In my last UnderCurrents post--Career Moms: Shifting the Balance--I suggested that a child's sense of self-worth and being loved is more important than keeping up with the Joneses. But what if today's kids are getting their sense of self-worth from keeping up with the Joneses? Houston, we have a problem...*
Now, this isn't really a column about parenting, but I see this issue as a wider social dilemma. Culturally speaking, we can't seem to come off our Madison Avenue addiction. We need things because everyone else has them, and kids are among the most vulnerable group when it comes to this kind of thinking. Our kids are Jonesing for the Joneses.**
Before we get all high and mighty about spoiled adolescents and bored upper-class snobs with low self-esteem, it's worth remembering (yet again) that we are SOCIAL animals. The feeling of "fitting in" is absolutely critical to life as a healthy human being.
[Photo courtesy of The World Wildlife Fund]
Human beings hate the feeling of isolation. It's inherently miserable. Some neuroscientists have even claimed that a feeling of extreme isolation is the absolute worst emotional pain that a human being can suffer, bar none. (See, for example, Jaak Panksepp's Affective Neuroscience.) That's why peer pressure is such a huge problem, especially among kids. That's also why kids who feel they are extreme social outcasts are at such a high risk of suicide.
And kids are far less prepared to deal with emotional crises than adults. The difference is so striking that even the military has studied the phenomenon. Pilots who have to ditch at sea tend to survive longer the older they are, despite the loss of strength and physical resilience that naturally comes with age. As it turns out, older pilots seem to survive longer simply because they have more life experience to draw on. The more hardships you have survived, the longer you maintain hope, and therefore the longer you fight to keep going.
Kids, on the other hand, have relatively little life experience to work with. Furthermore, there is evidence that the adolescent brain has not yet fully developed the ability to control our more primal impulses, contributing to many adolescent societal dilemmas, from teenage sex to drag racing. A teenage brain facing extreme isolation may turn to suicide as a way to end what is essentially an unbearable pain.
[Photo: National Hopeline Network]
But what does that have to do with designer jeans and ipods and keeping up with the Joneses? Well, everything - if these material goods are used to separate the in crowd from the out crowd. I'm not saying that kids are going to kill themselves if they don't get an ipod nano. Heaven forbid! But social isolation comes in various degrees. Push it far enough, over a long enough period of time, and the result can be clinical depression.
Even short of this extreme, being subtly shunned by the "cool kids" over the general nature of ones belongings is a common high school theme, and that can cause a certain amount of angst in its own right. If they are pushed far enough to the fringes, kids can carry that with them for years into adulthood in the form of shyness, self-doubt, and even social anxiety disorders.
So how can we turn it around? As a society, how can we turn our things back into things and take away their power to control our kids and their sense of self-worth? How can we make sure every kid grows up feeling that they belong?
I'm not going to claim there are any easy answers. It's a dilemma, but it isn't hopeless. Next week I'll return to UnderCurrents with some ideas to start with. But feel free to chime in with your own, too. It's definitely the kind of problem that we're going to have to solve together.
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* For more information, see "Parents of teens ride waves of expenses" - published on Yahoo News from USA Today, Monday, May 15, 2006.
**In thinking about this word, I was wondering whether the word "Jonesing" might have derived in some way from the phrase "keeping up with the Joneses." But according to the most interesting source I could find on the Net (in about five minutes of research), the word was attributed to the name of an actual person - "John Jones, the British physician who first described opiate withdrawal in 1700." The site itself was questionable, but the source cited was "Encyclopedia of Drugs and Alcohol, ed. by Jaffe, Macmillan, 1995, v. 3, p. 985." If anyone has that book lying around, you're welcome to look up the page and verify the accuracy of the quote. Let me know what you find out. Apparently the phrase "keeping up with the Joneses" was introduced in 1913 as the title of a popular comic strip, the phrase becoming common parlance by 1920. (The site with that information cited The Oxford English Dictionary Online. Anyone who has a paid subscription to that service is welcome to look that up too.)
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