ABSTRACT
Children are the largest market segment, and in many parts of the world they are more involved in choosing what to buy, use, and eat than they have ever been before. Food choice is one of the areas where children have gained major influence. Children’s symbolic thought develops in the preoperational stage but is very focused on perceptual properties of stimuli. Social perspective taking describes how children’s abilities to understand different perspectives progress through a series of stages. As purposive consumer training rarely occurs in families, children may learn certain consumer skills through observation and imitation. Social perspective taking and impression formation are the most directly relevant to consumer socialization. Purposive consumer training by parents occurs infrequently and parents have only general consumer goals for their children such as teaching children about price-quality relationships.
