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...
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...
