The High Price of Guilt

She was quite a sight in her proper business attire, stuffing a pinball machine in the overhead luggage compartment.

“It’s for my son,” she said weakly, as the flight attendant helped her cram the large toy into the small space. “He called me yesterday and said he really wanted one.”

For the flight attendant, the only variation on this theme was the object purchased by the anxious, absent parent.

“You felt guilty because you were out of town,” she said. “And so you bought this big extravagant gift to make both of you feel better.”

But Guilt Shopping Syndrome--in which parents try to compensate for a lack of time with their children by showering them with presents--is by no means limited to traveling moms and dads or upper-income families. All busy parents in general feel pushed and pulled by schedules that have spun out of control. In tones that range from remorseful to righteous, many parents report that “things” provide at least a temporary sense of balance.

“The truth is, I really did miss my kids,” said Maureen, a Westwood mother of three who recently made a quick trip East to visit an ailing relative.

For her 3-year-old daughter, Maureen returned with a dress, a hat, two necklaces, four pairs of earrings and some tights. Her two sons, 5 and 2, each got T-shirts, shorts and hats. Under no circumstances, said Maureen--who does not work outside the home--would she have bought that much stuff for her kids on any one day in L.A.

“I missed them,” she said. “But mostly I felt guilty for being away.”

Ruby Takanishi, a developmental psychologist at the Carnegie Council on Adolescent Development in Washington, defines guilt shopping as a tendency to “provide kids with huge amounts of things which don’t have any relation to what they need.”

She called guilt shopping “an incredibly important issue--one that I have been very troubled by,” and said parents give in to the practice “because there’s just so much going on that most parents are in shock.”

At some level, Takanishi said, “we think that if we can consume things, and be busy in the act of consumption, we won’t have to face the more fundamental needs that our families and our kids have.”

As a mother and stepmother, Stephanie Marsten, a psychologist in Pacific Palisades, said she has not been immune to guilt shopping. But she has also seen its impact in the families she counsels.

Guilt seeps through modern families, Marsten said, because so many people have “unrealistic expectations of what parents are supposed to be.” In particular, she said, the “Ozzie and Harriet” image looms over a generation ambivalent about the fixed family roles with which it was raised and the evolving parental permutations it has embraced.

With lives that “really are stressed,” Marsten said, parents also feel guilty because “our behavior isn’t matching our values”--meaning that “we feel we should be spending a certain amount of time with our children, and we just aren’t.”

As a result, “people try to buy love and buy forgiveness from their children by using money as an exchange for time,” she said.

“It just doesn’t work,” said Marsten. “It’s like feeding a starving child marshmallows. You’re giving the child fluff when he needs substance.”

But try offering logic to the parent in a pinch.

Jeff promised his two boys that he would be home in time to take them to a school event. When a crisis kept him at his office, Jeff found himself stopping at an airport gift shop on the way home--the only place he could think of to buy athletic souvenirs at that hour.

“Of course the boys were in bed when I got home, and of course a couple of sports doodads weren’t going to make it all better,” Jeff said.

“But I just couldn’t go home empty-handed.”

In principle, most parents would agree that goodies are not valid substitutes for time, and that objects are not legitimate equivalents of love. But a materialistic culture encourages guilt shopping, and parents find it hard to fight.

Sam Newbury, who works at Family Communications in Pittsburgh, said he wrestles regularly with the dilemma of guilt shopping. “Every time you think you ought to be with your kids--and you’re not--it’s hard not to think you ought to give them something tangible instead,” Newbury said.

Buying material absolution from children is nothing new. Divorced parents have long waged their wars in the trenches of Toys R Us. Their children, in turn, have learned to use parental conflict to their own advantage--perfecting a kind of material battle strategy that might earn praise from the Pentagon.

“Kids are pragmatic. They only do what works,” Marsten said. “They quickly learn they can manipulate us by playing on our guilt. And I don’t think that’s something we want our kids to learn.”

There was Jennifer, for example, a divorced mother in Los Angeles who ran into a difficult deadline at her advertising agency. After a grueling 14-hour day, she brought a new book home for her son, Philip.

“But I wanted a sword,” Philip protested.

The next day, Jennifer came home with a sword.

Almost any kind of disruption can send overstressed parents reaching for their credit cards. Diane said she was near tears when her second baby-sitter quit in as many weeks. Distraught over the lack of continuity in the lives of her three young children, Diane packed everyone into the mini-van and headed for the mall. Mother--who, of course, was not compensated for this unexpected day off from work--and children spent the afternoon assembling a toy kitchen, a basketball hoop and a dollhouse “that I would like to have moved into.”

She went shopping, Diane said, because “I felt guilty that the kids were going through that kind of upheaval.”

Carilee Galligan, manager of the F.A.O. Schwarz toy store in Boston, said the toll of guilt shopping shows up on her customers’ faces.

“I think it causes a lot of people a lot of anxiety,” Galligan said.

“There are people who come in here and buy a particular item and say, ‘I’d better not come home without this,’ ” Galligan said.

And she said she has seen parents marshal their guilt, effectively justifying extravagances with installment-plan guilt such as, “Well, your birthday’s coming up soon, and if you really want that $125 imported doll . . . .”

Like any consumer activity, guilt shopping has other costs. Thomas Chesus, a business consultant in Marin County, said he has watched many busy parents tumble into a caldron of guilt-induced debt. They are overworked, Chesus said, overwrought, and, in far too many cases, financially overextended.

Working with families of various income levels, Chesus said he often questions them about their excessive credit card purchases.

“What I hear is, ‘It’s for the kids,’ ” Chesus said. “What it translates to is ‘More! More! More!’ ”

That paean to excess might just be the marching song of a society in the midst of the “painful process of restructuring” around the new reality of two-career households, according to San Francisco business consultant Harry Dent.

“Kids are a little more confused than they used to be--and parents are a lot more confused,” said Dent, author of a new book about American spending habits called “The Great Boom Ahead.”

“It’s in the nature of the messy transition that we’ve been making as we move from the old Bob Hope economy to the economy of the Baby Boomers,” Dent said.

Yet guilt shopping is not always an evil endeavor.

“I actually think these kinds of things work if there’s a good relationship between the parents and the kids,” said Pasadena psychologist Neil Clark Warren.

Bringing home a little something--not to mention a large something--”does carry a powerful message,” Warren said. “It says, ‘My mom or my dad thought about me while I was away from them, and I really do matter.’ ”

But no less an experienced observer of youthful behavior than Fred Rogers--Mister Rogers himself--has written that saying “no” to guilt giving can be a gift in its own right.

“No one wants to disappoint a child,” Rogers wrote in an article in the magazine Christian Herald. “But an important part of being parents is helping our children cope with disappointment, a skill they will need all their lives.”

And Takanishi, at the Carnegie Council on Adolescent Development, said she fears that consumer indulgence veils the real needs of time-strapped families.

“If you dump your kids in the station wagon and take them to the mall, then you’re not at home, being together, having a conversation together,” Takanishi said.

“I think it cuts across all strata, and I think that’s what we all want--time together,” Takanishi said.