A few weeks ago https://yourparentingmojo.com/captivate-podcast/mindovermoney/ (we talked with Dr. Brad Klontz) about the 'money scripts' that we pass on to our children - perhaps unintentionally - if we fail to examine these and make conscious decisions about the messages we want to convey about money to our children.
Today we continue our series on the intersection of parenting and money with a conversation with Dr. Allison Pugh, whose doctoral dissertation (and subsequent book, https://amzn.to/2xeSqMt (Longing and Belonging: Parents, Children, and Consumer Culture)) remain seminal works in this field even a decade after their publication.
In this interview, we take the position that advertising to children is happening - so what do we do with that? How do children make meaning out of the messages sent to them through our consumerist culture? How do parents attempt to resist the effects of this culture, and how successful are they?
In our next episode in this series we'll dig more deeply into the effects of advertising itself on children's brains, so stay tuned for that!
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Jen 1:31
Hello and welcome to the Your Parenting Mojo podcast. Today's episode is part of a series that I'm doing on the Intersection of Childhood and Money. A while back now I interviewed New York Times columnist Ron Lieber, on his book The Opposite of Spoiled and we do use his approach to several topics related to money. But it seemed to me for a while now that there's a lot more to say on this. So more recently, I interviewed Dr. Brad Klontz on his concept of Money Scripts, which are the ideas about money that were passed on to us by our parents and that we will probably pass on to our children as well if we don't critically examine these and potentially make a conscious decision to choose a different path. Another avenue I've been wanting to explore is consumerism since I come from England, which is certainly becoming more Americanized than many other places, but where consumerism still doesn't have the same force that it does here in the US where buying things to express love or because you're feeling sad or just because you feel like it is pretty much considered a birthright. And I spent a lot of time looking for someone to talk with on this topic and finally found our guest today Dr. Allison Pugh. Dr. Pugh is a Professor of Sociology at the University of Virginia whose teaching and research focuses on contemporary work and relationships, and particularly the intertwining of culture, emotions, intimacy and economic life. She's currently a fellow at the University of Southern California in Los Angeles while she writes a book about her research on the automation of work that's historically relied on relationships between people like the caring professions. She wrote the book Longing and Belonging: Parents, Children and Consumer Culture back in 2009, in which she studies how children and parents in both affluent and working class communities in the East Bay Area of California where I live, manage the commercialization of childhood. The book was named by contemporary sociology as one of the 12 most influential books on the family written since 2000 and received several awards. A decade later, it remains the seminal work on this topic. So I'm excited that Dr. Pugh is here today to talk with us and help us think through this important topic. Welcome, Dr. Pugh.
 
Dr. Pugh 3:26
Thank you so much.
 
Jen 3:28
All right, so I'd like to start by quoting a few of the very first sentences from the preface of your book. So you say “Ask them straight out and most upper income parents will tell you they don't buy much for their children because they have the ‘right values’. Meanwhile, low income parents will try to convince you they buy quite a bit because they are not ‘in trouble’. Go into their children's bedrooms, however, and you will find many...