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

This article draws on data from a qualitative study of children living in families with either low or high levels of household income and outlines the intrafamilial dynamics that surround young children's relationships to contemporary consumer culture. The motivation for parents to provide their children with particular commodities, how parents prioritised children's requests and the rationale they used to buy or not to buy certain items was much more 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 consumption and thus new experiences of childhood which meant parents having to deal with an aspect of their children's lives that was much more problematic than they had experienced in their own childhoods.