Parental Style The Implications of What We Know (and Think We Know)

This article presents a synthesis of our prior work in consumer socialization of children. We focus discussion on parents as consumer-socialization agents and offer a review of the effects of parents as agents of children's consumer socialization as moderated by parental styles. Our research has uncovered one particular parental style-"authoritatives"-that appears to be more engaged in consumer socialization. We also review the more limited work on how parental styles may actually influence children and suggest avenues for future research that incorporates the parental style framework. These additional research possibilities include investigating what inherent parental characteristics may account for regarding the unique consumer-socialization formats that parents may use with children.