Kidding Around The USA

Kids are big business, with baby and tween being particularly hot buzzwords. (With over 19 million children aged 8–12 in America last year, it's no mystery why tween buying power is building.)

But the age that matters isn't necessarily that of the child: More mature moms is a trend that impacts attitudes toward shopping as well as cash in hand.

While the most popular age to have a first baby remains between the ages of 20–24, 49 percent — practically half — of first time mothers are now older than that; 24 percent are 30 or older when their first babies are born.

And the shopping for baby doesn't stop there: 60 percent of babies born in 2005 were the second, third, fourth or higher in their family. Each new baby means new baby gifts.

California wins hands down, at 549,626 live births in 2005; Texas is next at 385,963, followed by New York at 246,354 and Florida at 226,280. But that's not the same as the highest fertility rate (the total number of live births per 1,000 women of reproductive age). That honor goes to Utah by a country mile, at 90.4. The next highest is Arizona, at 79.2. Meanwhile North Dakota, Vermont, Wyoming and Washington, DC, all had less than 10,000 babies born in 2005.

When kids themselves do the shopping, the forecast is mixed. The good news for traditional retailers is that, despite growing up with technology, when today's kids shop, they overwhelmingly do it in stores. Seventy percent of kids aged 5–18 said they plan to do their holiday shopping "mostly at stores," according to a poll by Weekly Reader Research, Stamford, CT. Only 22 percent said they'd shop "about equal amounts online and at stores." Those shopping "mostly online" didn't even crack double digits at 9 percent.

If those numbers are driven by kids' free time and view of shopping as a social activity, they will likely persist; however, if the main reason is kids' lack of credit cards for online purchasing, the next few years may see those proportions reverse (see Pre-Plastic, page 86).

The bad news? Kids, or at least teens, are simply spending less on gifts. A 2006 JA Worldwide (Junior Achievement, Colorado Springs, CO) Interprise Poll on Teens and Holiday Spending found that kids planned to spend less on gifts for the third consecutive year this past holiday season. Some 66 percent said they planned to spend "less" or "about the same" as last year.

How much is "less"? Some 57 percent planned to spend more than $75 — that's a 3 percent decrease compared with 2005, and a 5 percent drop from 2004. Spending varies by gender, however: 38.3 percent of boys said they would spend more than last year, compared with 29.6 percent of girls who said they would spend more.