My grandmother, no-nonsense mother of seven, had a rule about children: Don't tell them how cute they are all the time; you'll spoil them. She had a special sort of rapport with kids that focused on needs, not wants -- there was no thought of wants because there was no money for wants. And everyone respected her. My own parents had the same approach with my sister and me. We were loved, but not fussed over. And we respected them.

But if we're using those rules as a guide to achieving parental respect, it seems inevitable that my children will devour Randy and I alive by the time they're 10 years old. You will find our wallets emptied, our cars run down to the rims (who will tell them to rotate the tires if we're gone?) and our dreams of raising grounded children buried under a pile of mangled Fisher-Price toys, portable DVD players and receipts for $20 toddler haircuts at Peek-a-Do! salon.

I'm not saying my kids are Upper East Side spoiled, but they are a special kind of spoiled. A modern kind of spoiled. A "blessed with opportunities" kind of spoiled. Last week, for example, we were serenaded night and day with requests to go to the zoo. On Monday, we told MJ she'd have to wait until July, when we promised we'd take her while her grandparents and cousins are in town. She probably would have been OK with that.

But by Wednesday, beaten down by her need to see the "wions," we were checking weather forecasts for Asheboro that weekend. She's three, and this would have been her third trip there. I believe I was 12 before I went to a zoo. I also put a board game called "Stop Thief" on the top of my Christmas list three years in a row and never received it. And yet, today, I might go to the store with MJ for milk and come home with, say, a family of four plastic giraffes and a puppy that blows bubbles from its mouth. (But no milk. That, I would forget to buy.)

What I'm saying is: We give in. A lot. But we do much more than that; we anticipate what MJ and Little L might like to play with, where they might like to visit, what experience we could give them next that would make this the Best Childhood Ever. We spend a great deal of time searching for those things and thinking about those excursions, and I know we didn't inherit that trait from our parents, bastions of frugality and practicality that they are.

Randy and I both come from close families that extend to cousins and aunts and uncles. Most of the time, we made our fun with relatives, not props or exotic locales. We probably romanticize our childhoods a bit, though, so that the one trip we each took to Disney World when we were little fills years of memories in our minds. Those journeys were special because they were so singular. And yet, it sometimes feels like we are inexplicably driven to provide every opportunity we ever had to our children, and then some, right away. It's as if not getting to pet a stingray on alternating years in March will define our kids for the rest of their lives and, in some convoluted way, rob them of getting into their college of choice, graduate school and, possibly, winning a bid on their dream house.

But when I sit down and breathe a bit, I begin to think the opposite will be true. That giving them so many experiences that were considered once-in-a-childhood moments when we were kids will actually turn them into teenagers and young adults who are bored and disaffected by all but the most spectacular of events. So I wage this war between what is enough and what is excessive in my mind. Between old school and new school. How much is too much for a child these days? At what point does opportunity become a euphemism for spoiled? If a tree falls in the Woods of Parental Resolve, does respect soon follow?

I've always thought my greatest challenge as a parent would be raising down-to-earth, grateful children in such an open and plentiful world. (Although, perhaps the recession will provide an automatic correction of this problem). It's not that I don't want to give my kids the entire contents of the universe. I just wonder if they need it wrapped up with a pretty bow before they ever reach kindergarten.

A few years ago, two decades after I put that board game at the top of my Santa list, I opened a package from my dad on Christmas morning. There it sat: the same game, long since discontinued, won in a hard-fought, midnight battle on Ebay that probably cost him more in shipping than the toy itself did in 1980.

The real gift, of course, wasn't the game itself but the years between my childhood and my adulthood, when we joked about why I never received it, when "Stop Thief" became the immediate example anytime something didn't pan out for one of us, when I learned both the art of waiting and the skill of laughing at little things not only lost, but never received. My parents never gave me the whole world, just an honest one. That's the one I hope I'll find for my own children, somewhere between Mickey Mouse and plastic giraffes, between anticipation and realization, between a little bit at a time and everything all at once.

Beth appears every Tuesday on TriangleMom2Mom. Read more about Beth at Mother Bunker.