Tikkun Magazine, January/February 2007
Privilege
How Materialism Hurts Our Kids
By Madeline Levine
Our country has a new group of "at-risk" kids. They don't belong to the group traditionally considered "at-risk"—inner city kids growing up in harsh economic circumstances. Surprisingly, they belong to the upper middle class, to parents who have comfortable incomes and high levels of education. Current research tells us that it is children of privilege, children long assumed to be protected from elevated rates of emotional problems that are, in fact, evidencing the highest rates of emotional problems of any group of kids in this country.
These numbers remind us that there are myths at both ends of the socio-economic spectrum. Many of us assume that the economic and social challenges of poverty are so severe that parenting skills and child development are compromised. Alternately, many assume that in families where parents are financially secure and highly educated, both parenting skills and child development are enhanced. Research tells us that neither assumption is correct. In fact, pre-teens and teens from affluent homes have the highest rates of depression, anxiety disorders and substance abuse of any group of children in this country.
There is something unsettling and paradoxical about this fact. After all, these same youngsters are the recipients of both high levels of parental involvement as well as extensive educational, extra-curricular, and recreational opportunities. Is it possible that some combination of money, opportunity, and involvement is having a toxic rather than a protective effect on kids? And if so, what can parents do to make sure that being privileged works toward healthy emotional development rather than against it?
Troubled Kids
Adolescence has long been thought of as a period of heightened confusion and unhappiness. In fact, adolescents are no more likely to be clinically depressed (as opposed to normally conflicted) than any other age group. So when researchers find that 22 percent of girls from affluent families are clinically depressed—that's three times the national rate—and that somewhere between 30 and 40 percent of teens from privileged backgrounds have significant psychological symptoms, we have, according to the definition used by the CDC (Centers for Disease Control) in Atlanta, reached an "epidemic."
This epidemic should disturb all of us, no matter our background. Kids from affluent homes, because of the educational and financial opportunities available to them often grow into positions of leadership and authority. Our future doctors, lawyers, CEOs, and policy makers need to be emotionally robust and to have well-defined sense of right and wrong. Mental health problems compromise good decision making.
Ironically, I began to realize the depth of this epidemic—and to write the book that became The Price of Privilege—when I met a girl who was particularly adept at hiding her illness from friends and family. Allison was a seemingly typical new patient in my practice made up largely of the daughters and occasionally the sons of well-to-do parents in Marin County, California. She was a well groomed and polite fifteen-year-old who walked into my office with the kind of confidence I often see among my young patients. But Allison's distress was easy for me to read. She was wearing the kind of T-shirt that those in the business of adolescent mental health instantly recognize as a "cutter's T-shirt," a shirt with the cuff pulled low to hide the wrist and a hole for the thumb. These T-shirts are often worn by young girls trying to camouflage the cutting that they do on their wrists and forearms.
When I commented on Allison's T-shirt, she willingly showed me what she had done to herself only hours earlier—taken a razor and incised the word "EMPTY" into her forearm. Allison's "EMPTY" helped crystallize my thoughts about what exactly I had been seeing in my office for the past several years—kids who for all the world looked fine on the outside, but were bleeding underneath. Kids who looked like they had everything, but in fact had none of the things that are necessary to anchor a healthy sense of self: a sense of authenticity, of purpose, of being loved for who they are and not simply how they perform. For Allison, as for many of my young patients, the development of a sense of self was stalled.
Perplexed Parents
Allison's parents, like most of the parents in my practice, are involved, concerned, loving, and very demanding. They tend to motivate Allison with material goods like expensive pocketbooks and designer jeans. They are very proud of their child's academic and athletic accomplishments, but seem to have little understanding of Allison's distress. They are more than a bit angry that after all they've done, their daughter appears ungrateful. However, they are also terribly worried about Allison's cutting and escalating depression, and are hoping that with some therapy and "a little medication," she'll get back to her old self. In fact, Allison does need help—help understanding why she has given up on herself, why she feels so empty, and why she is so reliant on external praise and recognition to feel good about herself.
Yet to help Allison, as in so many of these cases, her parents also must be helped. These privileged parents need to learn some of the basic tenets of child development: that a sense of self is crafted from the inside out; that parental love cannot be conditional on performance; and that emotional availability—not simply car-time racing from one activity to the next—is what helps kids develop a robust sense of self as well as a reliable repertoire of coping skills that help them to navigate through the inevitable challenges of life.
Unfortunately, good intentions are not the same as good parenting skills. Parents today focus too much on what they can do for their children and on what they can give to their children, instead of concentrating on being available for their children. In the words of one of my astute patients: "It's amazing that my mother can be everywhere and nowhere at the same time." The levels of anxiety we have about whether our child will get into the right preschool, the right elementary school, the right high school, and ultimately the right college, used to be reserved for issues of life and death.
Whether our child gets into this school or that simply is not that important. Research has consistently shown that the college one attends has no relationship to how happy one will be in life, nor for that matter does it correlate with how much money one will make. Our tremendous preoccupation with grabbing the brass ring, competing with those around us, and winning at all costs, has sent a clear message to our children—that what matters most in life is competition, individualism and the things we accumulate. Instead, we should be teaching our children the values of cooperation, reciprocity and connection. We need to turn our attention from the surfaces of life and let our children know that what we really value is the substance—how we value ourselves, how we treat others, and our ability to walk in someone else's shoes.
Children learn by watching and imitating their parents. This should not be news to anyone. Before we can teach our children good values, we have to gut check our own values.
The Problem is not Money—It's Materialism
Acknoledging that children of privilege are experiencing unacceptably high rates of emotional distress is a good beginning, but it doesn't address the cause of these problems. It is not money per se that stalls emotional development. Rather, researchers have found a number of variables that appear to be driving the high rates of depression, anxiety disorders and substance abuse among upper-middle-class kids.
1. Kids are excessively pressured. Voltaire said, "The enemy of the good is better." When kids sit weeping in my office because they received a B instead of an A on an exam, or when a child is too afraid to go home, anticipating his father's disappointment when he finds his son has been cut from the varsity team, we have made it clear that our kids are only as good as their last performance. This makes for anxious kids who can't attend to the normal challenges of growing up because they are so worried about maintaining parental approval, often at all costs.
2. Kids feel disconnected from their parents. Research shows that upper-middle-class kids feel more disconnected from their parents than children from any other socio-economic group. It takes time and effort to accumulate money. Often we lose sight of exactly whom we are providing for. Every child, in the safety of my office, says that they want more, not less, time with their parents. Children don't need "stuff," they need us: they need our inviting, listening presence.
3. Materialism causes problems. Materialistic kids have higher rates of emotional problems, fewer friends, and poorer grades than non-materialistic kids. Money is not what ratchets up rates of psychological problems; rather it is the culture of affluence—a culture that values things more than people, competition more than cooperation, and individuality more than reciprocity. All things being equal, affluent parents are more likely to capitulate to the culture of affluence, because their money makes this a readily available default setting.
It's not unusual for me to see a mother and daughter together in my office. Here's a typical visit. The girl is the queen bee at school—she's beautiful, bright, and sets the trends among peers. To her great surprise and chagrin, she's just been dumped by her third boyfriend. She doesn't understand that the reason none of her boyfriends hang around for long is because she is so exhaustingly self-centered. As she cries in my office, her mom wraps an arm around her and says, "Don't worry, honey, we'll go shopping, you'll feel better." That's a parent who means well but who is not doing well for her child.
Every time we use a material thing as a way to calm a child, we rob that child of the opportunity to manage negative or unhappy feelings. Unhappy feelings are inevitable in life, and our kids need to learn how to navigate their way through challenges, disappointments, and unhappiness. We need to be teaching emotional resilience and self-management skills, not consumerism. We can suggest that the child call a friend, go for a walk, write in a diary, talk to a trusted teacher, and most importantly think about why she's having trouble holding on to her boyfriends. Teaching skills for managing unhappy feelings are good for a lifetime; designer outfits are only good for a season.
Materialism and Me-firstism
Solving problems by buying stuff is one of the more obvious manifestations of materialism. But it's not the only one. When parents push kids to be perfect, they are also engaging in a more subtle form of materialism.
Part of a parent's job is to encourage their children and to set the bar high. We should have substantial goals for our kids; we want them to do well, and we want them to learn the skills that lead to confidence and healthy self-esteem. Yet how we encourage our children makes a big difference.
In the real world, we value both competition and cooperation. But kids coming into my office tell me about stealing other people's papers and cheating on the SAT. There is a lost sense of integrity and values. These kids are engaging in a kind of competitive behavior that doesn't acknowledge the humanity of the people they are competing against. It is a kind of competition that turns people into things, relationships into commodities. What we want our children to aim for in school, in relationships, and later out in the world, is a "win/win" attitude. But kids who are encouraged to adopt an "every man for himself" attitude, come to see others, not as people like themselves, but as obstacles to be overcome. The ultimate form of materialism is when even people become objects.
What Kids (and We) Need
Kids need parents who love them for who they are, not what they do.
That's true for all of us. Some days are better than others. I'd hate to have my husband come home on a day when I've had a tough time writing and hear him say, "You didn't write well today, so I'm not interested in you." We all need to feel that the core of who we are is dear to the people who love us.
So many kids experience love as conditional, and that makes them incredibly vulnerable to depression, anxiety disorders, and substance abuse. These kids are often forced to forgo the myriad of developmental tasks they face—learning self-control, frustration tolerance, what genuinely interests them, what their talents are, how to talk to the opposite sex, etc.—as their anxiety about pleasing their parents makes them spend disproportionate amounts of time and energy on maintaining their parents' approval. There is a big difference between performance and true learning. Performance is outer-directed; it's goal is to please others. True learning is inner-directed. Inner directed children are driven to learn, not because of grades, medals or even parental approval, but because they gain real satisfaction from the process of learning.
The stunningly high rates of emotional problems among America's most privileged kids is due in part to paying too much attention to what doesn't matter, and too little attention to what does. Make sure your child knows you value being a good person above all else.
There are some incredibly simple things—things our grandmothers knew how to do with their hands tied behind their backs—that we can do to raise healthy kids.
Kids need to be loved, period. The closest we come to a silver bullet in psychology is maternal warmth. When a toddler falls down, we are not mad at the toddler. We are proud of them for trying to walk. Why, then, do we get mad when our teens experiment with their attempts to be independent? Kids need us to be interested in them and support them even if they are very different from us. We need to be just as interested in the child who is learning to fly solo as we were in the one who wanted a co-pilot.
Kids need discipline. Childrearing is not just about the warm fuzzies. When I would tell my teenage boys they had a curfew, they would slam their door and say, "you are the meanest mom in Kentfield." I took that as a compliment. Since Kentfield is a pretty small town, it meant I wasn't the meanest mom in the world.
When we set limits for them, kids learn how to set limits for themselves. As a psychologist, I tell parents that the single most important thing we can teach kids is self-control, partly because the number one cause of teenage deaths is a failure in self-control—drinking and driving for example—and also because as long as children have not mastered self-control they will not be able to get on with the other tasks of child development. The kid who is once again sitting in the principal's office for shouting out in class or bothering the student next to him is missing out on both academic and social experiences.
Kids need us to be there, without judgment. When I asked a large group of my sons' friends what single thing would lessen the stress in their life, they told me—without prompting—that they wanted to spend fifteen minutes with their favorite teacher, just hanging out. That's what quality time means—it's human being, not human doing. Research tells us that eating with our children five times a week dramatically cuts the likelihood of them being substance abusers. Other research tells us that a half hour of "floor time" with young children encourages emotional health. We need to hang out with our children, to "chill," to be the inviting, listening presence that encourages disclosure and reflection in our kids.
Kids need a sense of purpose. A child's first community is his or her family. Children should be encouraged, at an age-appropriate level, to contribute to their households. We need to pull back on micro-managing our kids' academic and athletic lives and make sure that they have a meaningful life within the family. Chores, family outings, dinners together with everyone participating in preparation or clean up, assure our children that they are both loved and needed by their families.
An Alternative to Materialist Culture
Our materialist culture teaches us that if we only get our kids the right things—the right clothes, the right schools—that they will be happy. Our culture is wrong. The thrill that we get from "stuff" is amazingly short lived. Even lottery winners, people whose lives have been radically altered by great sums of money, have been found to return to the same level of happiness they were at before their windfall within about eight weeks.
Of course we want our children to be happy. But in order to successfully navigate through life, kids need more than happiness. They need a strong sense of self, an internal home, where they can retreat to problem solve and heal when the going gets tough. Even if we could give our children a "perfect" childhood—no unhappiness, no distress, no failure—we would be sadly mistaken if we thought that they would then have a "perfect" life. The notion of perfection is a childhood fantasy, one we would do well to get rid of. If every time our toddler fell, we picked him up, we would be crippling him for life. He wouldn't learn how to fall down and find himself quite capable of getting up and starting out again. Every time we prematurely intervene for our children—call the teacher about a grade that doesn't seem right, or argue with the coach about why our child is sitting on the bench—we interfere with our child's ability to learn how to manage their own conflicts and disappointments. As our children grow, they carry themselves, not their parents, with them at all times.
The renowned pediatrician Dr. Spock said that a child who has not been bandaged has not been well loved. Part of being a parent is the very difficult job of watching our children struggle. It is an act of love that we are able to do this, and in the process we make sure that our children develop a healthy sense of self—the ability to be independent, capable, and connected to others.
Many children of privilege (as well as their parents) are disconnected and lonely. Our culture of materialism makes them lonelier, teaching them to replace people with things. They are vulnerable to the bankrupt values on TV shows like My Super-sweet Sixteen or Pimp My Ride. Because of the pervasiveness of the media, we are all swimming in the same ocean of isolation and materialism. In that ocean, there is no safe harbor.
I've been on a book tour recently, and one day I found myself standing at the pulpit of an Episcopal church. It was awkward for a Jewish girl, accustomed to her home shul, but I found my sense heightened by the newness of the situation. I started talking, and when I hit the part of my speech about how important it is for a child to be connected, I had a moment of intense clarity. I looked around at the people sitting in the pews and realized that you can't walk out on the street and create a community. You can't stand on a corner with a placard saying, "I'm ready to be connected to other people."
The church I was standing in—and other faith- or community-based institutions that embody parents' values—can provide that kind of ready-made community for our kids. They can be our safe harbors.
Children need communities where they can learn shared values and make connections that are not based on their performance. Children need places where people value them for being who they are, not for what they do or how they perform. They need parents who love them just for being themselves. They need a life in which the essence of a person matters, a life based on values. They need an inner life, a reflective life; they need, as we need, a more spiritual life.
Madeline Levine, PhD, has been a practicing clinical psychologist for twenty-five years. She is the author of Viewing Violence, See No Evil, and most recently The Price of Privilege (HarperCollins, 2006).
Source Citation
Levine, Madeline. 2007. Privilege: How Materialism Hurts Our Kids. Tikkun 22(1): 33.
