Consumer parenting, cultural processes, and the reproduction of class inequality

Abstract

This article examines the cultural processes a group of middle-class parents engage in to manage tensions between their classed sense of proper consumer-parenting and their children’s consumer interests and desires. Based on analysis of qualitative data from interviews with parents with young children living in a middle-class neighborhood in Austin, Texas, I highlight the cultural practices through which parents acquiesce to their children’s desires without compromising their own classed consumer norms. Specifically, in this article I highlight the cultural processes through which middle-class parents (1) draw distinctions between spending on objects and spending on experiences, and (2) engage in intra-group “circuits of commerce” through which class actors confer positive shared meanings and moral understandings to otherwise excessive or “bad” consumer spending. Examining the ways in which parents were able to provide many of the “cheap” consumer goods their children desire without compromising their classed consumer norms provides insights into class boundaries in contemporary U.S. society as well as the role of consumerism and consumer culture in the reproduction of class inequalities.