The discount giant, Target, has a snappy advertising campaign that’s been featured on television and in its stores. To the strains of the Roy Orbison classic, “You Got It,” Target encourages consumers to come in for “anything you want” and “anything you need.” While most of us can easily distinguish between needing toilet paper and wanting a piece of jewelry, when it comes to making purchases for our kids, the lines quickly blur. Does your child pass a store window exclaiming that she “needs” the latest American Girl doll or the newest limited edition Disney DVD? Do you find yourself believing that your children need things that clearly will not affect, on any level, their health, education or welfare on any level? And despite all your purchases, do you find that your child is often bored and bases his self-worth on what he wears and how much he has? “You can count true needs on one hand, and you’ll have an endless supply of wants,” says Gary Buffone, Ph.D., a leading advisor to the affluent, and author of Choking On The Silver Spoon: Keeping Your Kids Healthy, Wealthy and Wise in a Land of Plenty. Dr. Buffone counsels families who have found that although their children have every material comfort, the children are still unhappy, unmotivated and unproductive. Experts have coined a term — “affluenza” — to describe this overwhelming preoccupation with material goods and the emptiness that too much “stuff” engenders.
Affluenza defined In their book, Affluenza: The All-Consuming Epidemic, John DeGraaf, David Wann and Thomas Naylor define affluenza as “a painful, contagious, socially transmitted condition of overload, debt, anxiety and waste, resulting from the dogged pursuit of more.” Dr. Buffone reports, “I see affluenza getting worse. I get more and more calls expressing this concern. There is going to be an increase in the number of wealthy families in the country over the next few years. So you are going to see even more of these problems.” The problem of affluenza is especially prevalent here in New York City, the capital of competitive conspicuous consumption. If something exists, it is probably available for purchase by the dozen in every New York City borough. If it’s really “good” you’d better get on the waiting list, because it’s sure to be sold out. Everyday, businesspeople are coming up with new products and services to sell us what will make our kids smarter, happier and, yes, better than they were before. And if you can afford expensive things (or have access to enough credit), it can seem almost churlish not to buy your children something that could make them happy, even if only momentarily.
The consequences So what happens to children who get everything they want? In theory, they should never whine. These grateful children should be showering their parents with thanks for having laid life’s bounty at their feet. They should be wonderfully behaved so that they can prove that they are worthy of such largesse. Get real. What really happens when kids are overindulged is just what your parents told you would happen as they readily denied your heart’s desire – kids turn into brats. It then becomes increasingly difficult for parents to break the cycle of giving into constant demand for more. And it’s impossible for these kids to stop asking for more. Parents sometimes even fall into the trap of believing their children when they say that they need certain things in order to be happy or popular. “By teaching children that they can have what they want when they want it, you are setting them up for a lifetime of misery. Sure, you might get a Prada bag, but you might not get the guy you want,” says Jessie O’Neill, founder and director of The Affluenza Project, president of The Affluenza Healing and Education Foundation, Inc., and a licensed therapist. O’Neill says that the major symptoms of affluenza include the inability to delay gratification and tolerate frustration. “Over a long period of time, the more subtle symptoms would be loss of self-esteem, loss of self-confidence. Also, experiencing a loss of the inner life to a preoccupation with the external. ‘I judge myself by how many, how much, how thin,’” she says. Dr. Buffone lists another clue to spotting a child with affluenza: behavior patterns that are outside of the norm for your child’s chronological age. “It’s one thing for a 6-year-old to throw a tantrum, another for a 12–year-old or 16-year-old,” Dr. Buffone says. “These characteristics last through stages where you would expect them to age out.” Any parent has experience with children who fall apart when confronted with a challenge. But it’s the unhealthy relationship with money that sets children and adults suffering from affluenza apart. “Children are very susceptible to picking up poor financial habits and beliefs from their parents. Even if a parent doesn’t think his or her children are paying much attention to how they manage money, they should think again,” says Francine L. Huff, author of The 25-Day Financial Makeover: A Practical Guide for Women. “If a parent places a lot of emphasis on acquiring material goods, spending lavishly on entertainment or vacations, or just never seems to be able to make ends meet, their children will grow up believing that this is the norm and are unlikely to see anything abnormal with their own behavior if it is similar,” she maintains.
Affluenza in action Many New York City mothers see this behavior all around them, everywhere from playgrounds to birthday parties. Kathy Vance, 40, a stay-at-home Greenwich Village mother of 6-year-old and 2-year-old daughters, says that social occasions for the kids seem to be ripe with a degree of overspending that baffles her. “The parties — that’s the first thing that I noticed. Huge Bar Mitzvah-scale parties started happening when (my older daughter’s) peers were about 3. Twenty-five kids in somebody’s home, entertainers, catered — 50 guests and a corresponding amount of gifts left at the door. A couple of families I know do this year after year. I always think, ‘How are they going to keep topping this?’ But they do,” Vance says. “There have been some comments from kids who have been invited to small, normal birthday parties at home, and they complain about the quality of goodie bags. It’s appalling,” she says. From an educator’s perspective, you don’t buy as much as you think when you give your child the latest “must-have” item he’s been pining for. Sarah St. Onge, middle school director of the City & Country School in Greenwich Village, says, “It’s been my experience that when children have their ‘gimmes’ met immediately, the sought-after items are often discarded after two weeks.” And if you think that you’ve got to buy your children toys with the most bells and whistles because they are marketed as being educational, St. Onge says it is better “to provide open-ended materials in which children can use their imaginations to recreate their world, rather than buy them plastic toys that have only one purpose.” Enough’s enough Unchecked, affluenza will lead to teens who lack the motivation to get into college, college students who flunk out and continually “borrow” money from mom and dad, and adults who are demanding money from their parents because they cannot hold a steady job and see no reason to. While some behavior in a child that is related to affluenza might be passed off as normal, in an adult it is clearly an unpleasant — and much more intractable — condition. So if you’re finding yourself heeding the siren song of Madison Avenue encouraging you to buy more, more, more, how do you get out of this trap before doing serious damage to your children? Perhaps by first acknowledging what money can’t buy. Nancy Samalin, parenting educator and author, with Catherine Whitney, of Loving Without Spoiling, says parents are sucked into overspending on their kids because of a reluctance to acknowledge that what kids really want from their parents is what always seems to be in very short supply – their time. “At that moment (that you’re shopping) you feel pretty good. I don’t think that’s what kids need. I think that we wish that this would be a substitute for what they really need because it’s so much easier to write a check or give them your Visa card. When it comes to the things that kids need, it’s our interest, our attention, or occasional approval,” she says. Renee, a bank officer in East Elmhurst, Queens, who didn’t want her full name used, is the mother of a 7-year-old son. She sees parents buying things rather than spending routine time with their children. “I have seen overworked fathers — upper-income fathers — compensate by buying toys and other items for their children because they did not often come home early enough to eat a meal with the kids or tuck them into bed,” she notes. In fact, parents who choose not to buy their children everything they want explain that it’s not because these kids don’t ask for material things — it’s simply because the parents have taught them to appreciate what they already have, and how to be kind to others who are less fortunate. Pauline Izzo-Kravitz, mother of three and the owner of Little Sprouts Day Care in Dyker Heights, Brooklyn, says that she has a standard comeback when her kids ask for too many things. “When they ask me for something and say one of their friends have it so why can’t they, my answer is that they have other things the other kids don’t have, like a nice house and their own room, and good food on the table every night,” she says. “We go on nice vacations and I think they realize that if all our money were spent on ‘toys’ we wouldn’t be able to have all those other nice things.” And Elisabeth Rich, of Manhattan’s East Side, who is a stay-at-home mother with a 6-year-old son and 2-year-old daughter, says her children do not receive birthday gifts, instead choosing to give to charity. “My children don’t receive birthday gifts from friends. Instead they collect cans of food for City Harvest, or the Yorkville Food Pantry. We’ve done this all but one year. It’s to the point where my kids don’t even think about it. Although this year, my oldest is collecting books for a Harlem daycare (part of a school community service program). This was his idea,” she says. Psychologists and financial planning experts agree that there are several concrete steps parents can take while their children are young to cure affluenza. Parents need to consistently resist the temptation to provide beyond their child’s basic needs. Dr. Buffone says, “Parents get into trouble when they use more money than good sense when raising children. Parents have got to be willing to say no, to not put up with those kinds of demands.” He counsels parents to “cure the plague of prosperity” for their children by not giving them more material comfort than they need, setting limits, making them earn what they get, and showing fiscal responsibility through teaching and example. You also need to have frank discussions with your children about money, starting at an early age, child development experts say. Teach them how to manage an allowance. Explain your views on charity and the class divisions that exist in society. Show them that even in New York – especially in New York – you can have a good time with very little money in your pocket. However, these steps mean nothing if you don’t practice what you preach. It’s very difficult to tell your child that she can’t have the latest designer jeans when you shop on your lunch hour every day. And if he hears you and your friends talk about the price of real estate in the Hamptons, he’ll be hard pressed to understand why he shouldn’t assume that everyone has a second home, or that people who don’t aren’t good enough to be in his crowd. “I feel like at this age children’s materialism is an extension of the parents’ issues,” Elisabeth Rich says, adding, “I am constantly amazed at how money-aware we are as a society. Everyone seems to need to know how much everyone makes. I don’t get it. If we are really happy with our own lives, who cares what anyone else does?”
