LONDON: If you’ve been planning a shopping trip with the kids on Sunday, you might not want to read any further, because teaching your children consumerism is helping to turn them into selfish, immoral creatures without a streak of empathy, according to a new study.
You may be making them just like stressed-out adults, whose potential as human beings is killed off as genuine altruism is suffocated by their greed and anxiety.
We are born good but modern habits like shopping and reality TV are making children more selfish and mean, a new book has claimed.
Child psychotherapist Graham Music examined decades of research and said our modern, consumerist society could be a bad influence on children’s health.
The counsellor of more than 20 years’ experience, from London, said constantly pushing against our hard-wired wish to be altruistic could be turning children more stressed as adults.
In the book, The Good Life: Wellbeing and the New Science of Altruism, Selfishness and Immorality, he suggests social changes over the last few decades are making us greedier.
Music gave examples such as shopping and the pressure to have the latest gadgets or clothes, along with a faster pace of life.
The writer said he did not agree that children are born selfish, an idea long put forward by Freudian psychiatrists who say a child’s id – desire for self-gratification – develops before its superego, seen as a moral compass and understanding of the needs of others.
He cited a German study which placed 15-month-old toddlers in a room where an adult pretended to need help. The toddlers mostly sprang to the subject’s aide, he said, even when they were not rewarded with toys.
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