Peer pressure, targeted marketing campaigns and bad parenting have all been blamed for increasing materialism in children.
Until now, there has been little evidence showing when this drive for material goods emerges in kids and what really causes it. In one of the first studies to focus on the development of materialism among children, Deborah Roedder John, a professor of marketing at the University of Minnesota's Carlson School of Management, reveals that a young person's level of materialism is directly connected to their self-esteem.
In her recent paper “Growing up in a Material World: Age Differences in Materialism in Children and Adolescents,” in the December 2007 issue of the Journal of Consumer Research, John and co-author Lan Nguyen Chaplin, assistant professor of marketing at the University of Illinois and Carlson alum, report the results of two studies conducted with children in three age groups. In the first study, they found that materialism increases from middle childhood (8 and 9 years old) to early adolescence (12 and 13 years old) but then declines by the end of high school (16 to18 years old). This mirrors patterns in self-esteem, which instead decreases in early adolescence but increases in late adolescence.
“The level of materialism in teens is directly driven by self-esteem,” said John. “When self-esteem drops as children enter adolescence, materialism peaks. Then by late adolescence, when self-esteem rebounds, their materialism drops.”