Author: Derek Beres / Source: Big Think
- Keeping a gratitude journal caused children to donate 60 percent more to charitable causes.
- Other methods suggested by researchers include daily gratitude reflection, gratitude posters, and keeping a “gratitude jar.”
- Materialism has been shown to increase anxiety and depression and promote selfish attitudes and behavior.
The new Netflix drama The Kindergarten Teacher offers viewers a complex and uncomfortable narrative. Lisa Spinelli is worried that her teenage children are caught in the clutches of materialism and inattention. Her daughter barely looks up from her phone, having already given up a passion for print photography; her son, instead of pursuing an intellectual path, has chosen to enter the Marines, where, according to his mother, he’ll only be fighting for oil. It’s not surprising she becomes obsessed—disturbingly so—with her student, a five-and-a-half year old poet named Jimmy Roy. When Spinelli (Maggie Gyllenhaal) confront Jimmy’s father, Nikhil, in his Bayonne night club, the elder Roy brushes aside his son’s poetic pursuit in favor of making money. (Ironically, the actor, Ajay Naidu, an old friend, is one of the most artistic and poetic people I’ve ever met.) This story is not new, but it does ask a pressing question of parents today: In a culture consumed by micro transactions conducted on a device that consumes all attention, how do you raise your child in a non-materialistic matter?
Kidnapping a five-year-old to cross the Canadian border is not the answer. Research conducted at Villanova University, recently published in the Journal of Positive Psychology, offers a different approach: teach your child to be grateful.
The team, led by Lan Nguyen Chaplin (now at the University of Illinois at Chicago), noticed that rising materialism in American culture has led to an uptick in anxiety and depression, greater likelihood that children will get hooked on addictive drugs, and an increased chance they’ll display selfish attitudes and behaviors as they age.
Patrick Fore / Unsplash
Gratitude is a well-studied behavior. Dr. Robert Emmons at the University of California, Davis spent eight years intensively studying gratitude. His research found having an ‘attitude of gratitude‘ improves emotional and physical health, as well as strengthens relationships and communities.
One of Emmons’s studies found that people who kept a gratitude journal exercised more frequently, reported fewer physical symptoms…
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