Abstract: Research on children's influence in family purchasing assigns household members to roles and treats the influence process as a negotiation conducted between a child and a parent. That specification carries an unstated structural assumption: that the adult a child petitions is the adult who controls the purchase. In much of South Asia, the Arab world and Southeast Asia the assumption does not hold, because grandparents and other kin are resident and hold standing in household consumption. This paper argues that the decision-role model is under-specified for such settings, and that the missing element is directional. Recent work establishes that family structure conditions how parents socialise children; what remains unmodelled is the reverse path, in which a child recruits a third party to carry a request the parent has refused or has not yet heard. Drawing on social power theory and on evidence from India, Jordan, Ghana, Nigeria, Pakistan, Sri Lanka, China and Croatia, the paper adds a coalition-partner role to the standard set and specifies mediated influence as a pathway parallel to direct influence. Six propositions follow. The central implication is that estimates of children's purchase influence obtained from dyadic instruments are systematically low in multigenerational households, by a margin determined by household composition rather than by children's persuasive capacity.

Keywords: family decision making; children's influence; consumer socialisation; extended family; social power; emerging economies; India.