![]() Children with material values also have lower grades in school and are less likely to care about learning for learning’s sake, he said.ĭr. This should matter to parents, he said, because research has shown that people who have materialistic values are less likely to be happy and more likely to be depressed and anxious they’re also more likely to be competitive and manipulative, and less likely to be empathetic. "And that’s another drop in the bucket toward developing a strong materialistic value orientation.” "It does strike me that the more excessive the gift-giving is, the more likely a child - especially a young child - is likely to receive the message that possessions and getting stuff are really important," Kasser said. ![]() ![]() ![]() And people who limited their spending at Christmas and engaged in practices such as drawing names and setting limits on spending had lower levels of well-being.īut the findings are relevant for parents as they think about how many presents their children will unwrap on Christmas morning or during Hanukkah. The researchers talked to adults, not children, and noted that older people were more likely to be happier at Christmas “although this effect was largely explained by more frequent experiences of religion and lessened salience of receiving," Kasser and Sheldon wrote. In a subsequent report “What Makes for a Merry Christmas?,” published in the Journal of Happiness Studies, Kasser and co-author Kennon Sheldon concluded that people are happier when their holidays are more about family and religion, and less so when they focus on spending money or receiving gifts. Nearly two decades ago, Kasser, a professor of psychology at Knox College in Galesburg, Illinois, investigated the correlation between holiday happiness and specific activities, such as helping others or eating well. “While to my knowledge, no one has directly studied that in the context of Christmas gift-giving, it seems likely to me that Christmas gift-giving is one of those times when that modeling is especially salient."Īnd thoughtfully establishing a tradition of a certain number of gifts - and the type - when children are young can help head off problems later when the children are older and confronted with peers whose parents go over the top, parenting experts say. “We know that one of the ways in which children, especially, are likely to take on materialistic values is through the modeling of family members,” Kasser said. And some parents delight in celebrating abundance and want Christmas to be a time of merry excess in contrast to the disciplines of regular life.īut regardless of how they choose to handle gift-giving, parents should be aware that what they do in December may shape their children’s attitudes and behavior for the rest of the year, says Tim Kasser, an Illinois professor who studies materialism. Others go by a “rule of four” or seven or 10. Some people say that three gifts are sufficient since that’s all the baby Jesus got. But what is the ideal number of holiday gifts for a child, the number that makes a child happy, not spoiled? When the pile of presents threatens to topple the Christmas tree, parents may suspect they’ve gone too far. Editor’s note: This story was originally published Dec.
0 Comments
Leave a Reply. |