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You Don't Need It
One of the most difficult tasks that we have had as parents has been to teach our children how to say 'enough.' Through baby-sitting and other after school jobs, each of our children had discretionary income. Give a teen money, place them in a society where they receive an 'estimated 3,000 commercial messages per day,' where mass media advertising exists to make people think that their 'wants' are their 'needs,' and you have a challenge confronting every parent.
As I saw our children often blithely buying things that they didn't need in order to follow the dictates of a consumer culture, I wondered about the cost...psychologically, emotionally and theologically.
Concludes Nathan Dungan (Prodigal Sons and Material Girls: How Not to be Your Child's ATM, 2003),"our society is working overtime to addict the next generation to spending." |
"In our view,capitalism does not just sell people what they really want; it also sells them what theythinkthey want. Especially infinancial markets, this leads to excesses, and to bankruptcies that cause failure inthe economy more generally."
George A. Akerlof and Robert J. Shiller, Animal Spirits: How Human Psychology Drives the Economy and Why It Matters for Global Capitalism, 2009.
- "By the time acollege student reaches senior year, he or she will have an average four credit cards, $3,000 of credit card debt and $30,000 of student loan debt. (Source: www.salliemae.com)
- The after-tax savings rate for young people thirty-five andunder is minus 16%. (Bureau of Labor Statistics)
- Children today spend five times more money than their parents did at the same age (KGA Consulting Firm)
- This year, America's 28 million teens will spend $74 billion on food, gas, electronics, movies, and music (Pipe Jaffray Companies)
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