How to Make a Moneymaker

What does it take to breed a child who is financially aggressive
and values monetary success? For starters, it helps if you value
financial success yourself. After all, kids identify with their parents.
Child-rearing styles also play into it, finds psychologist Tim Kasser,
Ph.D. The less warm, involved, and democratic parents are, the more they
attune a child to financial success.

Socioeconomic circumstances count, too, Kasser and colleagues
report in Developmental Psychology (Vol. 31, No. 6). People who live in
disadvantaged communities marked by low income and high crime tend to
have offspring who emphasize money in their value systems.

What all three factors have in common, says Kasser, a professor at
Knox College in Galesburg, Illinois, is that they orient young people
toward rewards extrinsic to themselves. "When mothers are cold and
controlling, their children focus on attaining security and a sense of
self-worth through external sources, such as financial success."

Kasser, who looked at 140 18-year-olds and their mothers, confirmed
what many intuitively know--the more people are materialistic, the less
they value self-direction, sociability, and relationships with others.
It's not, he says, that earning money is bad. "It's wanting money more
than wanting other things."