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As I have dozens of times before, I recently braved our local Sephora to pick up a gift for one of the many kids’ birthday parties on our shared family calendar. But this time, when I handed the bottle of trendy hair oil to my 14-year-old daughter, I got a new response. “I can’t give this to Maggie,” my daughter protested.
“It’s nice!” I said, a tad defensively. “The salesperson recommended it.”
“I mean, I like it. But it’s not on her Giftful.”
I forced a long, deep breath, suppressing the lecture forming in my mind. Giftful and its counterparts Giftster, GiftList, and WishApp are gift-registry apps, and at least one has a prominent place on the home screen of every teenage girl I know. Year-round, the girls add product links that specify their preferred color, size, brand, and price—then share their lists with friends and family for birthdays and holiday parties.
As apps go, Giftful seems pretty harmless. And it has its uses. Parents of young kids can share lists with grandparents, who otherwise might spend excessively on unwanted or duplicate toys. And when a pre-selected gift is a literal click away, parents who think ahead can be saved a trip to the ninth circle of hell (I am referring, obviously, to the local mall) on a hectic Saturday morning before a birthday party. In theory, an app like Giftful can prevent waste and increase efficiency—both good things.
But we’re relying on efficiency as a measure of value an awful lot these days. As someone who has always cherished meaningful gift exchanges, I’d hoped the realm of gift giving might be spared the pressure of optimization. I’d hoped we might, for reasons of sentimentality or connection, preserve some human practices in their inefficient forms. If the wish list’s popularity among teenagers is any indication, Gen Z and Gen Alpha have other ideas. I can’t help but think ubiquitous gift registries may be distorting the concept of gift giving for entire generations of kids.
The issue goes deeper than presents. I have four kids from elementary to high-school age, and as hard as I try to expose them to life’s realities, they remain sheltered from disappointment and dissatisfaction at every turn. Netflix curates their media, I accommodate their food preferences, teachers personalize their education, and now, increasingly, when someone gives them a present, it’s something my kid has declared she wants. I understand the temptation to text an Amazon link to Grandma. But Giftful and its ilk take this a step further, with the kids themselves curating “wish lists” from an infinite stream of products offered up by their smartphones. The experience of the app creates a powerful illusion of consumer sovereignty, which is not something I necessarily need my teenage daughter to have.
Gen Z and Gen Alpha are famously savvy consumers, and acquiring things has never been easier. My own closet is proof that shopping can feel perilously frictionless. Gifts, though, have remained a unique form of buying culture because, historically, the recipient hasn’t been able to control the entire transaction. More than a commercial exchange, a gift can still be surprising, strange, or revelatory. It can also be impractical or disappointing, but that low-stakes “risk” is what makes it fun. Plus, learning how to graciously respond to unwanted gifts is a cornerstone of every kid’s social education. A moment of disappointment is a brief but meaningful chance for a kid to decenter herself before tearing the wrapping off yet another box on Christmas morning.
But registries like Giftful leach the magic out of the gifting process and forestall the need for humility and even gratitude. The giver morphs from someone who interprets the recipient into someone who fulfills the recipient’s specifications. Disappointment becomes another problem to engineer away. In a world that is already hyperpersonalized to kids’ tastes, I worry these apps are yet another signal that intimacy is something that happens online, by way of corporate brands, and doesn’t come in the strange wrapping paper Grandma bought at the dollar store. One of the most meaningful gifts I received as a child was a volume of Emily Dickinson’s poems, but I didn’t love the book at first. It took me years to realize my mother had chosen the gift for a version of me—the writer—she understood I’d one day become.
Registries make the most sense when a person needs something in particular; they’ve been used for brides and grooms and soon-to-be parents for decades. To set up a young adult for a new life, it helps to know whether they have or do not have a whisk, a set of forks, a shower curtain. The logic of need does not apply to teenage girls in the market for a seasonal Jellycat plushie or peptide lip tint.
Some of my daughter’s friendships seem to lack the intimacy and silliness that marked my teenage relationships. The teenagers I observe today seem less willing to make themselves vulnerable or take an emotional risk, and groups present as more homogeneous: one hairstyle, one outfit, one shoe brand. Much of this can be traced to online habits, which prepare teenagers to behave and dress and shop according to a set of trends. Methods of signaling adolescent clanship have never been so fixed—or so expensive—as in the era of the wish list.
Inside Giftful, the Explore tab opens into a world of recommendations, so teens can realize they need all manner of things they hadn’t heard of before. Users learn to identify inside the structure of certain brands and classify themselves inside ready-made categories. Wish list curations have titles like “Vanilla Girl,” “Cottagecore,” “Y2K Girl,” “Street Drip,” “E-girl,” and “Old Money Aesthetic.” Does my daughter really like ruffle socks and cable-knit cardigans, or did she fall too far down the “Classic Preppy” rabbit hole? I don’t know, but—and this is far more telling—I doubt she does either.
Of course, to a certain extent, a self-centered, dog-eat-dog, conformist mentality is normal among teenagers. But as a parent, I want to actively encourage my kids in the opposite direction, toward friendships built around shared interests, not shared brands. I want their relationships to form based on what makes them different, not how good they are at being the same.
When I was amply pregnant with twins and didn’t think I could survive another day, my older sister gave me 50 tiny numbered gifts to get through the final 50 days, along with explicit instructions to open one a day. The gifts ranged from a package of Junior Mints to a handwritten joke to a printout of Tim Riggins (Friday Night Lights was at its peak) with a text bubble that said, “Hang in there, Linds.”
Each gift took me about 10 seconds to open every day, but she must have spent hours assembling 50 of them. Each little slip of paper or trinket was a tangible reminder of my sister’s care, which was just what I needed to survive one of the hardest seasons of my life. That kind of thoughtful gift giving isn’t innate; it’s practiced. Anti-commercial gift giving is a set of skills I want my kids to learn: thinking ahead, paying close attention to another person, anticipating needs, sacrificing resources other than cash. To give a thoughtful gift, you have to do more than click a wish list; you have to get inside another person’s skin.
This isn’t an indictment of parents who use registries to keep grandparents from buying yet another stuffed animal or even the teenagers assembling commodity-filled fun. Techies are geniuses at creating apps that respond to our “pain points,” and awkward or superfluous gift giving can be a source of discomfort. But when we overrely on efficiency, we push out newness and surprise. We reduce the chances that our kid taps into an unknown love of harmonica playing because Uncle Jeff took a gift-giving gamble. A long shot, sure. But long shots are the spice of life.
If we don’t draw boundaries around the market economy, the ethos of it can seep into our every interaction, defining not just our shopping habits but the quality of our relationships, too. It seems particularly important to me that kids recognize the seepage when it happens, that if they are going to browse Giftful, they at least know they are being tracked, their habits tabulated and recycled back to them as preferences. Kids who can’t sense they are being manipulated and targeted are the most susceptible to the myth that joy is found primarily in the marketplace.
My younger daughter, who is 12, is still phoneless (and, therefore, app-less). She’s spent the last two weeks assembling a basket of items for her best friend’s upcoming birthday. It includes a goofy photo of the girls we printed at Walgreens for 39 cents, a fish keychain that I’m told is a reference to an inside joke, a homemade card on printer paper, and a bag of Lay’s pickle chips.
I don’t understand the gift, nor would I want to receive it. And that’s just the point. It isn’t for me. It is, very specifically, for my daughter’s best friend Sophie. The gift is not really the pickle chips, which cost $2.50. The gift is being known.
