关键词: 居住流动性, 跨代际消费决策, 父母为子女做决策, 子女生命历程, 家庭消费决策

Abstract: Residential mobility has become an increasingly common feature of modern society, shaping individuals’ cognition, emotions, social relationships, and consumer behavior. While previous research has examined its effects on individuals’ own consumption decisions, little attention has been paid to how parents’ residential mobility influences the consumption decisions they make for their children. This gap is noteworthy because parents frequently act as decision-makers for their children across a wide range of consumption contexts. Moreover, their decision priorities may vary substantially as children progress through different developmental stages. Consequently, understanding the intergenerational impact of residential mobility requires a life-course perspective that takes children’s developmental characteristics and stage-specific needs into consideration.
Drawing upon the literature on residential mobility, family consumption decision-making, and child development, the present research proposes a novel theoretical framework to explain how parents’ residential mobility affects the consumption decisions and preferences parents make for their children across different stages of the child life course. Specifically, we focus on three representative decision domains corresponding to three key developmental stages: food decisions during early childhood, educational decisions during middle childhood, and entertainment decisions during adolescence.
For food decisions during early childhood, we propose that residential mobility shapes parents’ attention to nutritional information when making food choices for their children. Specifically, parents with higher residential mobility become more concerned about their children’s safety and adopt a prevention-focused orientation, leading them to pay greater attention to negative nutritional attributes rather than positive nutritional attributes.
For educational decisions during middle childhood, we argue that residential mobility influences parents’ preferences for educational products. Because parents with higher residential mobility place greater emphasis on their children’s emotional experiences and emotional support, they are more likely to prefer affective educational products over cognitive educational products.
For entertainment decisions during adolescence, we propose that residential mobility affects parents’ preferences for entertainment products. Specifically, parents with higher residential mobility perceive their children’s future environment as more competitive and become more motivated to expand their children’s social networks, leading them to favor cooperative rather than independently completed entertainment products.
Beyond identifying these effects, the proposed framework also specifies the psychological mechanisms and boundary conditions underlying each decision domain. By examining how residential mobility shapes parental concerns, motivations, and developmental priorities across different stages of childhood, the study provides a more comprehensive understanding of the process through which residential mobility influences family consumption decisions. The framework further demonstrates that the consequences of residential mobility are not uniform but depend on the developmental context in which parental decisions are made.
Overall, this research contributes to the literature in three ways. First, it extends residential mobility research from the individual level to family and intergenerational consumption decision-making contexts. Second, it advances family consumption decision-making theory by highlighting residential mobility as an important socio-ecological life experience that shapes parental judgments and preferences. Third, it integrates residential mobility theory with a child life-course perspective, providing a dynamic framework for understanding stage-specific variations in parental decision-making.
The proposed framework also offers important practical implications. First, it provides guidance for family consumption decisions by helping parents better understand how residential mobility influences the choices they make for children across different developmental stages. Second, it offers useful insights for marketing strategies, enabling firms to better understand families with different mobility experiences and to develop more targeted products, services, and marketing approaches. Third, it provides a basis for policymaking by helping policymakers better identify family needs and social development trends when designing education-, nutrition-, and family-related policies.

Key words: residential mobility, intergenerational consumption decisions, parental decision-making for children, child life course, family consumption decisions