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.
Introduction
Engaging in the correct consumption patterns is an important marker of classed belonging (Carfagna et al., 2014; Peterson and Kern, 1996). As Carfagna et al. (2014) and others (Sherman, 2018) have shown, enacting a set of socially and ecologically oriented consumer practices has become central to the identity projects of many middle- and upper-class consumers. Less is known, however, about the intra-class processes through which cultural distinctions between “good” and “bad” consumer objects are negotiated and established. This article illustrates the cultural processes a group of middle-class parents engage in to manage the moral tensions that arise from their resource-rich environments and cultural imperatives to limit the consumer goods in their children’s lives. Specifically, this article extends our understanding of consumerism and consumer culture’s role in reproducing and obscuring class boundaries by describing 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” (Zelizer, 2004, 2010) through which middle-class parents bestow positive shared meanings and moral understandings to otherwise excessive or “bad” consumer spending. Moreover, drawing on interviews with parents of pre-school–aged children, this article builds on Pugh’s (2009) analysis of how children’s social worlds shape parent’s consumer practices by highlighting how parents’ own social world shapes understandings of appropriately classed consumer behavior.
This article proceeds in five sections. The first two provide the theoretical building blocks for thinking about class, parenting, and the role of consumer culture the reproduction of class inequalities. I then describe the research site and present findings analyzing the cultural processes through which middle-class parents produce and negotiate meanings regarding appropriately classed consumer behavior. The article concludes with a discussion of the role these processes and consumer culture play in the reproduction of class inequality.
Class and consumer-parenting
How are class inequalities reproduced? According to Bourdieu’s (1984) theory of habitus, “cultural capital,” or the cultural dispositions acquired in the home during childhood, is fundamental to the functioning and maintenance of class inequality. Scholars working within this tradition have broadened our understanding of the reproduction of social inequalities by highlighting the cultural and moral forms of capital that people call on to establish and reproduce class boundaries (Bourdieu, 1984; Lamont, 1994). For example, scholars have documented how families differing levels of economic capital shape the type and amount of cultural capital children develop. In itself this is of no consequence. However, when children from different classed backgrounds interact with institutional contexts such as schools, institutions tend to bestow rewards onto children with already privileged forms of cultural capital (Lareau, 2011). These arbitrarily privileged set of cultural habits and dispositions—transmitted from one generation to the next within families—function as class-specific resources capable of generating classed advantages. In this way, cultural habits and dispositions are directly implicated in the reproduction of social inequalities.
While the class status of the wealthiest in society may rest on ownership of capital or property, members of the professional middle class must participate in the labor market, both for their immediate well-being and to guard against future generation’s downward mobility. Membership in the professional middle class is therefore an inherently insecure and anxious position as members’ sense that even small missteps or misfortunes can lead to a slide down the class hierarchy (Ehrenreich, 1990; Zimmerman, 2015). Those in the professional middle class tend to have higher levels of education, salaries, and more autonomy at work relative to those lower in the class hierarchy. Nevertheless, for those in the professional middle class such as the parents interviewed for this study, the intergenerational reproduction of their class position is largely dependent on their children developing the correct cultural knowledge and competencies (Khan, 2012; Lareau, 2011). For instance, while affording to own a home in a middle-class neighborhood is an important token for membership in the professional middle class, engaging in the correct consumption patterns such as pursuing college education and “omnivorous,” ecologically focused consumerism likewise an important marker of middle-class belonging (Carfagna et al., 2014; Peterson and Kern, 1996).
The contingent and anxious nature of the professional middle class’s position produces a similarly anxious orientation towards parenting. That is, while middle class parents may want to provide for their children’s needs, they nevertheless worry that engaging in the wrong type of consumerism will produce children who develop bad tastes, lack self-direction, and succumb to the low-brow, mind-numbing thrills of mass culture (Pugh, 2009). These are precisely the cultural traits that middle-class parents feel to threaten their future generations’ position in the professional middle class. Middle class and affluent parents have developed creative responses to this dilemma. In the past, many affluent families opted to simply remove their children from market spheres altogether, thus creating the initial demand for sleepaway summer camps and boarding schools (Khan, 2012; Paris, 2008). More recently, middle-class and affluent parents have sought to ease these anxieties by engage in simplicity circles, gift-less birthdays, and home schooling in efforts to dampen the influence of mass culture and commercialism (Jacobson, 2004), as well as engaging in “precautionary consumption” to protect their children from potentially harmful industrialized foods and medicines (Cairns et al., 2013; Mackendrick, 2014; Reich, 2014). Pugh (2009) describes middle-class and affluent parents strategically withholding toy and game purchases for their children in response to parents’ uneasiness with their children desiring “the wrong things” such as “junk” toys and violent games, a practice Pugh labels “symbolic deprivation.” Likewise, Sherman (2018) has documented how wealthy parents concerned with raising “entitled” children limit their children’s access to material goods in efforts to cultivate what they deem to be the correct habitus of privilege. Each of these is example of parents parenting according to classed norms around good parenting. Each of these are also reproductive strategies—parents’ efforts to reproduce their current and their children’s’ imagined future place within the middle-classes (Vincent and Ball, 2007).
Arlie Hochschild’s “commodity frontier” (2003) has been a useful metaphor for scholars thinking about middle-class parenting and consumerism. Specifically, this metaphor encodes a tension between “sentimental home life” and “the market” by positing that culture and economic behaviors exist in independent, “hostile worlds”—to the extent that the worlds come together they necessarily pollute each other (Zelizer, 2010). Hochschild’s imagery invokes a wall between market and non-market spheres, a wall never tall nor wide enough that parents must guard to ensure that the right commodified goods and experiences get in while the wrong ones stay out. While useful, this approach has tended to overlook the sociological, class-specific processes through which parents negotiate and establish exactly what counts as “good” consumer-spending. Parents have been shown to actively avoid buying “the wrong things.” However, how do parents come to agree on which consumer goods or experiences are “right”? This article fills this gap by describing the processes through which parents come to understand certain types of consumer spending as more or less appropriate. My findings demonstrate consumer goods and experiences are not in themselves intrinsically “good” or “bad.” Instead, I show how parents engage in meaning making processes through which even seemingly “bad” consumer goods can take on “good” meanings. Consequently, because consumer goods cannot be classified as “good” or “bad” outside of the classed contexts and communities in which they circulate, I argue that these processes play an important role in obscuring and maintaining class boundaries. However, parents must overcome a significant obstacle before they can successfully enact classed consumer-parenting norms: their children’s own consumer desires.
Children’s consumer desires and their meanings
While parents may be committed to enacting classed consumer norms, there is no guarantee that their children will cooperate. Because children’s predilections can help or hinder parents’ consumer practices, we need to understand how parents interpret and manage their children’s consumer desires. Scholars working within the “new” sociology of childhood paradigm have underscored children as active contributors to shaping their social worlds and childhood as a permanent structural segment of society worthy of study (James and Prout, 1990; Qvertrup et al., 2009). (Chin and Phillips, 2004), for instance, describe how children’s values and temperaments influence their family’s day-to-day lives, sometimes compensating for what adults are not providing though often impeding their parents’ plans and pursuits. Others have explored the symbolic means through which 2- and 3-year-old toddlers seek control over adults (Lignier, forthcoming), and ways that children’s voices could become more influential in shaping policy (Hallett and Prout, 2003).
In terms of children’s role in pecuniary matters, scholars have shown how even as children became emotionally “priceless” during the 20th century they continued to be active consumers, producers, and distributors. As Zelizer (2002: 376) has argued, children’s economic practices had “remained closeted, camouflaged by the supposedly exclusive dominance of play and learning over market activity.” Pugh (2009), for instance, demonstrated how children forge community around consumer goods and experiences. Sterib (2011) found preschoolers to be apt class actors who unwittingly contribute to the reproduction of class inequalities. Drawing on linguistic styles developed in their upper-middle class homes, preschoolers routinely drew on their cultural capital to gain teachers’ attention and win cross-class disputes (Streib, 2011). Moreover, middle-class and affluent parents have been shown to spend considerable resources actively cultivating children’s interests and talents, enrolling children in organized—typically competitive—extracurricular activities (Friedman, 2013; Lareau, 2011).
Children’s consumer preferences, however, are not necessarily consistent with middle-class consumer-parenting norms. For example, children do not value things and experiences equally. Chaplin et al. (2020) show that children under five derive more enduring happiness from material objects than experiences. As they enter adolescents, the authors argue, children develop cognitively in ways that allow them to come to value experiences over objects. Younger children, however, tend to prefer and derive greater enjoyment from things over experiences (Chaplin et al., 2020). For middle-class parents, these preferences can undermine the types of distinction work adult consumers seek (Pugh, 2009: 86). Parents in Pugh’s study reported feeling dread, anxiety, and guilt when partaking in the consumerism their children desired (Pugh, 2009: 86). Children’s consumer desires, which parents acquiesced to more frequently than they would have preferred, felt to middle-class parents like “alien invaders” insidiously channeling advertising and peer culture into the fortress of middle-class family life.
Pugh (2009) concludes that the source of parents’ acquiescence to their children’s consumer desires can be traced to children’s social worlds. That is, parents acquiesce because children use consumer goods and experiences to forge a sense of belonging and community with other children at school, and parents prioritize their children’s social belonging over their consumer anxieties. By drawing on interviews with parents with pre-school–aged children, this article extends these finding by showing how cultural processes in adult’s social world can likewise explain why parents acquiesce. My findings demonstrate how parents manage the tensions they experience between commodity-rich worlds and middle-class consumer norms. Specifically, I outline the cultural processes through which middle-class parents establish distinctions between spending on objects and spending on experiences, as well as how they engage in “circuits of commerce” (Zelizer, 2004, 2010) that confer positive moral meanings to otherwise excessive or “bad” consumer spending. Cultural processes are the micro-level interactions through which meso-level scripts and frames are put into practice. Scholars have recently begun to emphasize cultural processes as routine but critical actions through which inequalities are produced and reproduced (Lamont et al., 2014). As Khan (2012) has argued, most people can memorize a list of classed cultural rules. The cultural processes through which classed rules are interpreted and implemented, however, are more difficult for outsiders to grasp as learning these requires prolonged engagement with specific social settings. Echoing Bourdieu, Kahn states that “eating a meal—ironically, the most common of things that we do every day—is more challenging that knowing what to order” (2011: 83). Highlighting the cultural practices through which middle-class parents resolve tensions between classed consumer norms and their family’s commodity-rich worlds, this article uncovers the classed dispositions that yield a sense of recognition and belonging among middle-class consumers. Understanding these dispositions is essential to understanding the reproduction of class boundaries and hierarchies in contemporary society.
Methods
To investigate how middle-class parents manage the tensions between their classed sense of proper consumer-parenting and their children’s consumer interests and desires, I draw upon my research with middle-class parents living in a new urbanist neighborhood in Austin, Texas. During the Spring and Summer of 2014, I conducted 31 in-depth, semi-structured interviews with parents whose oldest child was 3 years old or younger. I specifically sought out respondents with very young children as these children would tend to express preferences and desires least congruent with parents’ middle-class consumer norms. My criteria for being middle-class follow well-established cultural definitions of class wherein adults have college degrees and are either employed in reasonably well-paying jobs that either entail substantial managerial authority or draw upon complex, educationally certified skills or are enrolled full-time in graduate school (Lareau, 2011; Weinberger et al., 2017; Zimmerman, 2015). Because this group tends to have more educational than financial capital, the threat of downward mobility always looms (Zimmerman, 2015).
My research site, the Mueller neighborhood, is a new urbanist development in central Austin, Texas. Construction of the residential portion of the neighborhood began in 2007 on a 700-acre plot that was previously a decommissioned airport. New urbanism is a movement in architecture and urban planning that advocates “traditional” American small-town design as a remedy for the social and environmental ills linked to suburban sprawl and inner-city decay (Duany and Plater-Zyberk, 2010; Talen, 2005). To promote density, property lots in Mueller are small and private yard space is kept to a minimum. All homes in Mueller have front porches that open either onto sidewalks or communal gardens. Design choices such as wide, shaded sidewalks and garages accessible only by rear alleyways are intended to further encourage social interactions. Moreover, as a “mixed use” neighborhood Mueller’s design integrates office and retail space and 140 acres of public parks and green areas. New urbanism is rooted in a conviction that urban planning—and consumers purchasing homes and shopping within these new neighborhoods—can promote social goals such as economic prosperity, ecological integrity, and social cohesion (Gibbs et al., 2013). As such, simply living in Mueller accomplishes some of the distinction work that middle-class and other high cultural capital consumers routinely engage in (Carfagna et al., 2014). Additionally, while sociological analysis of culture has tended to focus on how culture creates and is created by macro-level communities such as ethnic groups or nations, situating my study in the Mueller neighborhood allows me to underscore the influence of local contexts in shaping the understandings and preferences of social actors. The Mueller neighborhood, a middle-class neighborhood explicitly designed to promote social interaction among inhabitants, thus serves as a useful “action space” within which strong ties and a strong consensus of cultural meanings and practices can be generated (Fine, 2012). Like all social behavior, class inequalities have their roots in small groups. These small groups, in turn, impact other groups and shape the broader social discourse. Local contexts such as Mueller therefore serve as the necessary foundation upon which theorizing about macro social structures can take place.
Average sale prices for single-family homes during my fieldwork was $480,000, while 3-bedroom homes rented for approximately $2900 per month. The median home value in Austin during this period was about $240,000 (Kerr, 2015). Respondents’ average household income was approximately $160,000 per year, ranging between $90,000 and about $400,000. All but two of my respondents lived in dual-income homes.
In-depth interviews were chosen to illuminate the meanings that respondents attached to their consumer behavior and processes that they engaged in. While surveys have been used in the past to quantify “ethical” consumer behavior (Micheletti et al., 2004; Neilson and Paxton, 2010), my goal was to understand the meaning making and cultural negotiations that parents engaged in while managing the consumer-related tensions that arose in their lives. In-depth interviews allowed me to inquire about and probe into the “magnified moments” that cemented or challenged parents’ identities as good consumer–parents (Hochschild, 2003), as well as the fantasies and fears that parents had about themselves and their children as consumers (Lamont and Swidler, 2014).
Some see the type of self-reporting interviewees engage in as too abstracted from lived experience to provide valuable information about people’s behavior (Jerolmack and Khan, 2014). For example, in their interviews with employers, Pager and Quillian (2005) find that they express a far greater willingness to hire black male ex-offenders than a previous audit study would predict, suggesting that self-reported behavior cannot be a stand-in for actual behavior. At most, these authors argue, interviews provide ex post facto (and often contradictory) justifications for behavior. I do not see my interviews as accounts of people’s behaviors. Instead, following Lamont and Swidler (2014), I see interviews as illuminating the cultural contexts within which social actors are embedded: the representations, classification systems, identities, imagined realities, and cultural ideals available to social actors. This is to say, instead of simply probing about people’s behavior I seek to understand people’s cultural contexts and the ways they are embedded in those contexts; how people “live imaginatively—morally but also in terms of their sense of identity—and what allows them to experience themselves as good, valuable, worthwhile people” (2014: 159). Through answers to factual questions, statements about what respondents think, or folk theories about causal explanations, interviewees work to present themselves in an honorable and admirable light (Pugh, 2011). The display work interviewees engage in allows access to different levels of information about the culture—the motivations, beliefs, meanings, feelings, and practices—that people use (see, e.g., Lamont, 1994; Swidler, 2003; Young, 2006).
To recruit participants, I spent time in the parks, shops, the children’s museum, and attended community events. I also located respondents through online community forums, during participant observation in the neighborhood, and through snowballing. My then two-year-old daughter served as a crucial “wedge” in helping me gain access in the neighborhood. As Levey (2009) argues, bringing one’s children to the field can aid in facilitating relationships by providing immediately relevant and often relatable information about the researcher. Moreover, when I contacted potential respondents whom I had not already met in person I made it a point to identify myself as a researcher as well as a parent who frequented the neighborhood with my daughter. By giving me access to parks, the children’s museum, and other places where neighbors congregate my daughter facilitated efforts to build relationships with residents and gain a foothold into the neighborhood. In addition, I felt that being able to relate to parents as a parent—especially, as was the case in these interviews, given that our children were roughly the same age—made interviews more friendly, open, and informative. In fact, several respondents reported having agreed to the interview in part to meet fellow parents in the neighborhood (several respondents realized during the interview that I was not myself a resident of Mueller), and all interviewees expressed looking forward to meeting again in the capacity of parents in the parks or at the museum. Though she was critical for gaining access to respondents I never brought my child to the interviews.
Interviewee demographics.
All names are pseudonyms.
aPurchased home through Affordable Homes program.
Findings
The following analysis explores three processes that middle-class parents engage in to resolve the tensions between their classed sense of proper consumer-parenting and their children’s consumer interests and desires. These processes are: (1) Protecting Purity: Parents express a need to shelter children from market influences to prevent their children from becoming “spoiled,” which they define in terms of being flawed consumers. (2) Spending to Not-Spend: Parents describe patterns of substantial spending for their children. Specifically, even those claiming to not buy much for their children described spending considerable amounts of money on specialized daycares, camps, travel, and athletic and educational experiences. In doing so, parents made cultural distinctions between “cheap” consumer goods and more worthy experiences. (3) Engaging Circuits: The parents I spoke with engaged in “circuits of commerce” through which they were able to provide their and their peers’ children with otherwise off-limits consumer goods. In this way, parents were able to provide many of the “cheap” consumer goods their children desire without compromising their classed consumer norms.
Protecting purity
All parents in this study expressed feeling a need to shelter children from market influences. As other studies on middle class consumer-parenting have shown, parents were concerned with their children becoming “spoiled” or developing irresponsible consumer habits from exposure to commercial goods (Mackendrick, 2014; Pugh, 2009; Reich, 2014). One way that parents enacted this sheltering was by limiting their children’s consumption of processed foods. Like parents in Cairns et al.’s (2013) study who felt responsible for preserving their children’s purity through the food choices they made, parents in my study were careful about what they fed their children.
Carol, a mother of a two-year-old, described a change in her food buying habits characteristic of parents in my study. She described how since becoming a mother she has refused to buy meats anywhere other than the farmers market where she feels confident in their “better quality, less processed” options. “I spend more money,” Carol accepted, “but feel safer about giving it to my child.” Similarly, Laurie, a mother of three-year-old twins, sees her choices for her children’s food as limited between organic store-bought and home-made food, even though before having children, Laurie said, “I didn’t care about what I fed myself.” Christine extended this “precautionary consumption” (Mackendrick, 2014) not only to the food her family ate but also to any chemicals that her family may come in contact with. Even though, as she explains, “I know in the end it probably doesn’t make that much of a difference,” Christine nevertheless pays extra for organic body washes, shampoos, and even weed killers. While before having kids she would not think twice about using potentially harmful chemicals if weeds grew in their yard, her approach is now: “can we get some vinegar and water!? How can we treat these weeds without using harsh pesticides?”
Even parents not as stringent in their food choices were nevertheless aware of the cultural imperative to raise the “organic child” (Cairns et al., 2013). Eloise “did it [the “organic child”] for a little bit,” she told me, but soon reached her limit. She recalled being in the supermarket choosing a sippy cup for her son and feeling tense about others’ “observation of whether you buy plastic for your kid to drink out of, or aluminum, or stainless steel.” While she was “fed up” feeling that her consumer decisions were being watched over, she found it too difficult to fully let go of the “organic child” imperative and settled with buying both a plastic and aluminum cup.
A second way that parents attempt to shelter their children was by limiting the amount of “stuff” their kids had. One parent bluntly expressed a shared sentiment among parents in this study: “we just don’t believe in giving [our kids] a ton of things.” In fact, parents feel uneasy about their children already having too much. Elizabeth, for instance, describes her concerns “as an ADD [attention deficit disorder] thing.” She worries that because her daughter has so many toys she will have “too many distractions.” For Elizabeth owning only “two or three toys” would be better for her daughter as it would “allow her to be more creative, imaginative [in her] play.”
Kevin likewise feels that excessive materialism can be “overwhelming” for a child’s brain. As he explains, instead of sitting in a room full of toys “I would love for them to go play in the park every day and just focus and let their mind work and create their own games and stories.” In a view that Elizabeth and Kevin share with many of the parents I interviewed, children’s consumer goods are perceived to thwart their children’s creative potential.
Parents also worry that having too much will “spoil” their children. Carol, for example, describes how she organizes charity fundraisers in place of presents for her daughter’s birthday parties. “I do think she has enough,” Carol explained, and “she doesn’t play with what she has—it’s about her not getting spoiled.” Nora similarly does not want to create a situation where her children “feel like they deserve any toy they want.” She contrasts her parenting to other parents in “our very market driven culture” who use toys as rewards “just because [their kids] got themselves dressed in the morning.” Similarly, even though Christian understands that at two-years-old his son is too young to understand, he attempts to use consumer goods to teach him about “how good he has it compared to a lot of people.” Christian has ambivalent feelings about his family’s economic success as he dreads raising his son “in a situation where it looks like we have money to spend without earning it.” While he feels it is great that, from his son’s perspective, food and toys “just appear in front of him,” Christian says that he and his wife work hard “to instill the same values that we were raised with, of hard work and being grateful for things that you have.” Another mother explained that if her kids had too much “they wouldn’t learn to appreciate it, or they would expect to have whatever they wanted whenever they want.” “And then,” she added, “they’ll grow up and become Anthropology professors and realize that it doesn’t work like that!” What the parents I interviewed fear is that excessive materialism will hinder their ability to raise responsible, self-sufficient consumers endowed with the proper work ethic. As Adam pondered, at stake for many of these parents is the question: “are you giving your kids the right tools to go out into the real world? Or are we going to have a son who’s 20 years old and can’t pay his rent and is calling mom and dad asking for money?”
Parents in this study want and can afford to provide their children with comfortable childhoods. As did parents in Pugh’s (2009) studies (see also Jacobson, 2007), parents in my study shared a general understanding that, if left unchecked, market influences are harmful to their children. This harm presented itself either in terms of harmful chemicals and processed foods, or as “market driven culture” stymieing children from learning values such as hard work, responsibility, and self-sufficiency. Nevertheless, children in Mueller lived commodity-rich lives, and their parents engaged in considerable amounts of consumerism on their behalf. The following sections will discuss how parents managed these tensions.
Spending to not-spend
In my interviews, parents routinely expressed hesitancy or regret in purchasing goods that they deemed unfitting. One mom described herself as a “sucker” for visiting the dollar store with her daughter in search of inexpensive Disney merchandise. A father bought his son a $300 bike for his third birthday—during our interview he wondered aloud: “Dang, why did I spend $300 on a toddler’s bike?” Instances of this type of consumerism for children were unusual. Nevertheless, every parent I spoke to described patterns of substantial spending. Specifically, while parents felt discomfort around buying their children “stuff” (or, as some parents referred to children’s consumer goods, “crap”), this uneasiness was absent from their talk of the spending they did on “activities” or “experiences” for their children, such as specialized daycares, camps, travel, and athletic and educational activities. In fact, every parent I interviewed reported either having enrolled their children in extracurricular or enrichment activities or aspiring to do so; six parents already had their toddlers participating in a formal, organized activity such as soccer or dance. While these “experiences” required substantial spending, parents work to reframe these as non-threatening by classifying this consumerism as distinct from the “cheap” consumerism associated with mass consumerism.
Travel was a common and expensive theme in my interviews. Charlotte took her daughter on her to visit the Costa Rican rainforest when her daughter was 18 months old. Since then, they have vacationed in Washington D.C., Florida, and have their first family trip to Europe planned for next summer. Still, Charlotte wishes she could provide her daughter with more travel so that she could “see more of the world.” Rose similarly delights in being able to take her three-year-old to New Jersey and Chicago every year to visit her grandparents. While visiting grandparents is the premise behind these trips, Rose and her husband strive to “maximize” these experiences. In Chicago, for example, Rose does not hesitate to take her child “to all the museums” regardless of how “ridiculously expensive” they are. “I 100% do that,” she explains, “because it is an experience they wouldn’t get elsewhere. To see Dinosaur Zoo—that’s an experience! I have no problem spending money on that.”
In addition to travel, parents regularly spent large sums on children’s organized activities. Contemporary class-specific parenting norms compel affluent parents to use organized activities to cultivate their children’s interests and talents (Lareau, 2011), a tendency reflected in this study. For instance, when Christine realized that her daughter enjoys drawing, she went out and bought “like a million coloring books” in an effort to cultivate that talent. Moreover, her daughter attends a relatively expensive daycare where tuition pays for kids’ yoga, swimming, and Spanish and Mandarin classes. As Christine explains, she and her husband have “worked hard to focus more on opportunities and experiences than the material stuff.”
Paid organized activities such as these were common among the parents I interviewed. For example, before her daughter turned two Penny had already enrolled her in music classes where monthly membership fees were about $85. Penny’s hope was that her daughter would become interested in music and learn to sing and “keep a beat,” as she had heard of other babies her age being able to do. From Penny’s perspective, the classes were a failure; her daughter was completely uninterested in the instruments and too shy to interact with the other children. “She’s not very disciplined,” Penny explained, “and she’s not that social.” Still, Penny insists that “It must be useful to know these [musical] things, right? I just imagine that the music is good for her brain in some way.”
Similarly, Sarah understood that in a general sense her daughter was going “to be fine.” “I’ve read Freakonomics, and we have lots of books in the house” she stated, acknowledging a correlation between number of books in the home and children’s long-term well-being. Yet Sarah worried that her two-year-old daughter was not getting a good enough education at daycare. “Sometimes I do worry,” she admitted, “since I’m not giving [my daughter] Mandarin lessons like other parents—I’m not doing bilingual education.” Sarah worries that she was not doing enough to assure her daughter would be able to “compete with her privileged cohorts who are getting a lot of attention.” Therefore, Sarah was in the process of enrolling her swimming and gymnastics classes as well as a soccer league. Like Penny’s daughter’s music classes, soccer was a disappointment. Sarah described soccer for three-year-olds as “kind of like herding cats” and did not feel her daughter was receiving the individualized attention that justified the $135 per term price tag. Other parents frequently spoke of enrolling their children in summer camps designed to teach children about art, nature, or theater.
The previous section showed parents expressing discomfort about buying their children “stuff.” In this section, I showed that parents did not express the same uneasiness when discussing spending large sums of money on “activities” or “experiences” for their children, such as specialized daycares, camps, and athletic and educational activities. As much as parents spent on these activities, they did not question whether this might spoil their children, or whether too many activities would undermine the children’s personal development. In fact, parents openly worried that their children were not getting enough individualized attention in these activities. Even spending on travel to visit family was couched in terms of giving children an opportunity to “see the world.” This supports Pugh’s (2009) findings regarding parents substantial spending. Unlike Pugh (2009), however, parents in my study were not driven by concerns over their children’s social well-being. Instead, parents drew on their own classed values and beliefs about proper consumerism when shopping for their children. In fact, children’s own interests and propensities were largely disregarded in parent’s accounts. Often parents expressed disappointment with these activities as soccer seamed to devolve into “herding cats” and music classes did not turn out as expected. Nevertheless, parents did not question the centrality of paying for these types of activities for “good” parenting. Penny justified the failed music classes in terms of being “good for her [daughter’s] brain in some way,” and Sarah was still hopeful that her daughter would 1 day come to enjoy gymnastics.
Engaging circuits
Despite parents’ talk of spending on experiences and preferring to limit their children’s consumer goods, all the children in my study lived relatively comfortable, commodity-filled lives. During interviews parents often grumbled about children’s toys taking over their living spaces and described strategies to minimize their children’s protests against donating toys they no longer played with. The homes I visited confirmed these stories; I conducted interviews in living rooms which had been converted into children’s play areas, played with one respondents’ child in an elaborate arts and crafts station, and watched as an interviewee helped her toddler organize a 12-piece fairy dress collection. How and why is it that parents could seem to say one thing but do another?
Through my interviews I found that parents engage in what Zelizer (2004) calls “circuits of commerce” with their friends and family. Zelizer (2004, 2010) describes circuits as forms of economic interactions in which members of a group establish shared meanings and moral understandings of the transactions that take place between members. Specifically, “circuits of commerce” consist of (1) well-defined relationships between group members, (2) some distinctive set of goods and/or services that are transferred among members, and (3) a shared set of meanings attached to those exchanges that are (4) meaningfully and incessantly renegotiated among group members (Zelizer, 2004). Zelizer (2010) cites Deborah Stone’s (1999) research on home-care workers as a helpful example of a circuit of commerce. Home-care workers and patients in Stone’s research were concerned with the potential of the industry’s financial restructuring expunging the intimate and personal aspects of caregiving from the caregiver–client relationship. Instead of succumbing to the threat of a “hostile” financial world transforming caregivers into “unfeeling bureaucratic agents,” patients and caregivers developed a payment system where caregivers were understood to be paid only for bodily care even though caregivers continued to engage in a variety of intimate and personal caregiving activities out of what they called friendship or neighborliness (Zelizer, 2010). In this example, members of a defined group (patients and caregivers) exchanged a set of goods and services (money and care) while negotiating a set of meanings (paid labor and labor performed out of friendship or neighborliness) which they attached to the exchanges. The circuit of commerce established in this example allowed patients and care-workers to circumvent an inadequate payment system and to maintaining close cultural ties.
Respondents unwittingly described participating in their own circuits of commerce with neighbors, friends, and family members. Within these circuits, parents exchanged many of the toys and objects that they were uncomfortable buying for their own children. Transfers made through these circuits allowed parents to provide their children with the “cheap” or “junk” consumer goods their children desired without the baggage of engaging in otherwise excessive or “bad” consumerism. Christine’s experience with her kids’ Frozen DVD is illustrative of how these “circuits of commerce” operate. Her daughter received a Frozen DVD as a gift from Christine’s friend, Kathy. Christine herself would not have bought her own children the DVD because, as she explained, that would feel “subversive” to their social values. Given that she could have downloaded or streamed the movie, the extra packaging that the DVD required felt unnecessary and in conflict with her environmentalism. Interestingly, Kathy had similarly expressed discomfort with the purchase, explaining to Christine that it was a third friend had gifted Kathy’s child a Frozen Blue-Ray/DVD combo for his birthday. The DVD Kathy gifted Christine was one part of that combo. Christine was grateful for the gift, in part because she knew that—while convenient—purchasing the DVD herself would not have been palatable given her consumer standards. Crucially, given that the DVD has entered her “circuit of commerce” as a gift for a “special event” (Kathy’s child’s birthday), and given that the DVD was exchanged as a gift between friends, Christine felt perfectly happy about her children having a Frozen DVD. For the parents in my study, consumer goods came to be deemed acceptable and appropriate through processes like this, including purchases that parents would not have made given their own attitudes regarding consumerism.
Linda likewise discussed her participation in similar circuits. Because many of her friends and family have children, her kids receive “a lot of hand-me-downs” and gifts. She describes her daughter as “well stocked with toys” even though she had “never felt compelled to give her things.” Sun similarly estimated that “at least half” of her kids’ belongings were acquired as gifts of hand-me-downs. She pointed out how her mother-in-law has taken it upon herself to buy shoes for her daughter. “It’s her thing and I’ve let her do that,” she explains, even if she did not feel that her daughter needed new shoes. For Sun, these transactions do not represent the encroachment of the commercial world into her family life. Instead, she frames it as something done within and “for family.” She does not see her mother-in-law’s behavior as motivated “purely based on consumer needs” but as a way to build a “personal relationship with us.” What Sun does not worry about, however, is her daughter being inundated with too many shoes.
Alex described a similar situation in her home. “When Christmas time comes around all the kids have their new toys,” she explains, “but we err on the side of not doing a lot.” For Alex “not doing a lot” does not mean that her kids do not receive gifts. She recalls the most recent Christmas when her daughter got a scooter that, she was careful to clarify, “was a hand-me-down from my niece.” Alex is clear about her family’s ability to afford new goods for their children. “Other people with incomes similar to ours,” she explains, “can be driving a brand-new Mercedes.” Nevertheless, for Alex it is important to have good “spending habits” and for her that her children “learn this lifestyle.” Like other parents in this study, Alex felt that she did not want her family to be concerned with “stuff” and understood herself as someone who set limits on their family’s consumerism accordingly. Again, however, Alex’s children were not lacking in toys. For example, her family has a tree house that takes up most of their living room. “It’s got a slide and stairs and they play on it,” she explains, “and I love it!” While it is not something that she would have considered buying for her own children, like so many of her kid’s possessions the tree house too was a gift. I asked Alex if she felt any tension between the tree house in the living room and the consumer “lifestyle” she wants to teach her children. “That’s funny,” she replied, “but no, that [the tree house] we didn’t buy, that was a gift!” As she attempted to explain her logic to me, she elaborated on the dynamism of her circuit of commerce: We just don’t buy a lot of things. Most of my clothes are hand-me-downs from either my sister or neighbors. My daughter is really small, so our neighbor is like “Oh, we had the same problem; here, have this.” I have another neighbor who wants to give us stuff. Our other neighbors just had a girl so we’re giving them stuff. We do borrow a lot of stuff. We’re borrowing a balance bike right now because [daughter] is learning how to ride a bike. So, we don’t buy a lot of clothes. We don’t buy a lot of stuff.
Alex, like all parents in my study, works to protect her children from market influences while teaching them proper consumerism by not buying “a lot of stuff.” Instead, for the parents and children in my study, much of what they consume is safely acquired through “circuits of commerce.”
Often even commodities that directly challenge parents’ norms are rendered innocuous through these circuits. When I spoke with Sarah, for instance, her cousin had recently gifted her children “this little inflatable donkey that you can bounce on,” which she contemplated being “about the most extravagant thing that anyone has bought my children.” Speaking about the inflatable donkey she explained: “I would have never bought that for my children! Do they actually need it? No! They have tons of things; we do things with them that are fun. Oh, I’d never get my kids that [donkey].” Even Sarah’s nephews were taken aback, asking their mother to buy them an inflatable donkey (a request which she refused). Sarah was, however, delighted with the gift: “It’s fun. It was cute. I was just like, that is a really sweet thing to get them. I told my cousin “That’s awesome. What an awesome gift!”
Despite the “extravagance” of the donkey and Sarah’s assertion that she would “never get my kids that,” the meanings that the donkey as a gift from a member of her circuit of commerce held for her—as “cute” and “sweet”—transformed the donkey from a potentially frivolous and indulgent commodity to a “fun,” even potentially educational (“it teaches them bouncing”) toy.
Parents I interviewed resolve the tension between providing and sheltering through participation in what Zelizer (2010) refers to as “circuits of commerce.” A myriad of consumer goods pass through the circuits discussed here. What these goods have in common is that by having been exchanged through these circuits a DVD, an unnecessary new pair of shoes, or tree house in a living room can be transformed from “junk,” “cheap,” or “wrong” things into fun, educational, and emotionally meaningful objects. Transfers made through these circuits thus allowed parents to provide their children with the otherwise distasteful consumer goods their children desired without violating classed edicts around excessive or “bad” consumerism.
Conclusion
This article explored the practices in which a group of middle-class parents engage in to manage the tensions that arose when their classed sense of proper consumer-parenting conflicted with their children’s consumer interests and desires. Concurring with classed patterns previously identified (Cairns et al., 2013; Jacobson, 2004; Pugh, 2009), the parents I interviewed talked of working to shelter their children from the wrong consumer goods as they feared these could spoil their children or otherwise turn them into otherwise flawed consumers. As we have seen, though, children in Mueller lived commodity-rich lives. But how did parents acquiesce to their children desire without compromising their classed consumer norms? On one hand parents spent substantial amounts to justify not spending. That is, parents spent substantial amounts on “experiences” which they worked to frame as non-threatening and distinct from “cheap” mass consumerism. While both commodified, parents in my study ascribed drastically different meanings to objects and experiences. Moreover, I have shown how middle-class parents engage in circuits of commerce within which they exchanged and received the sorts of toys and objects that they were uncomfortable buying for their own children. Transfers made through these circuits allowed parents to provide their children with the “cheap” or “junk” consumer goods their children desired without the baggage of engaging in otherwise excessive or “bad” consumerism. In what follows I will point to two ways that these findings help us to think beyond this case.
First, these findings have consequence for our thinking about ethical consumerism broadly. Today, perceptions of philanthropy and social justice have become entangled with consumerism (Cabrera and Williams, 2014; Carfagna et al., 2014; Einstein, 2012; Mukherjee and Banet-Weiser, 2012). Popular discourses propose that the greater good can be achieved if consumers take their societal and environmental concerns into account as they fulfill their needs, wants, and desires in the marketplace. For example, consider the ubiquity of “pink ribbons” (King, 2006), cause-related marketing (Einstein, 2012), and the emergence of an “eco-habitus” (Carfagna et al., 2014). Social and political organizations, moreover, have likewise embraced the market as a medium for cultivating solidarity, community, and affecting social change (Mukherjee and Banet-Weiser, 2012). By highlighting the ways that local contexts shape moral norms around ethical consumerism, this article’s findings should encourage future research to look beyond whether people consume ethically or not to understand the cultural work that people engage in to define certain things in certain contexts as ethical, as well as investigating the extent to which these meanings reverberate beyond group boundaries.
Second, in addition to being ways of solving everyday problems, parents’ actions are also efforts to reproduce their and their children’s future place within middle-class groups and institutions (Vincent and Ball, 2007). Social inequalities tend to be the unintended consequences of routine, meaning-making interactions between group members who are pursuing other goals (Lamont et al., 2014). By highlighting the cultural processes through which middle-class parents manage micro-level interactions, we can gain critical insights into how class boundaries are produced and reproduced in our contemporary consumer society. As stated previously, what it takes to fully belong within middle-class groups and institutions is not simply a list of rules that one can memorize. Class boundaries are metaphorically constructed out of the knowledge of the right cultural rules and an ease with the right cultural practices. An outsider to the social world which the parents in my study inhabited could be justifiably befuddled by the apparent contradictions between parents’ assertions of not spending and their children’s commodity-rich worlds. Nevertheless, parents in my study described a reflexive ability to engage circuits and know what types of goods are acceptable to be exchanged through these circuits, as well as the know-how to accurately make classed distinctions between the appropriateness of spending on consumer goods versus spending on experiences. These parents embodied the classed dispositions necessary to engage in these processes in ways that yield a sense of middle-class recognition and belonging. Because acquiring the dispositions to effectively engage in these processes requires prolonged exposure to and engagement the specific social settings in which they operate (Bourdieu, 1984), someone seeking upward mobility into the middle-class—despite their access to financial capital—would find themselves in a significant cultural disadvantage. Examining these processes allows us to better understand class boundaries in contemporary society, as well as the role of consumerism and consumer culture in the reproduction of class inequalities.
This study is limited given that it only explored the experiences of mostly white, middle-class parents living in a unique neighborhood. In their research on mothers’ preferences for feeding their children organic food, Cairns et al. (2013) highlight that poor mothers likewise incorporate ethical consumer discourses into their child-feeding decisions, yet they do so within unique constraints. Additional research is needed to explore whether the practices described here are as prevalent among other middle-class populations, and whether these practices are unique to middle-class and affluent consumers. Finally, this study raises questions about the intergenerational transmission of classed habitus generally. Parents are children’s most significant influences in their habitus formation, both as gatekeepers regarding what can be consumed as well as being actively engaged in cultivating ways of consuming (Martens et al., 2004). As I speculate that they are for class-outsiders, the processes and consumer rules described here could be confusing to children growing up in the middle-class. Future research on how these processes affect children’s identity formation, their own engagements with consumer culture, and parent–child relationships would further our understandings of how consumer culture children, parents, and social constructions of childhood.
Footnotes
Declaration of conflicting interests
The author(s) declared no potential conflicts of interest with respect to the research, authorship, and/or publication of this article.
Funding
The author(s) received no financial support for the research, authorship, and/or publication of this article.
