What is it with the buttons?

Haven’t you ever seen [insert movie name]? Where have you been?

or Do you remember watching [insert cartoon/kids show series] when you were young?


More often than not it’s a no. I watched television, sure. But as kids we had to pay for it. No kidding.

With buttons.

Our mother had a jar of buttons. She doled them out at the beginning of the week and we could use them as tokens for watching television. Every fifteen minutes of childhood viewing pleasure would cost you one button. If you had any buttons left at the end of the week you could exchange them for money.

Except for the news. That was free.

Having the whole family together for a couple of days brought up the opportunity to clear up a few burning questions…

Why buttons?
Apparently they wanted to use twenty cent pieces – one button was worth twenty cents – but they didn’t have enough twenty cent pieces. I don’t think it occurred to them that there was a bank just down the road. So it was buttons.

Why was this regime put in place?
The official answer is that it was to teach us budgeting skills and time management. Personally, I think this explanation has been refined with hindsight. Originally it would have started with how the hell do we keep the kids away from the television? (with special reference to freeing it up for our father) and the educational value would be discovered in later pondering of the idea, and having to justify it.

Was it open for negotiation?
I musn’t have had much skill in this area. I know we got the Olympics for free. Not that it was especially interesting – it must have been a bonus pay period for us because there was simply nothing else on. We didn’t have to spend a button at all for the entire Seoul Olympic games in ’88.
But it has come out that my sister Kat had learned to bargain with our father to get extra time. Nobody else knew about this until I started asking questions just this weekend.

Why didn’t we just raid the button jar?
I was telling somebody recently about the television regime (in answer to one of the opening questions of this post) and she brought up this question. I was dumbfounded. I don’t think it even occurred to me at the time to raid for more button supplies.
Our mother has always had that jar of buttons. She counted them, knew how many were there. I swear she knew and remembered purchasing every single fucking button and why, so there was no chance you could go on a raid and get more when you ran out.