My Limited Experiences With Kids & Stamps

It's been a while since I've been on this board but just had to blow off steam, somewhere.

About 8 or 9 years ago I told of how when some of my wife's family came to visit, my niece saw my computer and asked to use it to get online. She was probably 8 or 9 at the time.

Scattered around the computer were stamps I was working with and she thought they were "cool." So I found her an appropriate juvenile album from an auction lot I had purchased, along with some stamps and hinges, and she was thrilled. Whenever they visited, I gave her more stamps and even mailed stamps to her. Unfortunately, a few years later when I bought her a better album for her birthday, she was far less enthusiastic. I think she was starting to pick up on boys.

Now, I just returned from visiting one of my neighbors. Among his children is a boy who is 8 or 9 years old. He sits around, staring at his cell phone or what I take to be a cell phone, and looks and acts miserable.

When I asked him what he liked to do, he just shrugged his shoulders.

I thought he really needed to get involved in something and thought, why not stamps? So I found another juvenile album, put together a packet of US stamps and a packet of foreign stamps and along with some hinges, went to give them to him. He wasn't interested and said and shook his head no. But he did thank me.

Not even a shred of curiosity!

When I was his age, I was collecting stamps, collecting coins, playing with a chemistry set, photography, shooting it out with cap guns, making bows and arrows and sling shots from branches, out riding my bike, and a lot more, all around catching shows such as Superman, The Lone Ranger, and Captain Midnight on TV. This was in the mid 1950's.

I thought I could show him something else, something his busy parents probably had no knowledge about, but I guess not.

It must be the times.

Television - video games - cell phones. Things we did not have sixty years ago, let alone dream of. The farthest back I can remember us kids had wooden blocks to play with.

Peter

I make one of these and give it to kids I know, about 20% of them show some interest, about 10% ask for (and receive) a starter album, stamp and hinges.


But I agree to a point, when I was growing up I used to play with this to occupy my time...



The 'good ol days' had some downsides too...




I recall folks saying the same thing about television, that us kids were cooking our brains ands spending far too much time in front of them. I assume the same things were said about radio when every home finally got one in the living room.
Don

I heard someone say that the zombie apocalypse is all these people on their cell phones oblivious to the world around them.

I have a morbid fascination of the people who must be holding the phone at all times. It doesn't bother except when I see so many of them behind the steering wheel of a car or truck.

Studebaker,

Those pictures of the kids with polio and the iron lungs from back then remind me that one of my earliest friends was a boy, my age, a few houses down. My mother knew his. He had polio and got around using braces. While hospitalized, a gentleman had given him something that looked like the old, red, Scott Modern Stamp Album and a box of stamps. He took to collecting and was my first trading partner. I had stamps available to me through my father, who had collected stamps, and my gandfather, who brought then back, on paper, from his job.

I wouldn't necessarily even blame video games. I've been playing them since Atari 2600 (mid-1970's) and know a number of younger and older collectors who play. It's something to do and really a digital extension of traditional games like boardgames, card games, role play, etc. I'm sure there's others here who are gamers.

As a kid in a rural area in the 70s I did not even know there was Atari. Then I got a job and went to college and someone in the computer lab mentioned that someone did some computer thing from home. Wait! A computer in their home?!

I ran out and got the Commodore 64 with a modem and never looked back. It lead to bulletin boards, dial up role playing games, sysops and video games galore. Still a gamer.

I wouldn't necessarily blame video games, I wouldn't blame TV, either. As I've said, I watched it, it was fairly new back then, but it wasn't the only thing I did. I was interested in a lot of things. In my post, I forgot to mention reading. I had a library card and went to the library with my father. I loved the geography books in the kids section. They tied in nicely to stamp collecting.

For what it's worth my 6 year old Grand Daughter will come into the office and help me sort through stamps. And I did build the grand babies starter stamp collecting kits; album, hinges, magnifying glass, tweezers and a nice sealable plastic container. Most of my left-over stamps go into the kids storage box.

My youngest Daughter (27) loves to sit down with me when they visit and "do stamps". She'll be the one who'll inherit my stamps when I no longer.

I've been lucky and am 3/3 converting my kids into collectors, though these days there is lots of competition for their time between school and games. We'll see if I can make it 4/4 with my 8 month old in due course. :)

I think the important thing is to connect stamps with something else the child is interested in. None of my kids have been interested in printed albums or in collecting by country. They pick subjects (not always topics) and go that way. I started them by soaking (or trying to soak, darn those self adhesives) stamps off my mail when they were just 2 or 3....and then if they liked a stamp they got to keep it. Things went from there.

Moyock13 & paperhistory...

Yes, it does seem to be a matter of exposure, as you have shown, not just with stamps, but with many things in life. My younger brother and I both started when our father pulled out his Scott International which he had put aside for a while, went through it with us, and asked if we would be interested. We both said yes, and had albums shortly. Our younger sister caught on much later simply because I started selling approvals through the mail, with my father's help, while still in high school, and stamps were part of the home environment.

What surprised me today, though, is how my neighbor's son didn't even have enough curiosity to look through the album, but turned it down after a quick glance. I could say well he knows what he wants, but my thoughts are he will have a very uninteresting life if he fails to take interest in anything. Before showing him the album, I asked him what he liked to do and he just shrugged his shoulders. At his age, I wanted to try everything. Did I mention the accordion lessons?

We had 12 kids today at the kids stamp club meeting in NYC. And several are pretty serious about it :-)

Revcollector! Sweet! Keep up the good fight!

Modern, I'm a boomer and had the great fortune to grow up in the 50's, 60's and 70's before life kicked me into adult hood. I had the opportunity to see actual stamps in action and grew up with that technology as the only method to get your information from one point to the other. I had an appreciation for postage stamps and still do. The kids now days really do not have that appreciation simply due to proximity, they are not exposed to stamps as the medium for moving information. When was the last time there was an actual stamp on a piece of mail you received other than from fellow collectors?
They are just not exposed to stamps as we were and do not appreciate them as we do.

My son actually did get into stamps from the ages 6 -10. Then it waws and still is sports but more than anything it's digital entertainment. Welcome to the millennium.

Opinion.
The seed has been sown, I'd suggest the odds are high he will return later on in life.