Teens and Knowledge of Parental Spending

If you're a parent, this survey (actually, a press release about the survey) will come as no surprise -- teenagers underestimate how much parents spend on back-to-school stuff. Bill Me Later is involved in the survey, for obvious commercial reasons, but it's interesting nonetheless.

Favorite part of the press release:

...a quarter of all teens, and more than one in five preteens, indicated that there is nothing their parents won’t buy them for back to school.

Maybe so, but not in my house.

I suspect this idea could be dramatically extended into other forms of spending to explore the disconnect between what teenagers think their parents spend on them and what parents actually spend.  This is similar to studies that ask people how much the government spends on things like foreign aid (people always overestimate it).  But the teen-parent angle gives it so much more fun -- and, I suspect, the differences are always there.