Play Dough
Fool for Love
February 11, 1998

It's a heart-warming time of year. The time when pink hearts are tossed willy-nilly around the house by your little brood. When candy necklaces are crunched underfoot and yanked hither and yon by anxious hands. When sugary highs rain chaos on the family landscape.

It is, of course, a time for you to teach your kids about love. And this leads naturally to the next subject on the mind of parents everywhere -- money.

How shall we teach our children the relationship between love and money? How can we seize on the event of Valentine's Day to drum a sweet lesson into their little brains?

1) Teach them the message behind the marketing.

Help them to understand that Valentine's Day is indeed about love, and only secondarily about candy hearts and cookies and cake. Help them to see that the message of love is a wonderful one, and that the gifts we give on a day like Valentine's Day are expressions of a feeling. In giving gifts, we express the feeling, and we also strengthen the feeling.

2) Show them the pleasure of giving.

You can demonstrate that to give is often as much fun as to receive. Make a big deal of what they give you, even if it's a chicken-scratched paper. The better they feel, the more they learn to enjoy the act of giving.

3) Do a project with them.

Are they making valentines? Folding papers into quarters and making elaborate paper cutouts? Drawing hearts? Composing a poem? Whatever they're doing, try doing it with them. You'll both have fun. Use the lead-in to the holiday as an occasion to make something with your kids, and use the holiday itself as a time to enjoy the fruits of your labors

4) Teach them that money can't buy love.

Play them the old Beatles song. Make them understand that their hand-drawn valentines are more valuable to you than the LED, silicon hard-wired, holographic, auto-speaking, auto-winking plastiform super-duper electro-digi-card that they could have bought at the nearest megastore. While you're at it, you might tell them just how much that electro-digi-card actually costs, and how the thought is what really counts.

5) Get them to cut back on the red crayons. And the blue. And the green.

Are they drawing you a heart? A sleepy sunset over a cozy home? Explain to them that that they can get just the same effect by using just a line or two, as by filling the page with color. After all, those Crayolas don't grow on trees. Point out to them how Picasso -- before he embarked on Cubism, and while he was still emerging from his Red and Blue periods -- managed to capture extraordinary works with simple lines. Show them Matisse as well. Lecture them on parsimony and economy of line.

(Note: This last suggestion is a joke! Remember that here at the Fool we reserve the right to indulge in quite a bit of Foolishness!)

-- David Wolpe (TMF Dbunk)