14 DAY TRIAL // Today, it does not matter if you're a pea-brained person, you have gone shopping only on posh shops and for you a leopard is a type of fabric imprint and Romania a salad. It is more important to display $ 500 Italian boots, jeans that cost as much as a laptop and those stupid plastic sunglasses that cost a fortune because of the brand printed on them. Peer pressure, advertising and bad parental care seem to be the cause of materialism in children.
But two new researches published in the Journal of Consumer Research and made by the same team shows that victims of materialism will be those children with a low self-esteem. This is one of the researches relating the drive for material goods to a real cause. The researches were made on children in 3 age groups.
The first research revealed that materialism boosted from middle childhood (8 and 9 years old) to early adolescence (12 and 13 years old) but then lowered by the end of high school (16 to18 years old), all this connected with a pattern of self-esteem, which drops in early adolescence but goes upward in late adolescence.
"The level of materialism in teens is directly driven by self-esteem. When self-esteem drops as children enter adolescence, materialism peaks. Then by late adolescence, when self-esteem rebounds, their materialism drops." said lead researcher Deborah Roedder John, a professor of marketing at the University of Minnesota's Carlson School of Management.
In the second approach, the team increased the self-esteem of the children by offering them positive data about peer acceptance. Children were positively characterized, like being smart and fun, by their counterparts in a summer camp. The positive description lowered high levels of materialism encountered in 12 to13 years old teenagers to the moderate levels encountered in 16 to 18 years old teens.
"Particularly relevant is the fact that by simply increasing self-esteem in teens, we see a decreased focus on material goods that parallels that of young children. While peers and marketing can certainly influence teens, materialism is directly connected to self-esteem." said John.
Parents should know that by fueling a sense of self-worth in their kids can save hundreds of dollars from their pockets, wasted by children who are interested in material goods.