Do Youngsters Collect Stamps Today ?

I have not seen much interest in stamp collecting by anyone during my teen and college years and now fast forward 40 years it is sorta the same too. It has always been a hobby of mostly older than me people. Once I went to college, my interests dropped. I did subscribe to Linn's off and on many of the years but never was into serious collecting.

When someone says let's get back, my question is when.

I have to think the collapse of other categories of collectibles has something to do with the current philatelic situation.

How many young people have acquaintances or relatives who went nuts on Cabbage Patch Kids, Beanie Babies, sports cards, Precious Moments figurines, Bradford Exchange collector plates, and the like--and now can't even give that material away? Who wants to be associated with that kind of madness?

I am probably wrong but my impression is that not all , but the bulk of the younger generation are focused on the here and now and possibly the future, but seem to have very little interest or even acknowledgement that the past has some worthwhile aspects to it that I would regard as timeless. Forget stamp and coins; how about huge chunks of our culture including sports history , the arts, classical music, Broadway, classic literature, etc? I can easily envision in the not too distant future generations who never heard of Frank Sinatra, Barbara Streisand, Fred Astaire and the like if they even know them now.

I suspect that, if you went back fifty years ago, most adults, let alone young people, weren't reading classic literature or listening to the music of previous generations. Lots if these things have always been the preserve of a minority, as they still are. But that doesn't mean that there isn't a healthy interest in the arts. I'd see that as different as carrying on childhood pastimes, as stamp collecting or card collecting used to be.

In the short term, I'd have to agree with funcitypapa. We had an airhead pop starlet here in Australia years ago who didn't know who Lennon & McCartney were, and she was in the industry

I personally think the pendulum will swing back; eventually a new generation will come through with an interest in the past and a turning away from the digital world.

Anyways, I'm still (only just) under 50. Am I a youngster?

I started this discussion and have been reading all of the replies. There's one thing that hasen't been mentioned but, I think, is important.
I started collecting when I was eight. I soaked stamps off envelopes and put them into a container.
Today, kids can't do that. They would need a chemical helper to get the stamps off the envelope....adults probably wouldn't let them. And I don't think they'd want to anyway.
And finally, we get very very few letters. No snail mail....only email. Just had a birthday and got email "cards".
So the only stamps kids see are the very common ones. Nothing there to collect unless they buy them.
That was a long rant; sorry 'bout that.

GeoffHA: I certainly respect your opinion, but I don't agree with it. Here I am distinguishing between actively participating with culture of the past vs not even being aware that it existed. You have to have an interest in what came before and the ability to find out what preceded you to even be in a position to reject it. And here I find the curiosity of let's say too large a segment of the younger generation to be lacking.

Put another way, I may not listen to Bach, Schubert, or Mozart, read Henry James or Thoreau, watch movies of Al Jolson or Gloria Swanson but I know who they are. I recognize that every generation has its own stars but the immortals are cross generational. Said another way: there will never be a time that I can foresee at least in the USA where Washington, Jefferson, Lincoln, Babe Ruth and the like won't be known---but I sense that the feeling that the country had for JFK when he was in office is already fading and that true stars like Ty Cobb, Christy Mathewson, Cary Grant, Sid Ceasar, Jackie Gleason, Lucille Ball, Gracie Allen, Jack Benny are either already not known now or will in a generation or two be known by a dwindling few. In that sense we all would have lost but particularly the younger generation as I do not think you are likely to see the likes of them again.

Digitalization is a technology which will forever be with us (short of some near earth ending event). I am sure that if you asked someone back in the days when the only postal system were messengers on foot and horseback about a new technology in which pieces of gummed paper were used to account for prepayment but you could send a letter around the world, they would have been doubtful. In the same way people today are struggling to accept that the internet is simply the next generation of the postal system.

I do not think the hobby is not dying nor do I believe that there has been a 'collapse of other categories of collectibles'. But there has been a sweeping change, a paradigm shift, in the way that people interface with their hobbies. All the traditional methods of measuring the health of a hobby have been changed. Declines in paid hobby memberships can easily be explained by the increase in online participation (which often has zero cost). Declines in prices can easily be explained by the tectonic shift in availability that online auction venues have unleased. The decline in expensive hobby shows and exhibits can also be traced back to less costly ways to interface with a hobby online.

It is these sweeping changes that have caused some to assume that hobbies are dying. But there are indications that support a thriving online hobby interfacing including this very community. This community is like a stamp club that has between 20-120 people in the room 24/7/365. And this is just one online resource. Until we develop good ways to measure the health of the hobbies that include the new ways many of us interface with them, it would be wise to avoid saying any hobby is dying. Without this critical piece of the puzzle, it is misleading.
Don

While kids today may not give two figs about the pop stars important to baby boomers - and let's face it, many of them are lame (Gen X-er here) - it's a stretch to generalize that they don't care about history.

Apart from stamps on ebay purchases from stamp dealers (and on postcards from a 75-year-old friend who hasn't embraced e-mail), about the only stamp I see on my mail at present is the Nonprofit Org. coil that is ubiquitous on solicitations for donations.

I tried with my kids. One is into collecting, as are some of his friends. But I should add that we live in a very conservative environment, which does not allow children a great deal of access to computers, iPhones and the like.




I have this issue too. Still under 50, and demographics seem to indicate that in say 20 years stamps will be ALOT cheaper than today. so should I wait to buy. My feelings that doing so will make me miss 20 years of pleasure.

My feeling is that the BIGGEST hindrance to the lack of new collectors is the lack of stamps on envelopes! Cant collect what you don't know exists!

"I doubt many parents are giving their kids beginners stamps and album anymore."

My little one is now 4yo: she has her little stamp collection and her little tweezer, in her own album with around three dozen stamps grouped by colors - without help from anyone
The nice thing is that I placed an ad on a freecycle group asking if anyone has some spare stamps for my daughter: so far, she has received two envelopes with foreign stamps from a very nice lady! Receiving letters is something she enjoys: the excitement of not knowing what's inside
Will the above lead to a lifelong passion? ... I have no idea. Nor can anyone else say

To answer the question in the title of the post:
no child ever will wake up one morning saying, out of the blue, 'today I start collecting stamps!' ... education starts at home, I believe. ... and it has to be encouraged and supported by the wider society ...

While you can say that some people have moved from paid memberships to online participation, you can not say with any certainty that the entire decline in paid memberships has been replaced by online memberships because you lack hard data.

This is a bit long, but it was fun to write . . .

Few kids collect stamps anymore – though some do. The world has changed. Today it's much more likely that young people spend their free time playing video games, involved in organized sports, browsing the internet, or texting each other than spending their personal time in quiet hobbies like stamp collecting. Childhood has changed a lot, and for most young people, it's no longer a time for quiet hobbies like stamp collecting. It's no one's fault. The world just changed.

After its beginnings in the Gilded Age, stamp collecting became increasingly popular in the early 20th century. It really grew during the depression of the 1930s because it was an inexpensive hobby anyone could enjoy at home without going anywhere. And young people had free time they don't have as much of today. Stamps were also commonly used on the mail. There was a lot of daily (and business) mail before the internet, so almost any collector could get stamps. It was easy to start collecting virtually for free. That's certainly not the case anymore.

As more people collected stamps, more stamp dealers sprouted. And they advertised more. During the enormous baby boom of the 1950s there was much more interest in children's activities, in general, including educational hobbies kids could enjoy alone. Use of stamps on the mail grew, so stamp collecting made sense, and it was pushed in school stamp clubs, by the Boy Scouts (and Girl Scouts). I was publically proud to be a stamp collector because a lot of my friends collected stamps and stamp collecting seemed smart and interesting. There were ads for stamps in Boys' Life magazine and even in National Geographic. Many towns had a stamp store. This was the heyday of H.E. Harris & Co. with its cheap approvals, free catalogue and "Stamp Finder" and they advertised a lot where young people could see their ads.

Stamp collecting was also associated with famous collectors. Earlier, a few famous rich industrialists had been collectors, but by the 1930s the President of the United States, Franklin Roosevelt, was a well-known stamp collector. So was an English king, George V. This gave stamp collecting a great deal of prestige and sophistication. It no longer has that today, and it's hard to name a single famous person who actively collects stamps anymore. The 1930s through the baby boom of the 1950s into the 1960s was about as ideal a period for the growth of stamp collecting as you could have hoped for.

But gradually the hobby changed as the world changed. In the 1970s, there was a growing attempt to turn stamps into an "investment" like a kind of stock market. I think that made it seem less fun, more like a business. Stamp prices did rise, but that may have discouraged a lot of collectors who just wanted an enjoyable hobby, not high finance. If prices of stamps were rising, how could they possibly keep up with them? By the 1980s, the American middle class began to stagnate economically, and stamp collecting may have suffered because of it. Both parents now needed to work which had not been the case in the 1950s. There was more pressure to make young people's interests "pay off". This may have made hobbies that were simply fun seem less important, even a waste of time.

There were increasingly intense adolescent sports programs which occupied young athletes for hours every day after school. For many young people, there was growing pressure to do well in school. Homework demands grew. Life became more competitive for young people, and there was less time for just having fun with a relaxing hobby, for "goofing off" or many of the leisurely childhood things young people had once done by themselves. And there were new and more exciting distractions with computers, cell phones, and video games that kept kids busy when they did have free time. Stamps also disappeared from the mail. In the 1950s and '60s, I used to harvest dozens of stamps, including commemoratives, from the family mail. Today, I see very few stamps. The hobby gradually aged. It was increasingly unlikely that young collectors would feel comfortable at stamp shows or stamp clubs. Schools dropped clubs that didn't pay off in getting into college, including simple fun clubs like stamp clubs. In any case, there was no time – kids already spent too many hours in sports, they had computers to play with, and collecting stamps seemed old-fashioned and a little fussy like collecting postcards or baseball cards. Today we have an aging hobby that can't compete with video games, a hobby that seems old-fashioned, without famous collectors to admire, without stamps on the daily mail, almost no stamp stores to go to, few advertisements for stamps that kids can see, in a world that seems more competitive for young people's time.

No one talks about collecting stamps much today. The world has just changed too much. I don't even bother telling anyone I collect stamps anymore because of the strange looks I get. It's like I just said I collect shoelaces or snuff boxes or quill pens. There are still some kids who collect stamps, and I see some of them at stamp shows. But there are few stamp clubs in schools. We have no beloved leaders who collet stamps (and few to respect!). It's even hard for kids to buy stamps anywhere.And they can't get many stamps off the mail.

But maybe if someone designs a great stamp collecting video game for young people to play in their late childhood, that might be one way to alert kids to the fun of stamps through a medium they use a lot. Or if a major company put packets of stamps into their products – or if some famous athlete talked about how much they enjoyed their stamp collection – or if . . . All of this is pretty unlikely, though. But you never know.

I didn't start quite out of the blue, but I think my impetus was nothing more than the U.S. "Stamp Collecting" stamp from 1972. After that, my uncle (a serious collector) guided me and helped me progress.



That reminds me of an oral report I gave when I was in the sixth grade. I gave a detailed talk on how to identify the country of origin for a variety of foreign stamps, and I ended it by saying, "Or you can buy an H.E. Harris 'Stamp Finder' for 50 cents."