Souvenir strategy for young children

Our DD4 is a huge pressed penny fan too - she’s far more interested in these than most of the things in the gift shops!

We set expectations before leaving, e.g. she can have one princess dress and one toy. This has always worked well. If she sees a toy she likes I’ll make sure she understands that she won’t be able to get another - is this really the one toy she wants? A lot of the time the answer is no, but when she finds something she likes she does stick with it and doesn’t ask for anything else. We do have a bubble wand and a couple of spinny light up toys which we take with us, but she’s been less interested in those the last couple of trips, to the point where the bubble wand will be staying home in September.

We started my boys on the pressed pennies at the age of 2 and 3. They still do it at the age of 13 and 14!

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We did the take pictures and then wait till the last day thing.
Most of the time she was more happy taking pictures than getting merch.

We did give her an amount of her own money leading in to the trip and made sure she knew how many ‘notes’ would get used to take up the presents and how many she would have left if she bought a present. (all notes were the same amount and we would make up the difference just to keep the visual aid in check)

She might not have understood the amounts but she understood the visual ‘this is all you have left if you get that’.