Materialism

Question: I'm wondering if my plan to limit/deemphasize toys and other things in order to prevent my child from becoming too attatched to those things may backfire and result in her becoming obsessed with things because she feels deprived.

Answer: First off, I would question any parenting idea or practice that I was following in order to "prevent" my children from feeling a certain way. Or, to put it another way, if I were feeling uncomfortable with excessive materialism, the place to fix that would be in myself, not in my child. Trying to resolve personal feelings of discomfort with the world/self by controlling how other people behave or feel is the root of dysfunctional relationships.

Secondly, I don't think that obsessive attachment to things is about things at all. So restricting things or providing lots of them isn't going to do anything. Obsessive attachment to things is the result of trying to meet unmet social/emotional needs. This is an accepted and recommended practice in our mainstream society starting with pacifier and crib toys and going on from there. Many mainstream parenting practices are all about teaching children to turn to things for comfort rather than turning to people. I don't think obsession with things is by any means inevitable, nor is the result of having access to lots of them. It is taught and reinforced from the beginning of life.

Lastly, I think people in our culture are actually seriously DIS-attached from things, with very negative consequences. It takes something like 14,000 people to make a pencil. When you pick one up, do you do so with full respect for the life energy of all of those people that you are holding in your hand? Are you aware of the bit of your own life energy that went into getting it into your life? Do you respect the life of the tree that ended so that you could hold the pencil? How about the lives of the many creatures that lived up the mines where the graphite and clay were acquired? How about the gifts of the graphite and clay themselves, received directly from the body of the earth?

Do you treat that pencil with the respect it deserves? There is an awful lot of spiritual energy packed into it.

I think that if we took proper and respectful care of our things, maintaining and cleaning them appropriately, we would have many, many fewer things. It takes a tremendous amount of time to properly care for things.

In our culture we have an obsession with acquiring things, but we are far too casual about the things themselves, with little or no recognition of the cost to the web of life, other people and to ourselves that their manufacture and use entails.

TCCMaven

Materialism