Relation of Parental Caring to Conspicuous Consumption Attitudes in Adolescents

Adolescent conspicuous consumption attitudes are perversely rooted in human relationships and interfere with personal growth and engagement in adult roles. Negative associations between parental caring and conspicuous consumption could be evidence of a compensatory motive to seek for the passing admiration of others when parent–child relationships fail to fulfill basic needs of competence, autonomy, and relatedness. Very little support, however, was found for Veblen’s original hypothesis that conspicuous consumption attitudes are driven by perceived social class distinctions. Yet, immersion in the consumer culture promoted by the media predicted higher levels of conspicuous consumption attitudes which were also more prominent among older adolescents. This small-scale study of 257, predominantly middle-class adolescents, calls attention to the need for more family socialization studies of adolescent money attitudes. Copyright Springer Science+Business Media, LLC 2012