Family communication and children's consumption behaviour

Good afternoon everybody,

today we are going to focus on family’s role in protecting children from marketing dedicated to them, or better, in educating them to a responsible consumption attitude.

I have found an interesting paper by Gregory M. Rose, David Boush and Aviv Shoham, “Family communication and children’s purchasing influence: a cross-national examination” (2002), in which the authors study the importance of family’s communication process in shaping children’s purchasing power. 

Marketing is always ready to attract and persuade kids: it appears on TV, magazines and it pervades the Web. Even if we fight for making marketing ethical and responsible towards children, it will be impossible, even excessive to prevent firms from targeting them. It is family’s responsibility, too, to instruct children to react in a rational way to marketing messages.

Parents have to make their kids aware of the money’s worth, of product prices and of puffery; they have to learn how to recognize a misleading message and understand that not always a product described as the best and as the one that you definitely have to buy is something that you really need. 

Marketing to children may be unethical, but if parents pamper their kids too much, buying them anything they want, they will facilitate irresponsible marketers’ work.

A lack of family communication often generates spoiled children

A good communication between parents and children is crucial and it usually has two main dimensions – as the authors state: one mainly socially-oriented, related to human interrelationships (based on some dictates, like avoid conflicts, respect the elders and so on), the other one conceptually-oriented, focused on teaching children to think independently and to evaluate all sides of an argument during the communication process. 

Starting from these two dimensions, four communicative patterns have been elaborated:

• laissez-faire: typical of families with a low-quality communication, lacking both of social and conceptual orientation;
• protective: it describes families in which socially-oriented dimension is strong, but the conceptual one is insufficient;
• pluralistic: more focused on the conceptual dimension, less on the social one;
• consensual: both the dimensions are important.

Family communication and a responsible consumption behaviour are often connected

If we consider these dimensions on a scale where the lowest level is laissez-faire and the highest the consensual one, the more we move towards the consensual level, the more our children are conscious about the use of their income.

Usually, children raised in pluralistic and consensual families have more income at their disposal and they are more responsible about their purchasing power, while children in protective and permissive families tend to be more dependent to their parents’ income. 

Which kind of communication do you adopt in your family? Be careful: if you recognize that your communicative pattern is low-quality, remember that it is important to raise independent and aware children, in order not to make them easy targets for irresponsible marketers. 

Carlotta Neuenschwander