How Children's Gender Shapes Parents' Product Preferences: The Mediating Role of Parenting Regulatory Focus

ABSTRACT In parenting, parents are usually the decision‐makers for their children's consumption. However, child gender, as a fundamental demographic characteristic of the child, has received very limited attention. In this paper, a secondary data analysis using the China Family Panel Survey (CFPS) and four experimental studies was conducted. These studies involved various product selection scenarios, including bicycles, educational decisions, growth forecasting services, tutoring classes, and financial products. These studies found that parents buy products with different regulatory focuses for boys and girls. Specifically, parents tend to adopt promotion‐focused parenting for boys, whereas their parenting regulatory focus for girls is more prevention‐oriented. These differences in parenting regulatory focus, in turn, influence product preferences, leading parents to prefer promotion‐focused products for boys and prevention‐focused products for girls. In addition, parents' gender‐based differences in product preferences for their children are attenuated when they engage in perspective‐taking.