The impact of gratitude on adolescent materialism and generosity
tandfonline.com
tandfonline.com
What’s developmentally appropriate? When is a kid ready to focus away from shiny stuff onto what matters for a good life?
It wasn’t until the middle school groups (age 12-14) that you really saw kids with what looked like genuine concern for others, and we ran staffing levels more like 6:1.
I grew up in the 80s and 90s and remember spending a lot of time unsupervised going about wherever and doing all sorts of wild things well before I was 7 years old. Looking back now as a parent it is absolutely terrifying to me what I was "allowed" to do. Then again when I think about the Norma in countries like Japan (where it is not uncommon to see kindergarten kids walking home by themselves and crossing streets and intersections), I am reminded that kids can develop independently to a great tune than we give them credit for. I don't know about Japanese kids materials levels but I've noticed that they are typically given more freedoms to act independently and spend a lot more time on outdoor and social activities. If I had to guess I'd say they are a lot less materialistic than their Western counterparts.
As for my own child, I try to let him be independent even at 1 year. For example, we have a TV stand that any parent would be terrified if their kid climbed on it. I was terrified at first but then with some observation and secret supervision I let him climb it. To my surprise he quickly learned how to turn around and get down safely. There was only a single time when he fell from it sideways unhurt, but now he goes up and down like a pro without any supervision. I can leave the room knowing he will always get down fine. To what effect independence will have an impact on materialism remains to be seen but I suspect one of the commenters is right on the money with mirroring behavior and values.
My experience with Japanese children is limited, but when I worked in informal education we had a number of groups of high school students from Japan, and when I was in college there was a large group of exchange students from Japan. Some of my American friends went on to become full-time teachers in Japan… and some of the Japanese people I knew went on to become full-time teachers in America. My impression is that if you think that Japanese children are “given more freedoms to act independently” then this is probably a result of your cultural bias around what it means to be independent. The phrase that usually gets thrown around is “出る釘は打たれる”, which means “the nail that sticks out is hammered down.” There is generally a lot of structure in the lives of Japanese children. As for materialism—your mileage may vary. The Japanese people I’ve known haven’t been exceptionally different from Americans when it comes to broad aspects like materialism. Japan definitely has its share of brand-conscious consumers.
And this is a song and dance we’ve heard before. “If I only raise my child using principle X, then they’ll grow up to be great people.” There is no secret technique to raising better children, there’s just a million little things and a lifetime of effort.
It's mentioned by Piaget that kids are inherently ego-centric at that level, and likely won't share. It think it's a generally relative thing for them to be very self-centered at that age.
At the same time try to avoid values dichotomization so the kid won't grow up with a destructive idea of financial wealth being a bad thing to pursue.
If their intelligence seems not sufficient try to make it fun for them to play n-back games like BrainWorkshop, their intelligence will develop stronger and my experience suggests it helps to grok all kinds of stuff (including even transcendental matters!) a lot, in whatever an age (it in fact has enhanced my own mind capacity enough to instantly realize that life in a society is not a zero-sum game and it is usually more beneficial for myself to help others to develop, succeed and strive than to care about maintaining competitive advantage over them and that in whatever an argument the primary objectives are to understand the opponent (whatever bizarre they may sound and regardless to whether or not they're wrong) and enrich your vision while winning the argument is a secondary objective and even happens to be irrelevant in many cases).
By observing everything that is not them but theirs (memories and feelings included) and recognizing what remains.
> what exactly is it?
That's you.
> Also, the influence of n-back training on general intelligence is anything but uncontroversial.
How is it controversial? There are at least 2 credible papers proving it works and the empirical experience of mine and of other people I know demonstrates its efficiency.
Your post has good aim but I don't believe this is the case. Financial wealth is relatively trivial to safeguard after a point - particularly more stable forms (if you own a home outright, in a jurisdiction without property tax, it's essentially yours).
By contrast, one could wake up tomorrow suffering amnesia, could be hit by a car, or suffer any number of health ailments that would drastically curtail those "inner" attributes.
Piaget agrees, but puts it at 7-11 years old.
Both say the beginning and ending ages are an approximation and development occurs throughout, but that's the developmental stage when the brain is particularly sensitive to it.
How do you figure?
#1: Questions: "What made you feel good today? ... Tell me about it.." (By them telling the story, they relive the experience, and the brain releases the same feel-good endorphins)
#2: Receptors: Even if kids don't understand language yet, they're still hypersensitive to your emotions. By you yourself practicing gratitude in their presence, they'll tune into it and receive the signal.
I suspect they are misusing "materialist" in this context and they meant "selfish". The link is selfishness causes materialism, not materialism causes selfishness.
“””Amen, I say to you, this poor widow put in more than all the other contributors to the treasury. For they have all contributed from their surplus wealth, but she, from her poverty, has contributed all she had, her whole livelihood.”””
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lesson_of_the_widow%27s_mite
Bill Gates is sacrificing basically nothing by giving away half (or even 90%) of his wealth. He lives the exact same life of supreme comfort that he did before.
Weirdly this is one of the few things the bible was actually abundantly clear about (and it's a pretty good point).
To put it another way, although one can give the Gates generosity-brownie-points for caring about other people, they don’t get fourty thousand times as many such points as a normal couple who “only” donates a million dollars to charity.
First, in terms of ends, it's not better, but you can say it is more virtuous, in the sacrificial sense of putting the needs of others before hers, even though probably pointless in practice.
Thus, in terms of practicality, I do think it's better for the poor to keep their money, and the rich to redistribute their surplus.
But, in this practical sense, I feel it would be even more efficient if our society could improve its systems so that the surplus simply never happened in the first place. What would be both virtuous and better in practice in my opinion is if Bill Gates simply had chosen to give himself a smaller share and a lower wage from the beginning.
Now, maybe if you take into account psychology and motivations, it might be that humans require our current system of winning it all and then giving it back. So its hard to say if it could be implemented at all.
This has always been the argument in favour of things like materialist and capitalist philosophy - the outcomes are much better than the alternative.
There are countless well-meaning individuals who have achieved nothing, because they give their wealth away early on, compared to this one convenient counterexample in Gates, who firstly made obscene wealth with tactics that were pretty shady in my opinion, certainly anti competitive, then did flat-out more good.
If Gates were more relatively generous through his life, it is pretty plausible that he and a lot of poor people throughout in the world would be _worse off_. This is a strong argument against being relatively generous.
I guess part of the problem is that Gates just so happens to have deployed his vast wealth for good, whereas there are plenty of very rich people that are ambivalent at best and (depending on your political viewpoint) negative at worst i.e. rich people funding climate-sceptic organisations.
On balance though I'm sticking to my point, which is that all the people preaching on incessantly about why us evil unenlightened need to mend our ways would do far better to shut up, make a stack of money being an evil capitalist, and then give it all away to their noble cause of preference.
But, in recent years, we're seeing a shift, and that's why people talk about late stage capitalism, because it seems that it no longer creates the reduction in the extremes it did in tbe beginning. The question is, what can be done about this?
And I say that assuming that we learned many times already that a few ultra rich with concentrated power and wealth do not become generous and efficient leaders, solving world hunger, ending poverty, etc.
Anyone with a lot of money can give a lot without any impact on themselves. When someone inconveniences themselves / gives their time and sweat, I’m more impressed.
Why are some judgmental criterias more acceptable than others? I mean, compared to many of the less change-able traits like look, skin color, where you are from, intelligence, etc, isn't wealth, being acquire-able, a somewhat more "fair" criteria to be judged on?
Wealth certainly isn't the least-bad.
Also I haven't seen any evidence that encouraging people to judge others by one metric discourages them from judging people by other metrics.
Why do we have to judge on only one thing? Why can’t we judge different traits and characteristics based on different metrics? What does material wealth tell us about someone? What is it about them we are judging?
Why do we need to judge people at all? If it is simply to feel superior, you can just make stuff up. "Look at that person with/without an iPhone while I don't have/have one."
But not everyone is equally judgmental, certainly not publicly. Some are constantly publicly disparaging everyone and every thing, offering unsolicited advice, making rude exclamations, making public comparisons, bragging, chatting behind people’s backs, or the like.
Others get along without ever making obvious negative judgments, e.g. don’t obviously concern themselves too much with other people, or keep their criticisms to themselves and keep their conversation no-nonsense, or find genuine compliments to dish out in a wide variety of circumstances, or talk about themselves out of joy at spreading ideas vs. personal marketing, etc.
Some of these people are just exceptionally empathetic (and don’t want to hurt anyone’s feelings) or politically savvy, but some pretty clearly just don’t care that much.
> isn't wealth, being acquire-able, a somewhat more "fair" criteria to be judged on?
Personally, I don’t feel like I should care about it, and I try not to care. There’s nothing inherently bad about wealth, but I don’t really find it very impressive or interesting per se.
I am much more judgmental (personally, not necessarily aloud) about how excited people are about what they are doing, how adventurous they are at trying ideas, how kind they are, how much they empathize with others, how reliable, etc.
Wealth is one of the least valuable signals I have found for predicting whether I will like someone in the long term... though I admit I judge people negatively for wantonly wasting resources or bragging about their wealth.
The letter is absolutely toxic, irrespective of political orientation. And it can lead to toxic actions and violent abuse - which may be institutionalised.
If you don't think that intelligence is very modifiable, then you must also not think that wealth is very modifiable too, given that IQ is the most accurate predictor of wealth that we have.
It's fine to judge by these, depending on the circumstances, since these are actions people take, rather than things about them that are out of their control or out of their reach.
Traits you mention are completely irrelevant in face of those - at least for me.
But putting people in a hierarchy where some people are better or worse than others (in particular in respect to one self) is IMO rooted in insecurity, it makes us feel good to put ourself in the same box as people we admire and above those we loathe.
Personally I love being with people who are not judgmental (by putting value on people, and yes they exist). And funny thing is that it is contagious, I feel much less like being judgmental when being around those people. The opposite is also true, the easiest people to judge are those who just judged someone, in particular if they judged me.
They had some of the participants journal what they were grateful for, they paid all the participants, and they suggested that participants make a supposedly anonymous donation of cash to an unknown cause.
Keeping the money is supposedly materialism. No, it is not. Spending the money on frivolous status symbols might be materialism, but that wasn't measured. Keeping the money long-term, or spending it on something of importance, is financially responsible. Giving the money to an unknown cause (might even be an offensive cause) is foolhardy.
It would be interesting to many here, I suppose, to find details of such research. Also comparisons of problems caused my materialistic world view versus idealistic world view could be interesting.
However we may easily trip into religious disagreements here, which are both burdensome and seem to be quite outside of the YC area. May be we best leave this topic undiscussed here?
> Indeed, materialism among this population has been linked to a variety of mental health problems such as anxiety and depression (Froh, Emmons, Card, Bono, & Wilson, 2011a), the use of addictive substances such as alcohol and illegal drugs (Williams, Cox, Hedberg, & Deci, 2000), and selfish attitudes and behaviors (Kasser, 2005).
Froh, J. J., Emmons, R., Card, N., Bono, G., & Wilson, J. (2011a). Gratitude and the reduced costs of materialism in adolescents. Journal of Happiness Studies, 12(2), 289–302.
Williams, G. C., Cox, E. M., Hedberg, V. A., & Deci, E. L. (2000). Extrinsic life goals and health-risk behaviors in adolescents. Journal of Applied Social Psychology, 30(8), 1756–1771.
Kasser, T. (2005). Frugality, generosity, and materialism in children and adolescents. In K. A. Moore, L. H. Lippman, K. A. Moore, & L. H. Lippman (Eds.), What do children need to flourish: Conceptualizing and measuring indicators of positive development (pp. 357–373). New York, NY, US: Springer Science + Business Media
Materialism ties your happiness to the state of a vast and unfriendly external system that you, particularly if you are a child in a non-wealthy family, cannot control. Suppose one day materialistic instincts - manipulated by advertisers and wealthy, high-status peers - inform you that you ought to acquire an expensive Thing to maintain your status and sense of self-worth. Your parents are unwilling or unable to provide the Thing for you. You, as a young person, cannot earn or save enough to buy the Thing on your own. As a result, you become unhappy. The situation repeats frequently, as materialistic instincts then go on to tell you that you ought to acquire Thing_2, Thing_3, etc.
Wouldn't this depend on the personality of the child? Maybe the child decides "I'm going to work hard, study hard and hussle until I have these things, and have more of them than my wealthy peers". I've spent a lot of time in China, where the majority of people grew up way poorer than even the poorest Americans (albeit with better access to schooling) and such an attitude is not uncommon.
Money solves problems. Fewer priblems makes you happier.
> Fewer problems makes you happier.
Ironically the "old clunker" is likely to generate fewer problems that cost less.
I recently had someone complain to me about getting their newer BMW serviced at service centers; I told them you could always buy a 10 year old car that you could take anywhere; like me.
The main benefit of having enough money is to have security in one's self - stable living situation, health taken care of, and so on and so forth.