The Influence of Adult Children from “Generation Y” on the Shopping Decisions of their Parents

Family is one of the most important socio-cultural factors which reflects on a man’s behavior. Contemporarily, young people demonstrate much more market activity. Except for doing shopping, they also play roles of advisors who in fluence choices of individual members of households. Most often, in spite of coming of age and leaving family home, they still have an impact on the behavior of family members. The aim of this paper is to examine the influence of children over 18 (generation “Y”) on parents’ consumer decisions (generation “X” and Baby-Boomers). As a research method a quantitative survey analysis was applied which showed that children have a relevant influence on shopping decisions of adults. Moreover, there are differences in the assessment of this influence between children and parents. The degree of young people’s impact on the shopping process of their parents is, among others, determined by age and sex of a child and a parent, the category of the product and its purpose. The limitation of the conducted analysis is the unrepresentative sample of respondents. The achieved results may be used by marketing specialists to deepen their understanding of consumer behavior of adult children and their parents and to properly address promotion messages.