Momof2 asked: "Now that toy catalogues are filling our mailbox and (ahem) Sunday Sun, how to deal with the gimme, gimme, gimmes? I don't think I can stand listening to all the things my kids want for the next 5-6 weeks until xmas!!!"

I asked Allison Pugh -- assistant professor of sociology at the University of Virginia and author of the soon-to-be-published book Longing and Belonging: Parents, Children and Consumer Culture -- to respond. Here's her post:

"There are different kinds of 'gimmes,' and each kind really takes a different kind of parenting strategy to handle successfully. For all of these, of course, a sustained "no" campaign will work. If parents found it that simple, then they would not be asking for advice, and we would not see polling reporting that 4 out of 5 parents think that America's materialistic society produces 'over-commercialized children.'

"Some 'gimmes' come from exposure to advertising, and it is not just the toy catalogues and Sunday papers that are targeting children. Television is a big conduit for ads -- kids spend more time watching TV annually than they spend in school. The Internet, cereal giveaways, marketing in schools -- these have all become commercial superhighways into children's brains. So the first step to handling this kind of "gimme" is to close down some of those highways, or at least bring them down to one lane. That means try to reduce kids' exposure to marketing techniques, enforce some of those house rules limiting television and Internet time, and try and get the catalogs into the recycling bin before the children get to them.

"Another kind of 'gimme' involves the things -- the toys, games, movies and the like -- that kids think they have to have to be 'normal' when they are with other kids. It is not that children are trying to be better than their peers -- more often they just want to belong to their social group. Kids want to be visible in their worlds, and to do so they have to be able to participate in the conversation at school or in the neighborhood, the conversation about what kind of lunchbox they have or have they seen the latest movie or played that Wii game. Many of the most urgent, persistent 'gimmes' stem from children's desire to be able to join in when a certain topic of conversation comes up, and parents seem to find these kind of requests -- for belonging, for social citizenship, for being "the same as my friends" -- the most difficult to withstand.

"In the short term, parents can try to ascertain what sort of goods carry the most social bang for the buck and restrict their purchases to just those items. They can also work with other parents to build little communities of agreement abstaining from certain purchases, or movies, or practices like party bags, so that "deprived" children do not feel different. But in the long term, parents' best shot is to try to head off some of these gimmes before they happen, by making difference not quite so scary. If parents take steps to celebrate difference, in themselves, in the family, among friends, in schools, children may see that they can belong in their social world even if they are different.

"Then they might not fall victim to what I came to see as the tyranny of sameness, stemming from their longing to belong."