By Kevin

Earlier today I read this paper called "Growing up in a Material World: Age Differences in Materialism in Children and Adolescents" by Deborah Roedder John and Lan Nguyen Chaplin which I found rather provocative (synopsis at physorg.com). I could easily imagine there being an inverse correlation between materialism and self-esteem in adolescents and the authors demonstrated that nicely. What was even more interesting to me was the second study they performed which showed that when individual kids of various ages got a self-esteem boost in a peer-group setting their scores on a materialism test were quite a lot lower than the control group. In the most materialistic and lowest self-esteem age bracket, 12-13 years, the kids that were given an esteem boost had one-third the materialism score of the others.

As a parent of kids getting inexorably closer to this age, this is of great interest to me because I'm concerned with the rampant materialism/consumerism kids are experiencing today. While I can't make other kids say nice things about my kids I can, at least for now, try to ensure that they spend more time with their nicer, more supportive friends. As I told Julie when I sent her the link, we can definitely play a part in deciding who gets invited over to play!

Lately I've been trying to figure out how Julie comes up with so many ideas for conversation and her various blogs. It's the conversation thing, mainly - she's never without something interesting (and deep of course, anyone can gossip about the day's news) to talk about and I'm absolutely jealous. Today I read The Top 20 Ways to Come Up With Amazing Ideas and I started to see a pattern. Read a lot, listen, examine your life, question everything, the list has a whole lot of suggestions that describe my wife perfectly. I began to see exactly how her personality and habits make her such a great conversation starter. There does seem to be some hope for me though. As the article notes, "coming up with ideas is a skill [that becomes] easier with practice."

*I was able to read the entire study thanks to my uni's library. I'd link to the actual study but the University of Chicago Press doesn't see fit to provide even a brief synopsis before login so there's not much point.

Labels: nablopomo, parenting

1 Comments:

• At 5:04 AM,  Rita said…

  This self-esteem-materialism link makes so much sense; thank you for posting about it!
  
  I think this whole post is fascinating--about Julie, too. You're a great conversation starter, Kevin!!
  
  (Look! I just lowered your need for, um, whatever you were going to buy next! ;) )
  
  Hm... (back to the paper topic). We all know shopping on "a bad day" makes a person feel better, but I've always linked that to doing something nice for yourself. ("Retail therapy.") I don't know that calling it materialism quite fits in that case.
  
  I suppose there are degrees of retail therapy vs. materialism. My need for a latte or a pack of crayons might not be in the same league as someone else's version. :P
  
  Of course, everyone always links buying sports cars to self esteem, too, jokingly or not. I don't think that's always fair, but . . . !! there it is

   

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