We gave our 8-yr-old b-day girl a handlebar as a gift...Have you been tricked or tricked your kids like this?

My husband then rolled in her Fuzion scooter, minus the handlebar. This was her big birthday gift.

My husband tricked me the Christmas before last by giving me fish food, then giving me a fish tank.

sounds funny, we did that kind of thing to my dad for christmas a few years ago, we gave him a new printer that we knew would not work with his computer, and then we gave him a new computer.


oh and i would love a new handle bar for my brithday, the one i want s $250 and would fit nicely on my bike.

I wouldn't do this.

This is cruel behavior...does not qualify as a joke. Not even funny if you want to ask me. There doesn't seem to be any satisfaction in this. Have you asked him why/what purpose this would serve and what was to be taught or gained by this?

Why not give a house key or car key and say wait another 10 years.

I believe child(ren) are precious and deserve the utmost respect. They will use what are taught to them in life.

i havent done that yet, but last weekend, my friend gave her son a psp game and then said "oh i forgot, you dont have a psp" then at the end of the party she gave him his box with his psp in it. by the way, psp is a portable playstation, very expensive.

8 yrs old, and messing with her head already................. good parenting skills there......... two thumbs, way the heck down..... and i'm speaking as a dad, of 3 children.

When I was a kid, my parents told us we were going to Kansas to visit relatives. When we got onto the connection flight in St. Louis, they admitted we were actually going to Disney World. It was awesome! Nothing wrong with that.

My Grampa did this stuff to us all the time, it was funny it made gift opening fun because we never knew what to expect. He'd wrap a small gift in a tv box and make you dig through 10lbs of paper to find it, he's taken gifts out of boxes and put bricks in them made us open 12 boxes to get to one box, it was fun. Great now I have a tear in my eye I miss my grampy!!!!

Nothing wrong with a little joke. Not like its gonna teach your 8 year old bad habits by doing this. maybe a good sence of humor but hey thats a good thing keep up the good parenting skills and dont listen to others who say that is a bad thing

So I don't have an answer for your question, per se, but I just wanted to comment on a few of the other comments. I don't think its "harming" your child in any way to have a little fun. I grew up in a family where we joked around with each other all the time, and I wouldn't have had it any other way.

There is absolutely nothing wrong iwt hthis at all. Its not like youre giving the kid a random part then three years later saying "oh, here's the rest of it."

IF this is considered cruel, then I would go as far as to say "wrapping gifts is cruel torture on children because they have no way of knowing what's in the box."

One of our family "games" at gift giving times is doing stuff like this -- sometimes when a gift isn't really wrappable they give "representative" gifts (in the case of the scooter here, It may have been easier to wrap the handlebar rather than a whole scooter (which would have lookd obvious.)

I'm trying to remember some things my parents did over the years...

I recently bought a house and around December EVERYTHING started going wrong and several appliances broke all at once... so my parents wrapped up a thermos filled with hot water. Of course there was laugther and confusion as I tried to figure out what it was until I found the note "we hear your hot water heater is broken... if this isn't enough, lets go to Lowes and pick one out"

Another time my parents bought my sister a new boom box for christmas (this is when CD players were just coming out) so we all bought her some CDs we knew she would like. Of course, she was trying very hard to be polite and not admit that she didn't have a CD player -- and the last gift of course was ... the boom box.

To sum up, a lot of the fun of gift-giving can be fooling the other person, making them guess and wonder what it is ... extending the guessing and wondering can make the gift giving more memorable.