Kids Are Keeping Up with the Joneses Too

This Sunday at church, we read the parable about the merchant who finds a pearl worth so much he sells everything he owns just to have it. I continued thinking about this because I realized that some people call this man a fool, some call him wise, but really the merchant knew the difference between the price of a thing and the value of a thing.

This reminded me of an Oscar Wilde quote about a cynic being someone who “knows the price of everything and the value of nothing.” Between this quote and the parable, I was in a pensive mood on Sunday, because I watch this kind of stuff play out in my own house fairly often. My kids can tell me exactly how much a toy costs (”Mom! The TMNT Tonie is only $20!”) and then try to negotiate with me about how much they’ll chip in for it with me. What I’m finding harder to teach as they get older is the value part. This is the stuff without a price tag, such as relationships, effort, or even the quiet satisfaction of getting good at something hard. But it’s also recognizing that a toy may also hold value to them too, and teaching them the difference between price and value, even when something does have a monetary price.

So this week I’m digging into a topic that is a little outside of my expertise, so I leaned into some “new to me” research. My main question is: does knowing the difference between price and value actually shape a kid’s emotional and behavioral outcomes? And, because I’m always thinking from the parent lens: do we, the adults in the room, quietly teach the wrong lesson without ever saying a word?

Long story short, the research says yes to both, but the mechanism is more about the whole “monkey see, monkey do” concept.

• Intrinsic values: things pursued for their own sake (e,g., close relationships, personal growth, contributing to your community).

• Extrinsic values: things pursued for external payoff (e.g., wealth, status, or image).

• Materialism: a value system where acquiring possessions sits at the center of what you believe will make you happy or successful. This isn’t the same as simply liking nice things (liking nice things without materialism is like saying, “I like shiny things, but I’d marry you with paper rings” – a la Taylor Swift’s Paper Rings).

Kasser and Ryan (1993) is a seminal study that provided the foundation for this field as a whole (along with Self-Determination theory, but that’s another post). They that when financial success is at the center of someone’s identity (or even just more central than other values), that person reports lower vitality, more physical symptoms, and even gets rated by outside interviewers as having lower social adjustment and more behavioral problems. Basically, this means that wanting money isn’t the problem, but organizing your whole sense of self around getting it is.

This finding was about adults (and has held up over the years), so, let’s look at the child development research, with this foundation.

Lekes et al. (2010) collected data from over 1,000 teens in China, the US, and Canada. Across all 3 counties, teens who prioritized intrinsic goals reported better well-being. The link ran through their parents:

• Teens who experienced their parents as autonomy-supportive (offering choices, listening, explaining the reasoning behind rules instead of just imposing them) were more likely to prioritize intrinsic goals in the first place.

• This held across cultures, even though North American and Chinese teens reported different baseline levels of autonomy-support and different average life goals.

Then, the same team did a follow up study, which specifically looked at moms and teens (Lekes et al., 2011). On average, mothers, prioritized intrinsic values more strongly than their teens did, but whether a mother’s values actually transferred depended on how much the teen felt supported at home. This link didn’t hold for if they felt (or didn’t feel) supported at school or with friends. When teens felt supported at home, their values tracked closely with their mothers’. When they didn’t, there wasn’t any meaningful link.

Materialism along doesn’t tell the whole story, and two more recent studies look at this from different angles.

• Van den Broeck et al. (2019) tested intrinsic vs. extrinsic values across 58 countries and over 25,000 young adults. Personally holding intrinsic values and living somewhere they’re culturally prevalent predicted better happiness, life satisfaction, and health.

  • But there’s a twist: young people in materialistic countries were a bit happier when their own values matched that culture than when they felt out of step with it. Fitting in offered a small protective bump (it just never outperformed living somewhere less materialistic to begin with, though).

• Denegri et al. (2022) found something similar in Chilean adolescents. They found materialism alone was only weakly linked to life satisfaction. The relationship got much stronger once they accounted for attitudes toward money specifically: believing money buys happiness, image, and approval. The belief that money buys happiness, image, and approval predicted lower satisfaction far more than materialism on its own.

Lastly, findings from almost 2,000 parent-child pairs in China and found 3 separate pathways connecting a parent’s materialism to a child’s psychological distress (Li, 2025):

• Passing materialism directly to the child

• Weakening the family relationship (less feeling like they could share feelings, parents getting along worse)

• Increasing how often the parent compared the child to other kids (grades, obedience, talent, appearance)

All three of these were doing damage on their own, but together they explained almost the entire link between a parent’s materialism and a kid’s distress.

Materialism itself is not doing the damage to the child’s psychological state, it’s what materialism does to the parent’s modeling, the relationship within the family, and the comparisons parents make.

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I want to be clear: the research isn’t saying that money is bad, ambition is suspicious, or wealth is horrible. What this is saying is that focusing your sense of worth around money and then passing that down to your kids via how you live is how these are correlated. Basically, this is the whole “actions speak louder than words” saying in action.

The research is suggesting that materialism is the “default value of modernity” (or a so-called cultural iron-cage), that we unknowingly pass on to the next generation. Society likes to tell us that happiness is for sale in some mall, on Amazon, or on social media ads (especially as parents and kids are ramping up for the new school year), but the data shows that happiness is actually found in “being” rather than “having.”

So parents (and caregivers, teachers, etc.), this matters because the most important lesson here isn’t telling our kids that money doesn’t matter, but creating a home environment where our child is values for who they are, rather than what they possess or how they compare to their peers. And we need to show them, rather than only tell them.

Kids inherit our values from how we actually live, not from what we tell them matters. The remedy for materialism isn’t poverty or selling everything we own like the merchant in the parable. It’s a home where a kid’s worth is never up for comparison.

• Centering your identity around financial success predicts lower well-being in adults, and the same pattern shows up in adolescents across very different cultures.

• Autonomy-supportive parenting predicts teens prioritizing relationships and growth over money and image.

• Values transmit from parent to teen most reliably when the teen feels supported specifically at home.

• Fitting in with a materialistic culture offers a small protective bump, but never outperforms living somewhere less materialistic to begin with.

• Believing money itself buys happiness and status predicts lower life satisfaction more strongly than materialism on its own.

• Parental materialism affects kids through three channels: modeling, weaker family closeness, and comparison. All three independently predict child distress.

• A parent’s materialism doesn’t hurt a kid directly. It works through the modeling, the strained relationship, and the comparisons it creates (and all three matter on their own).

Denegri, M., Peñaloza, V., Sepúlveda, J., & Riquelme, L. (2022). Relationship among materialism, attitudes regarding money, peer influence and satisfaction with life in Chilean adolescents. Revista CES Psicología, 15(1), 68-95. https://doi.org/10.21615/cesp.5703

Kasser, T., & Ryan, R. M. (1993). A dark side of the American dream: Correlates of financial success as a central life aspiration. Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, 65(2), 410-422. https://doi.org/10.1037/0022-3514.65.2.410

Lekes, N., Gingras, I., Philippe, F. L., Koestner, R., & Fang, J. (2010). Parental autonomy-support, intrinsic life goals, and well-being among adolescents in China and North America. Journal of Youth and Adolescence, 39(8), 858-869. https://doi.org/10.1007/s10964-009-9451-7

Lekes, N., Joussemet, M., Koestner, R., Taylor, G., Hope, N. H., & Gingras, I. (2011). Transmitting intrinsic value priorities from mothers to adolescents: The moderating role of a supportive family environment. Child Development Research, 2011, Article 167146.https://doi.org/10.1155/2011/167146

Li, M. (2025). The price of possessiveness: How parental materialism undermines child psychological wellbeing. Frontiers in Child and Adolescent Psychiatry, 4, Article 1600599. https://doi.org/10.3389/frcha.2025.1600599

Van den Broeck, A., Schreurs, B., Proost, K., Vanderstukken, A., & Vansteenkiste, M. (2019). I want to be a billionaire: How do extrinsic and intrinsic values influence youngsters’ well-being? The ANNALS of the American Academy of Political and Social Science, 682(1), 204-219. https://doi.org/10.1177/0002716219831658