Grandma explains why she doesn’t buy gifts for her grandkids in viral TikTok

A grandma of four is going viral for her unique approach to gift-giving for her grandkids—but not everyone is on board. Because this grandma doesn’t buy gifts for her grandkids.

“I do not buy my grandkids gifts,” grandma Tammie said in a now-viral TikTok video. “They get a ton of gifts from everybody else. I swear there’s like, 50 gifts on Christmas morning. They do not miss mine — it’s OK.” 

She continued, “I love watching them open gifts; they’re just not the gifts from me. The gift from me will come when they’re an adult and they can pay for college, put a down payment on a house, or start their own retirement plan with my initial investment into their future.” 

That’s because, instead of giving her four grandkids toys for birthdays and Christmas, she makes regular deposits into investment accounts for all of them. In her video, Tammie explains that when each of her four grandkids—ages 9, 6, 3, and eight months—was born, she opened an investment account in their name and deposited $100. Ever since then, she’s been making deposits of $10 per week. She started out with college savings funds, “but then I thought, ‘You don’t have to go to college to be successful,'” she said, so she moved the money to a more general investment fund so when the kids are older, they’ll be able to withdraw the money for a down payment or another investment in their future.

Tammie said that for Christmas, she usually does get each of the kids a small gift. And throughout the year, she spends a ton of quality time with her grandchildren, picking them up from school, going to their sports practices, hosting sleepovers, and taking them out for ice cream.

Tammie, a nurse practitioner, told Today.com that she grew up in poverty and dropped out of high school when she got pregnant. She didn’t start college until she was 27, and ended up getting her masters degree at 44.

“When I went from living off welfare to getting my masters degree, I thought, ‘I don’t want my grandchildren to experience this,'” she said. “At 50, I’m still paying off my student loans … It’s too late to do this for my children … but by golly, I can do it for my grandchildren.”

In the TikTok comments, though, not everyone agreed.

“So you hate your grandkids. Cool,” one commenter wrote. 

Another weighed in, “You show up on Christmas and accept gifts but you refuse to give. Damn, that’s next-level narcissistic.”

I’m going to need some of these commenters to go touch some grass. Tammie did state that she gives the kids Christmas presents. And just for fun, we plugged her contributions into a compound interest calculator, and found that at current, conservative interest rates, her $10-per-week contribution will result in close to $10,000 per child by the time they turn 18, even though Tammie will have contributed only around $1,000 per grandkid in that time.

“I just remember when my children were younger, all the LEGOs, all the Barbie shoes, all the little things that just got thrown away,” she said in her video. “I would just rather give them something that will be a gift that can last a lifetime or have a lifelong effect on them.”