool back then.

The fake credit cards I played with as a child were the paper kind that came with wallets, sort of like the flimsy photos of strangers that come with new picture frames. Now they sell fake credit cards with children’s toys. Dave Ramsey was just on CBS News to talk about this issue. The whole thing really gets under my skin. Here I am every year with Financial Peace University trying to teach grown adults how to stop using credit cards and climb their way out of massive consumer debt, and meanwhile corporate America is spending billions of dollars to raise up more people to get right back into it.

Here are some scary statistics:

• Most teens (51%) agree that it is easier to buy things with a credit card than cash.
• Given the choice, almost one in three (29 percent) teens would prefer buying things with a credit card than cash. This represents a 61% increase over last year (18%).
• Almost three in ten teens (29%) are already in debt.

These numbers make me sick to my stomach. Credit cards are not for play. Consumer debt has destroyed so many people’s lives (if you don’t believe me, listen to ten minutes of Dave Ramsey’s radio show) and yet these credit card companies are making it into a game. Why do they do it? Because they know if they familiarize kids with a certain item or brand early on, when they are old enough they will become customers for life. It’s kiddie branding, it is certainly not a game I want to play.

Technorati Tags: Holidailies, kids, credit cards,  finances, Dave Ramsey, FPU, kiddie branding, consumer debt

I’m reading a book called “Blink – The Power of Thinking Without Thinking” Very interesting. It pointed me to www.implicit.harvard.edu, where you can complete a short exercise to see how you really feel about things. I took the ”Young – Old” IAT and discovered this about myself:

You have completed the Young – Old IAT.

Your Result

Your data suggest little to no automatic preference between Old and Young.

Thank you for your participation. Just below is a breakdown of the scores generated by others. Most respondents, even the elderly, find it easier to associate Old people with Bad and Young people with Good compared to the reverse.

Many of the questions that you answered on the previous page have been addressed in research over the last 10 years. For example, the order that you performed the response pairing is influential, but procedural corrections largely eliminate that influence (see FAQ #1). Each visitor to the site completes the task in a randomized order. If you would like to learn more about the IAT, please visit the FAQs and background information section.

You are welcome to try additional demonstration tasks, and we encourage you to register (easy) for the research site where you will gain access to studies about more than 100 topics about social groups, personality, pop culture, and more.