People without kids: how much do you think about books / albums / clothes / photos as a repository for possible offspring?

Does this suggest some consolidation of who we think we are

Maybe, but don't bother trying to impress your kids with your superior tastes. Your kids will be able to pick up on what you really love faster than anyone else in the world.

I substitute it for the joy of beating children. Oh wait.

It crosses my mind occasionally, but as I am 35 and kidless I honestly don't pay it much thought. I might have kids, I might not, and should I do I will think about this question in a bit more detail. But at the same time, as Paul indicates, they'll grow up in a world where there's always been a compact computer in the house with endless amounts of music and visuals and art and text to access, for instance. Perceptions of what matters will be drastically changed -- not supplemented, but with a new central focus.

honestly though, i do remember loving that my mom had saved some of her childhood books and toys for us. oh god, and clothes! i have saved a few hilarious items of highschool clothing (multicoloured scarf-shirt, nirvana t-shirt, lollapalooza 92 t-shirt full of holes, weird suede jacket) - it's def not purely for nostalgic reasons. ha, it's like a freakin dave egger's book title "Our Hilarious Legacy: blah blah culture blah blah kids"

i don't think everything's going to go digital, but things we have will def be artifacts one day, as is the nature of material culture. kids might not have to read books in paper form or play records or cds but they might want to, sometimes, if only to make us happy.

XXPP post - I feel so sad! I just was on the suicide thread (which isn't a sad thread, but i made it sad), and now I'm listing things i would give to family members, and somebody should make fun of me now, and snap me out of this!

I was fascinated with a few book and LP covers as a kid but I never really bothered with finding out what was inside. I wasn't allowed to touch the LPs and my parents didn't really listen to them any more; I'd pull the books off the shelves and flick through when I was too young to understand, and by the time I was old enough they were just part of the furniture. (OK, I became and remain gently interested in the 70s sci-fi and puzzle books.) Maybe I'm just an ingrate or not curious enough.

OK, maybe that misses the point, but I do worry about related things: my parents are total packrats and I'm even worse, and they often complain that relatives' possessions have been junked or lost when they would have liked to be offered them, and, ok, some of it is a shame, but these were people who lived pre-war in tiny houses and moved halfway round the world a couple of times, they didn't really HAVE a ton of material possessions, and STILL there isn't really room for anyone to pass it all down. Whereas one day (unless I go first, of course) I and then my kids will be left with a house absolutely crammed with our/my massproduction-era consumerist excess and know that my parents would have been offended that I'd part with anything that Family had liked or which had formed part of childhood house-landscape memory, etc. Obviously there's a line to be drawn, but...

Needless to say, I've been clearing room, making way for the kiddo. I found a box the other night full of Texaco receipts. Now hear me out: I was keeping these because they document all the places I bought gasoline during all my roadtrips through the 1990's. I just always assumed that one day, my offspring and I would sit down on the front porch, and I would regale them with stories about that coffee shop off Exit 144 in Williams, Iowa.

I really doubt that's going to happen. I threw out the receipts. I've still got the stories in my head.

I used to pore over my parents' records. My daughter might browse through my DVD-RW's of mp3's. Ned's OTM in his first post: All the popular culture I could've saved for her benefit can pretty much be found online. And by the time she's 12 in 2019, I don't know if a crate full of moldy Choose Your Own Adventure books is going to be worth pawing through.

I always remember how I found a cabinet full of my dad's Mad magazines from the 1960's at my Grandmother's. It was a treasure trove, I tells ya. Weird pages with Popeye talking with President Kennedy. It was the first time that I ever wrapped my head around the fact that there was a time when JFK wasn't assassinated. Anyway, the experience was about four hours long. Was it worth the space and energy to keep those magazines around for twenty years for me to look through for an afternoon? Pretty good question.

I also take in consideration that my wife moved over here from Australia with four bags. That's it. When I start worrying about whether or not I need to throw out an issue of Entertainment Weekly from 1997, I think about that.

My mom has collected all kinds of crap that she says will be mine someday but it will just be a pain trying to get rid of it all.

My mother gave me a box full of Archie comics from when she was a teen and told me to find my fortune on eBay. I went online and found that you could buy ten of the same comics for around 50¢.

That was easy, wasn't it!

Thinking of collections that my parents had, I read my way through the books my mum collected. And listened my way through my dad's record collection, which were a great resource - I wish I'd had more time with them, before my mum took it upon herself to sell the lot during their separation.

The things I valued from my parents and grandparents were their stories - which I often had to get second or third hand. My mum telling me about my Grandparents' Indiana Jones style adventures chasing rare orchids through the jungle, stories about my ancestors, my Maths Gran and the Insoluable Equation - that kind of thing.

Things are, well, just things. Stories and ideas are the things which make you a person and connect you to your family and your culture and your past.

I'm unlikely to have kids, but my brother probably will - his kids will be richer than god and I doubt there's anything material that I could ever give them. But I can tell them stories about where they come from, which is much rarer and more important.

His Uncle Al has different opinions and has already given him a "Spider Man's Deadliest Villains" board book.

Dude -- at least my position is consistent. Yours is like saying, 'have kids, love them, and then beat them occasionally so they don't get too soft'.

Actually I have thought this way about my Harry Potter and Phillip Pullman books. I can't wait to have a child old enough to start reading him/her the Sorecer's Stone. If they don't like it, I'll be crushed. :(

I think alot about the things I will knit and sew for my offspring. Poor kids.

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She also said "hey, you've got a copy of Lost Girls!" I said "yes, and I would feel funny if you started reading Daddy's pornography, so pretend I don't!"

were you also confused by the thread title? i was wondering what on earth this would be about... playboy magazines or what? i think i must interpret the word 'repository' quite differently!

my son listens to music on computer and iPod but he also treasures the vast CD collection in our apt, and his own CDs are the subject of intense study esp. the lyric sheets as he writes his own songs. he holds his own tastes and enthusiasms as private pleasures and while he still seeks parental approval he's never tried to humor us by professing to like the same music. quite the opposite.

seeing your offspring derive intense pleasure from a recording or book or TV show or movie can ease the most firmly held critical sensibility. which isn't to say ashlee simpson's album didn't put this theory to a rather stringent test, but thankfully her sloppy singing and hack accompaniment is history, at least in our house.

Mark's got it right in terms of the importance of the private pleasure versus parents who are going to 'raise their kids right' by making them listen to the Beatles all day or something. Horrifying. I always liked what John Peel had to say, that his kids were always welcome to rummage through his albums but that he'd never make them listen to something. Smart man.

(I actually don't have a hyperproblem with this particular disc or approach -- if the idea is to create something gentle for really *really* young kids that you yourself would enjoy too, why not? I worry more about this kind of phase.)

good lord at first I thought that Baby Beatles thing was a recording of infants gooing & gurgling to the sounds of the greatest band of all time. you wouldn't believe some of the utter crap that's marketed to kids (and their parents) these days. maybe they're better off raiding our collections.

I like (gently) tormenting friends by pointing out that their kids have never not known widespread cell phone use, among other things. Seems to me that awareness of the changing goal posts like that will always be crucial because they're the ones who will make the intuitive leaps in the future as to what more to do with things like that (even as THEIR kids are further along than they are, etc.). I kinda hope I never forget that with time.

Of course it isn't! I'll repeat again: "Perceptions of what matters will be drastically changed -- not supplemented, but with a new central focus," ie, around the computer as providing information and things to do/see/read/hear. But said focus won't and can't be everything (and good thing too).

Yeah, before reading the initial post I had this mental image of people jizzing into their favourite album sleeves or using crumpled up pages from first edition books as menstrual towels/tampons. Ewww...I mean there are readily available means that are more comfortable receptacles than stiff paper or cardboard.

Anyroad, I do not want children.

I have a slight problem with hoarding mostly useless crap, but I'm working on it. My tendency to keep stuff I don't have immediate use for comes from my squeeze-blood-from-a-stone, depression-era-reared mother. I waste a lot of time and space holding onto things that I think may be useful because you never know when you'll need that doo dad.

But I move around a lot (about every other year), so I have to be ruthless and unsentimental about paring down material stuff. I donate my excess clothing to charity and give stuff away to friends who might enjoy it.

I still collect music, but I don't often go for white label, promo only, numbered limited edition crap unless it's got inherent visual appeal for me or it's just my fave single or something. From a previous career, I used to get a lot of promos and music for free. I'm not used to paying for my collectibles.

When I had a somewhat long-term living space (3 years!) I put up my fave autographed 12" vinyls and posters on the walls. Now they just sit in boxes and tubes because I'm going to have to move in 6 months. And if it all burns up in a fire, I may feel slightly sad (and annoyed), but I won't cry. The funny thing is that I used to try to get double copies of stuff in case there was a fire at one location, my back up would always be okay. Now I can't be bothered to fetishize these objects so much.

I just collect stuff for my own pleasure of looking at it, touching it, or listening to it. I don't care what happens to it after I'm gone, but I guess I would like it to be passed on to someone who appreciates it. If no one appreciates it the way I do/did, tant pis.

Too true.

I had some old USA versions of Beatles albums off ebay cheaply (early days of ebay) and thought "If I have kids, they can play them and I'm not bothered if they trash them".

Of course, Amber and Alice don't play LPs. They are (or have had) a Beatles time early on, but they will grow out of it, probably. And move on, of course. They seem to have got back into the Ramones again. I'm not sure what they rate highest right now, but I know what they like.