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Friday, July 11, 2025

Christmas and the pressures of materialism

by

2047 days ago
20191203

Last year around this time, I sat in a Stan­dard Three class ob­serv­ing and lis­ten­ing to a con­ver­sa­tion be­tween some Stan­dard Three boys. One stu­dent was boast­ing that he was go­ing to get an iPhone X for Christ­mas—a present I knew his par­ents could not af­ford. A stu­dent’s re­sponse was that the boast­ful stu­dent was ly­ing and he could not af­ford it, in not such a nice man­ner. The boast­ful stu­dent then said that his un­cle was go­ing to buy it for him. An­oth­er stu­dent then pro­ceed­ed to state that the iPhone X came out last year so he was lame for re­ceiv­ing this present.

I then saw the stu­dent start to spi­ral in his lie. He start­ed to say well he didn’t know ex­act­ly what iPhone his un­cle was go­ing to buy him, all he knew was that it was an iPhone. The stu­dent was laughed at, jeered, called a liar, which ob­vi­ous­ly em­bar­rassed him. An ar­gu­ment en­sued be­cause he was, “Not ly­ing!”, and a phys­i­cal al­ter­ca­tion of push­ing and shov­ing oc­curred. These were nine-year-old boys, why was a phone so im­por­tant to them? Or, more im­por­tant­ly why was this brand name such a big deal? One word: ma­te­ri­al­ism.

Nowa­days it seems that the fo­cus is on a ma­te­ri­al­is­tic life, you get what you want and not what you need—the on­ly way to live a good life. The ma­te­ri­al­ism pres­sure seems to be es­pe­cial­ly present among the younger gen­er­a­tion and seems to be a big prob­lem in schools. Chil­dren are now part of a so­ci­ety that gets hard­er and in­tim­i­dat­ing when you don’t wear or have de­sign­er shoes, or the lat­est tech­nol­o­gy de­vices just out.

I even wit­nessed a Stan­dard Four stu­dent who came to school in Nike Air Jor­dan’s and pro­ceed­ed to show every stu­dent his shoes (which were, of course, not the colour of the man­dat­ed uni­form), lit­er­al­ly down to the five-year-olds, for no oth­er pur­pose than to show he had this brand of shoes. It seems that chil­dren from the age of 8+ are more con­scious of what they have, what they wear and what oth­er peo­ple have and don’t have. In schools no mat­ter whether it’s pri­ma­ry or sec­ondary the chil­dren who have the more ex­pen­sive items and that flaunt it, are the more pop­u­lar with­in every age group.

What par­ents don’t seem to re­alise is that this makes the chil­dren who don’t have the mon­ey for these things feel left out and made fun of. This leads to them find­ing ex­treme means to get cer­tain items; steal­ing from par­ent’s wal­lets or hav­ing phys­i­cal al­ter­ca­tions, fight­ing with peers to get the at­ten­tion off of what they don’t have. It’s bet­ter to be feared than made a fool of.

The pres­sures of ma­te­ri­al­ism comes in­to play es­pe­cial­ly around this time of year in the big lead up to Christ­mas. Par­ents feel as though they have to buy their chil­dren the most ex­pen­sive toys/gifts in or­der for them to have a great Christ­mas.

In­stead of spend­ing the big bucks on a gift that may lose its lus­tre af­ter a week, here are some con­sid­er­a­tions to make for mind­ful spend­ing when pur­chas­ing gifts for your chil­dren:

Why does the child need this?

How long do I ex­pect them to use /own this item?

Do they al­ready have some­thing sim­i­lar?

Are they old enough to use this item re­spon­si­bly?

Can I cre­ate the same joy they will feel buy pur­chas­ing some­thing less ex­pen­sive with the same use?

Last­ly, en­cour­age you child to make a wish-list and a need-list for their gifts. Then, choose one item on that list af­ter con­sid­er­ing the mind­ful ques­tions. If you, the par­ent, are still feel­ing gen­er­ous af­ter pur­chas­ing a wish list item, pur­chase an item from the need-list.

This list not on­ly al­lows the child to be mind­ful of what is a priv­i­leged item com­pared to an item of ne­ces­si­ty, but it bal­ances out the gift giv­ing to be more of use­ful items, rather than ma­te­ri­al­is­tic needs.


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