Seeing others helps my kids realize it's not what you have that's important. Really. My dd has a best friend who has an iphone and her parents own a business as well as a large house, and another best friend who is homeless, and another....They all hang together. I love that about our school. And I KNOW we'd give that up if she went to private school. How valuable is this to her? It always seems like social and academic values collide these days.
My wife looks at things differently and would like to shield our children from lifestyles she disapproves of. The children have been told that you are "not allowed" to have children before you are married. When our daughter noted that she had an afterschool teacher who was an unwed mother, my wife was a bit annoyed with the center employing her (but did not say anything). The children rarely go on playdates (there are three of them, close in age, so they entertain each other), but she would be more likely to accept a playdate with a child from a "good family" which is academically inclined.
When my kids were very young, I also wanted to protect them from a lot of public school stuff-- advertising, bad behavior, "tolerance"/acceptance of ideas that I didn't want the kids indoctrinated with. And I think it's important to instill strong values in kids and the ability to say no and reject lifestyles that are not what we would consider appropriate. Including teen pregnancy, throwing perfectly good things away, etc.
But once you feel your kids are well grounded in who they are and are making good decisions, I think it's important to open them up to other ways of thinking and being. It seemed to happen naturally. The kids became more in tune to how others live as middle school hit. We discussed how kids react to form their identity, etc. Lots and lots of parenting that couldn't happen if we didn't have a wide variety of humans around us.
But, back to the materialism. It is elementary school that drove me nuts with the materialism. Asking for and sometimes insisting on brand name school supplies, ridiculous field trips to commercial places--and then charging for it! We opted out of many field trips, but the assemblies were no better. One had a yo-yo demonstration and told the kids to bring in 2.00 to buy a yo-yo. For one family I know, that was the last straw that caused them to reject public school.
It's tough to teach our kids to be financially responsible, delay gratification, and to stay off the road to more stuff, and then more room for the stuff, and then more stuff to fill the space.... Sort of counterculture in our affluent community here.
I think "materialism" is one of those words that means something different to everyone, and our personal values come into play.
