Urban Blog

The University of Missouri in Columbia has released a study showing that parents who raise their children with materialistic attitudes will see those children’s attitudes cause them a more difficult adult life.
 
So what’s so bad about materialism? It can cause budgeting and financial problems; it can fill homes with organizational problems. These material problems can give a person trouble finding a sense of personal fulfilment outside of what they own, and can even cause marital conflict.
 
In some areas of parenting, you know that psychologists and social scientists only performed a study because they want to convince the impossible people of the world of things that most of us already know. For example: if you teach kids to like material things, they will like material things. If you teach kids to measure how good or bad they are using material things, they will. There are people in the world who grow up mistreating whomever they can but think they are good people because they can buy what they want.
 
A conscientious adult can teach theirself not to do everything they were raised to do. But why make your kid have to go through that?
 
As for those of us who are going through the arduous journey to intentional living, we salute you.
 
Katherine Martinko beautifully summarizes the release at TreeHugger.