To Avoid Materialism... Give Kids Money?

I read a new article about "How To Avoid Raising Materialistic Kids" with interest. This is primarily because my own children appear to be hellbent on embracing our culture of conspicuous consumption. This is despite the fact that I buy my own clothing at Goodwill, buy almost everything else from either eBay, Craigslist, or a Facebook group, and have taken a pledge that aside from essentials and safety items, I will not shop for an entire year. Before I was a parent, I frowned smugly at parents whose children shrieked in the checkout line about wanting toys, taking comfort in the knowledge that my own kids would never behave that way, since they would have learned from experience that I never acquiesce to screaming tantrums, especially over low quality little toys. It turns out this theory was remarkably far from the truth. Kids love to throw tantrums and will throw them over anything and everything, logical behavior be damned.

I also read the original article, which pointed out additional past research showing that decreasing kids' exposure to television advertisements would decrease their materialism as well. Score! Yet another reason to be happy I live in a TV-less household, despite the fact that as the article states, this is "difficult to implement."

These recent studies suggest that the practice of gratitude can help children to develop less materialistic attitudes, in addition to increasing gratitude, and in the end, increasing generosity. I did notice that the way kids were motivated to take the study was that they were given $10, in $1 bills. At the end they had the option to donate some of this money. The article spends little time discussing this portion of the study, but as I reviewed the details, I noted that the children in the intervention group gave an average of two thirds of their earnings away. This seems very touching, particularly considering that they were only told that the money would go, generically, "to charity." Of additional interest in my mind was the fact that even in the control group, children gave on average more than 40% of their earnings away to charity. The overall generosity of all these kids was just amazing. I very clearly remember, as an adolescent, digging through the car seats in my car so that I could buy less than one dollar's worth of gasoline. I also remember scrounging up a few coins from various stashes so that I could walk with my friends to the Food Bag and buy a fountain soda. I feel ashamed to say that I doubt I would have been as generous as many of these children were.

In short, apparently you can motivate kids with money to decrease their materialism (through gratitude exercises) - and there is hope for this generous younger generation yet...

In Shock: With Resilience and Grit, Critically Ill Patients Recover

I'm reading In Shock, an excellent non fiction novel by physician author Rana Awdish about what happens when a critical care physician becomes critically ill. I haven't finished the book yet, but one thing that stands out in what I've seen so far is how little we think to credit the patient for their role in healing, and how being a patient who shows resilience and grit can change the way a critical illness impacts your life.

In Shock is full of examples of how Awdish used her own "fiery, molten strength" to survive and recover from being critically ill. First in how she tries to communicate her own understanding of the depth of her illness to her care team, and then in her approach to the rehabilitation process after being discharged from the hospital. She pushes herself through pain, through boredom, through one set of tragic circumstances after another. At times, she feels sorry for herself, feels powerless, and feels a sense of hopelessness, but she doesn't let it take root and grow.

As an emergency physician, I very frequently encounter people who have a much less healthy response to being ill. Although often frustrating, it's hardly surprising, given that so many people in the communities where I work suffer from life circumstances that serve to seriously undermine any coping skills they might have had to begin with, like living in crushing poverty, enduring abuse in many forms, and suffering from mental health diagnoses and addictions - many of which are closely related to the traumas they experienced in the former situations.

One passage from In Shock particularly highlighted how a healthy mind can be so important in a healthy response to being sick or injured, or just in a challenging and tragic situation:

"I learned that what was true of pain was true of most feelings. I didn't have to just submit to them, I was actually central to their construction. I could build a story of sadness and read it to myself, or I could choose not to...I could redefine my identity and claim my desired emotional state."

I believe that often people do consider how a lack of resources or lack of psychiatric stability affects the ability to treat or heal disease. Imagine the potential health and cost benefits from cultivating resilience and grit in a population, regardless of their income level, social standing, lack or presence of mental health issues?

The Paradox of High Earning Parents

A recent NYT column made mention of "the paradox of high earning parents" - suggesting that in wealthy households, parents pay more lip service to equality, but in fact they act in more traditional ways when it comes to roles within the home. The reference cited for this is a book from 2014 about the schedules of physicians, nurses, EMTs, and CNAs, called Unequal Time. Without being able to look inside the book, it's hard to refute this argument, but it is hard to see how the NYT article can draw conclusions about all wealthy households based on the literature related to doctors who are, according to the book blurb, "largely male" and reportedly have the flexibility to fulfill traditional roles as breadwinners by leaning on their wives and domestic workers. Although I haven't conducted research on the subject, I do have a great deal of life experience as a physician mother who is highly networked via social media with other physician mothers, and I can easily say anecdotally that physician moms also fulfill the breadwinner role by leaning on family members and domestic workers for childcare. The book also claims that largely male physicians work long hours "because they gain respect from colleagues for doing so", while the largely female CNAs also work long hours but mainly because the penalties imposed for not doing so are very high for them. Try surveying physician moms and I very much doubt that you'll find the top reason for working long hours to be gaining respect from colleagues. In fact, I've never heard a colleague of mine admit to working long hours for any reason other than actually enjoying their work, or money.

Back to the "Upshot" article, entitled "Where Boys Outperform Girls in Math: Rich, White, and Suburban Districts." It's relevant to the so-called paradox of high earning parents because this article describes a Stanford study, the results of which are quite succinctly explained in its title. The study was not designed to investigate the reasons behind this phenomenon, however it speculates that in areas where men tend to have more high powered science and math based jobs, boys may receive the message that they should also aim to succeed in math and science. It would be very interesting to hear more about what effect having a mother in a science or math based career may have on children in high earning families. In another fascinating snippet, the authors cite a study done on data from about 20 years ago showing that high earning families enroll children in more stereotypical extracurricular activities. I'm currently conducting an informal poll in a group of 71,000 physician moms to see what they say about this. Based on what I've seen of how children's media and toys have changed in the past 20 years, I believe that norms have significantly shifted in that time, even though most people probably don't feel there have been great strides made in increasing gender equality since the year 2000.

Can You Resist Eating a Marshmallow? And Does It Matter, Anyhow?

I've read that if a child can resist eating something sweet placed in front of them, with the promise that willpower will lead to a reward of more sweets, it suggests that they have inner strength and are destined for life success. My response to this, since becoming a parent, is a despairing eye roll, because it is abundantly clear to me that neither one of my children would pass this test, even for a moment. In fact, my children are willing to risk significant negative implications to steal candies, should the opportunity present itself. I have decided not to guess what this might mean about their destiny.

A study that has just come out by Watts, Duncan, and Quan, suggests that this type of test (classically termed "the marshmallow test") is not an accurate predictor of either future stamina or achievement. Instead, it's a reflection of the child's privilege. In other words, a child is willing to wait to eat a marshmallow if he or she comes from a wealthier household, or one with more educated parents.

At first glance, this seems like a very rational realization with regard to the original study. Of course, if kids are poor, they'll be hungry and used to scarce resources, and want to eat any nearby marshmallow right away instead of waiting. The original authors were foolish not to more carefully account for the effects of income level on children's abilities to delay gratification. As I considered it further, though, I've known many privileged and wealthy children who don't seem to have much ability to delay gratification at all. Isn't that the definition of being "spoiled"? What's the difference between a spoiled kid and a rich kid who can delay gratification?

I've known many privileged and wealthy children who don't seem to have much ability to delay gratification at all. Isn't that the definition of being "spoiled"? What's the difference between a spoiled kid and a rich kid who can delay gratification?

The Atlantic Article I linked to above ["Why Rich Kids Are So Good At The Marshmallow Test", June 1 2018] notes "This new paper found that among kids whose mothers had a college degree, those who waited for a second marshmallow did no better in the long run—in terms of standardized test scores and mothers’ reports of their children’s behavior—than those who dug right in." Thus, the spoiled kids and those who were rich but 'unspoiled' were equally successful by the measures of this study. I would be interested in an deeper exploration of the these two groups to investigate whether there were actually differences beyond those two measured variables. In the meantime, though, perhaps the easiest thing is to conclude that 4 year olds can't resist marshmallows, and that's no cause for concern.

All material © Alison Schroth Hayward, MD. All rights reserved.

Improving Academic Performance Using A Simple Intervention

Researchers are keenly interested in trying to create an intervention that could be used in schools across the nation, to build on established psychology literature and try to use the findings in a practical way to impact performance of students. Wouldn't it be wonderful if a quick intervention that only took an hour and a half out of the school curriculum could significantly change the students' achievement? Researchers Paunesku, Walton, and colleagues believed that if they could prove such an effect, the intervention might surely be adopted at schools everywhere - what we call a 'scalable' intervention because it can be scaled up from a small test group and propagate easily to other institutions and communities.

In their study, these researchers assigned students to one of several groups. In the control group, there was a 45 minute session teaching them that different parts of the brain have different roles to play in memory and intelligence. The second session focused on how it was important to do well in school so that you could make better money in the future. There were three intervention groups. One of them had an intervention designed to teach them a growth mindset, by describing how the brain can grow and reorganize based on hard work and challenges. Another group had a "sense of purpose" intervention, which discussed how important it was to perform well academically in order to achieve what the researchers called "beyond the self life goals." Instead of focusing on how academic success could help a student personally, this group discussed how it could impact the world in a positive way, set a good example for others, and make family members proud. The final intervention group was taught about the growth mindset and about gaining a sense of purpose.

This study spanned 13 schools in a number of different regions, which reportedly had an economically diverse group of students, a good attempt by the authors to try to ensure generalizability. The findings of the study were that the interventions made a positive impact on the students' grades across all subjects, and their GPAs - which bore out the assertion that even a simple and brief intervention could make a difference. The kids who had education both on growth mindset and on their "sense of purpose" did not do so well. as those who had just one of the classes, which suggests that multiple attempts at mindset intervention are less effective, perhaps because of dilution of the messages.

Take home points: even a 1 hour intervention can make a positive difference in a child's performance in school, if they learn proven lessons designed to boost sense of purpose and teach growth mindset. This suggests that parents can teach children about these concepts as well, without using an extensive curriculum. In my experience as an educator, messages that are reinforced are retained best - I suspect results could have been even better if students had had periodic reminders about the concepts they learned. I also liked how the curriculum asked the students to imagine another student who was struggling with their work and how they could help. Putting these psychological lessons into practice by teaching them to others, or even considering an imaginary scenario in which they could be relevant, are way to help cement them into the students' minds.

All material © Alison Schroth Hayward, MD. All rights reserved.