Gift Giving, and Other Questionable Choices

My son is six years old. Still so delightfully innocent in many ways, and growing more and more worldly every minute, too, much to my dismay. I'm hearing about things that he's witnessing or participating in at school that are curling my hair. But last weekend, he made a request that stumped my husband and me for several days. I'm still not convinced we gave the right answer.

Son announced that he would like to buy a gift for a classmate, a girl that he sits next to in first grade. "Mom, I really want to buy her a present. I told her I would," he said earnestly. I didn't know what to say. A first-grader buying another first-grader a gift? Why? We're used to buying gifts for birthday parties, but this was a first. At first, I thought it wasn't a great idea, but I wanted more information. 

I asked why he wanted to do this. He told me he had promised her a gift. Ah-ha, I thought, maybe he's trying to buy her friendship. He also told me that he had given her a drawing or a note recently, and that she hadn't been any too impressed with it. So I figured he was trying to win her favor with a little gift. Then, he got specific about the gift: he wanted to buy her a tiny stuffed puppy he had seen at Target. A puppy he had wanted for himself. So, now he wanted to buy an item for someone else that he actually wanted for himself. Are you trying to get her to like you better, I asked? He said no, but I still wondered if that was part of the equation.

Some parenting decisions are fairly cut and dried. This wasn't. My spouse and I pondered over this for three days, and still came to different conclusions. Husband thought we should allow son to spend his money and to see what the outcome would be, learning a lesson if the recipient was still cool toward our kid. I thought it would be better to discourage spending money on someone who was not even really a friend, and offered to bake cookies as a gift as an alternative. In the end, we didn't let our son spend money on a trinket, and he brought her homemade treats instead. And the girl? She didn't care for the chocolate-covered pretzels at all. Frankly, I don't think she's that keen on our young man—that or she's incredibly difficult to please. 

I recall vividly wanting to give gifts to teachers I was crazy about and older boys that I had crushes on. I tried to give my third grade teacher a pair of earrings that had belonged to my grandmother. Luckily, she returned them and gently explained that I should keep them for myself. Its hard to know what to do when you're young and you have strong feelings for someone, and I'm still not sure if we made the right decision about this gift issue. I want my son to be generous of spirit, but how do I encourage that if I discourage gift-giving? When I was his age, I didn't have an allowance burning a hole in my pocket, or a parent offering to bake cookies with me to give as gifts (bless her heart, a single working mom, she didn't have time!) So I'm in uncharted territory here. I'll do my best.