Twenty-five years of consumer socialization research have yielded an impressive set of findings. The purpose of our article is to review these findings and assess what we know about children's development as consumers. Our focus is on the developmental sequence characterizing the growth of consumer knowledge, skills, and values as children mature throughout childhood and adolescence. In doing so, we present a conceptual framework for understanding consumer socialization as a series of stages, with transitions between stages occurring as children grow older and mature in cognitive and social terms. We then review empirical findings illustrating these stages, including children's knowledge of products, brands, advertising, shopping, pricing, decision-making strategies, parental influence strategies, and consumption motives and values. Based on the evidence reviewed, implications are drawn for future theoretical and empirical development in the field of consumer socialization.

/pdf/consumer-socialization-of-children-a-retrospective-look-at-4gdoobedcf.pdf

Consumer Socialization of Children: A Retrospective Look at Twenty-Five Years of Research

Influence perceptions of mothers, fathers, and one adolescent child are compared to document structural relationships between parents and children in family decision making. Family triads are found to disagree in their perceptions of adolescent influence on both a broad selection of specific products and general influence in family decision processes. Mothers, fathers, and children, however, all rate children as having some influence in purchase decisions for a variety of products. A “household” measure of perceptions of general adolescent influence in purchase decisions is constructed and the antecedents of agreement or disagreement among family members are explored, yielding propositions for future research.

https://www.jstor.org/stable/pdfplus/2489544.pdf

Family Members' Perceptions of Adolescents' Influence in Family Decision Making

Parental and teenage child influences in family decision making

quences, focusing on the impact of television advertising on mother-child interaction. Specifically, we studied children's attempts to influence mothers' purchases of various products and mothers' yielding to these attempts. Some previous research has examined relationships between mass media use, parent-child interaction, and subsequent effects. For example, adolescents' mass media use has been related to parent-child interaction and political socialization processes [2, 6]. Halloran and his associates examined exposure to television and intrafamily communication among samples of delinquent and nondelinquent British adolescents [5]. Little empirical evidence has been found on the extent of television advertising's influence on intrafamily interaction and behavior. For example, while much commercial research attempts to relate mass media exposure to aspects of consumer behavior, little effort has been devoted to explicit examination of parentchild interaction intervening between media exposure and behavior [3]. Research on consumers' family decision making usually focuses on husband-wife interaction and is not concerned with the influence of children [4]. Some qualitative data indicate that mothers feel television commercials influence their children [8], citing the apparent formation of desires for various products. Parents resent the encouragement of overt attempts to influence their purchases, although many mothers are said to accept television advertising as a necessary evil. Such qualitative research, of course, does not explicitly link media exposure to specific family processes. Berey and Pollay examined such processes in mothers' purchases of children's breakfast cereals [1]. While not concerned with mass media influences, the investigators found highly child-centered mothers purchased their children's favorite cereals less frequently than less child-centered mothers. The child's assertiveness was not correlated with purchase perhaps because the assertiveness measure was based on teachers' rat-

Children's Purchase Influence Attempts and Parental Yielding

Recent changes in family composition and life style, including rising divorce rates and decreasing family size, suggest that a reexamination of the traditional family life cycle is necessary. A revised family life cycle, with implications for family sociologists and consumer and marketing researchers, is proposed.

A Modernized Family Life Cycle

The role of the child as an influencer of consumer decisions was investigated by studying the interaction between mother and child. Purchase behavior by the mother of a child's preferred packaged c...

Lewis A. Berey

Papers

The Influencing Role of the Child in Family Decision Making