To Buy or not to Buy: Family Dynamics and Children's Consumption

This article draws on data from a qualitative study of children living infamilies with either low or high levels of household income and outlines theintrafamilial dynamics that surround young children's relationships tocontemporary consumer culture. The motivation for parents to provide theirchildren with particular commodities, how parents prioritised children'srequests and the rationale they used to buy or not to buy certain items was muchmore complex than parents simply ‘giving in’ to pester power. In the main,parents were making very considered judgements based on a range of factors.Wider social changes were seen as being contributory to new forms of consumptionand thus new experiences of childhood which meant parents having to deal with anaspect of their children's lives that was much more problematic than they hadexperienced in their own childhoods.