If you have been planning a shopping trip with the kids, you might not want to read any further, because teaching your children consumerism is helping to turn them into selfish, immoral creatures without a streak of empathy, according to a new study.

You may be making them just like stressed-out adults, whose potential as human beings is killed off as genuine altruism is suffocated by their greed and anxiety.

In a book that suggests that social changes and the shift toward an ever more unequal society are making us cold-hearted and mean, psychotherapist Graham Music says we are more likely to be born big-hearted and kind but then be pushed toward being selfish and cold than the other way around.