What Will People Think If We Rent Books Instead of Buying Them?
Your sister-in-law asks why you don't just buy your child nice books "like everyone else," and you don't have a quick answer that doesn't sound defensive. Underneath the practical question — rent or buy — there's a quieter one: does renting mean your child is getting a lesser version of something, a pile of someone else's leftovers instead of their own shelf?
There's good reason to think it's the opposite. Leaf Van Boven and Thomas Gilovich's well-known 2003 research on spending found that people are consistently happier with money spent on experiences than money spent on possessions — in a national survey of over a thousand Americans, 57% said their experience-based purchase made them happier, against 34% for the one they'd bought to keep. The effect held up even a week later, just from people spending ten minutes thinking back on an experiential purchase versus a material one.
Their explanation is that experiences tend to matter more to how we see ourselves, and give us more to actually talk about with other people, than objects sitting on a shelf do. A rotating box of books your child works through, talks about, and hands back for the next one has a lot more in common with that than with a static shelf of owned titles nobody's opened in months. The "leftovers" framing assumes the value was always in the object. The research suggests it was mostly ever in the reading.
None of this means owning nothing matters — a few specific favourites a child keeps returning to for years are worth having on a shelf of their own, bought or gifted, alongside whatever rotates through. But the next time a relative questions it, "we rotate most of what she reads so she gets through more books" is a complete answer, not a defensive one. What's actually worth watching is what your child talks about afterward — a story they loved, a character still on their mind — not whether the book came with a receipt in your name.
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