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With the year’s biggest gift-giving holiday
just weeks away, your kids are probably already busy making lists,
specifying all the things they absolutely must have this year. You wonder, exactly how did those little angels turn
into greedy consumers? Lan Chaplin, a marketing professor at the University
of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, has studied the subject of children and
materialism, and his research appears in the December edition of the Journal of Consumer Research. In a recent interview Chaplin talked about what
parents can do to keep their kids from turning into materialistic monsters.
How do you raise a nonmaterialistic child in a
materialistic age?
I wish I had a simple answer to this question,
because I’d make a lot of parents happy.
Are advertisers to blame, or do other factors trigger
kids’ need for things?
This is a good question. The media blame parents, and
parents blame the media. A number of factors contribute to children’s
need for things, including social-cognitive changes with age, pressure from
the media and peers, and self-esteem. During early adolescence we see a
peak in materialism. By this stage of development, early adolescents have
developed a very sophisticated understanding of the symbolic meaning of
products and brands, leading them to have strong preferences for certain
brands and products. They are also experiencing major physical and
emotional age-related changes, which makes them more critical of
themselves, and their social awareness heightens. One seemingly easy way to
fit in and feel good about themselves is through buying the most popular
brands to project a desirable image. One way to encourage this type of thinking is to
allow children to make their own decisions from time to time. For instance,
if there is no harm in the child wearing a fancy sweater with a pair of old
sweatpants other than it might not match, then parents should allow the
child to decide what to wear. This not only builds children’s
self-confidence but also allows them to practice decision-making and
critical-thinking skills with strong support from parents. Take countless situations where parents encourage
children to think critically to better understand their environment and
make their own decisions, and you have children who are armed with what I
consider to be the most powerful defense against possible pressure from
their environment whether it be from peers or the media: self-confidence
and the ability to think critically. If children feel good about who they
are and who they are not, they will be less likely to feel a strong need to
buy certain brands just to fit in. In addition, if children are encouraged
to think critically from an early age, they will be armed to question
advertising messages they encounter on a day-to-day basis. As a result,
they are likely to feel less pressure to buy things for the wrong reason. With the holidays approaching, what should parents
and gift-givers consider to keep from reinforcing materialistic values?
Parents should lead by example. If parents give and
let their children see how happy it makes them to be able to give to
others, children will learn the value of giving and focus less on
receiving. What parents don’t realize is that children do enjoy the
simple things in life, such as going for a walk with their parents or
playing a board game with family, but parents can’t expect children
to enjoy these things if they aren’t used to doing these things. With
the holidays approaching, attractive, enticing material things will be
displayed everywhere, which only fuels the desire to acquire even more. So my advice to parents would be to focus on giving.
However, when the inevitable happens — that is, when children ask for
things or receive presents, redirect their attention away from the fact
that they just received the most popular toy or a very expensive cell phone
and help them direct their attention toward feeling genuinely appreciative
and grateful for the people and things in their lives.
Jan Dennis is
with the University of Illinois News Bureau. Contact her
at jdennis@uiuc.edu.
This article appears in Nov 22-28, 2007.
