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The purpose of this paper is to examine mothers’ social media accounts that focus on children’s fashion. The authors probed children’s fashion photo practices as representations of the mothers’ extended self and the kind of childhood representations produced by the social media accounts. They also investigated mothers’ perceptions of children’s privacy when engaging in sharenting – the sharing of information about children or parenting online.

The study is based on 16 semi-structured interviews with Finnish mothers who had Instagram accounts focusing on children’s fashion.

Children’s fashion photos play a diverse role in mothers’ identity work. The photos can be used to express a mother’s taste and aesthetic skills, to express values, to fit into peer groups and to store memories of oneself and the children. Through the photos, representations of the prevailing Finnish childhood ideals, such as authenticity, naturalness and playfulness, are reproduced. The mothers perceived the children as part of their extended self and justified sharenting with mother- and child-centered arguments.

Through shedding light on the practices of social media fashion photography, this paper provides insights into how commercialism and social media shape cultural expectations for both motherhood and childhood. The paper contributes to previous research on sharenting, extending it to the context of fashion photography.

This paper aims to examine the connections between young Finnish consumers’ stimulation values, impulsive buying, financial problems and life satisfaction.

Path analysis with maximum likelihood robust standard errors estimation was used to examine relationships between variables and composite variables, as well as to explore indirect connections among them. The data set included 2,297 respondents aged 18–29 years in Finland.

Results show that stimulation values were directly positively associated with greater life satisfaction and indirectly linked to lower life satisfaction through impulsive buying and financial problems. Findings also reveal the connections between stimulation values and impulsive buying and between impulsive buying and financial problems.

This study extends the authors’ understanding of Schwartz’s values theory by showing how consumers’ stimulation values have both positive (i.e. higher life satisfaction) and negative (i.e. lower life satisfaction) outcomes.

This study brings recommendations for educators to reinforce young consumers’ media literacy and financial literacy to prevent the youth from developing a tendency toward impulsive buying and to seek stimulation more constructively. Also, from a public policy perspective, it would be beneficial to include more financial literacy and financial skills courses in young people’s curricula to help them recognize and resist impulsive buying tendencies, which can further reduce financial problems.

This study broadens the knowledge of the important connections between young consumers’ stimulation values, impulsive buying, financial problems and life satisfaction, an area where the authors’ understanding has been limited.