Moms and Dads of America, please take a look around you. Have you amassed a growing pile of toss-out single-use bibs and Tupperware? Does anything with splashy “Disposable!” and “Convenient!” and “No-Mess!” make you grab your credit card? If so, please, for the love of Pete, put the card down! You don’t need all of this crap. In fact, make this your mantra; “I don’t need this crap.”

Case in point: these stupid “Wonder” no-mess markers from Crayola. Don’t get me wrong; I happen to heart Crayola. I have a giant bucket of every color of crayon on my desk and my child and I use them daily. But the point of markers, the point of art itself, dear Mom and Dad, is to be messy. Remember?

The joy of taking a medium and expressing it not just on paper (or, in this case, one special type of paper that will be the only canvass that accepts the medium, ever) but on everything from paper grocery bags to giant cardboard boxes made into space ships and cars to white sleeveless summer t-shirts and yes, to your beloved walls, is part of childhood. Deal with it. If there’s one thing you shouldn’t limit in childhood, it’s creativity, for goodness sake! If your child paints on the walls, have her help you clean it up and paint over it. Then provide a dozen or more acceptable surfaces for the art. It’s that simple.

Who came up with the idea that childhood isn’t supposed to be messy, anyway? I’m still finding Cheerios in my cushions from when my daughter was two, and rather than whine about it, it makes me chuckle, remembering how much fun those days were. These days are fun, too, but I’m still going to look back and long for them a year from now, because that’s what we do. So why waste time worrying about markers (or paying more for a product you don’t need) when you could instead be using a plain old set to decorate your dog’s new crate with (as we’ve been doing this week)?

Stand up to the businesses that pander useless junk to you like there’s no tomorrow (if they keep it up, with so much destruction and waste there won’t be) and care nothing about you and your family. Spend your hard-earned money on something more meaningful, like healthy food or membership to the children’s museum or family bicycles.