China Focus: Young parents' uncompromising spending fuels children's economy (2)

According to the China Chain Store & Franchise Association, Chinese parents poured 1.15 trillion yuan into the under-twelves market in 2012, and this figure is expected to expand at an annualized rate of 15 percent to top 2 trillion yuan by 2015.

"More anxious and crisis-aware than their fathers' generation, young Chinese parents are building for their children the kind of life they were deprived of themselves. Their endeavor to seek good childcare starts from the moment they decide to have babies," says Chen Wenxin, a professor at Hainan Normal University.

Because of the country's family planning policy, parents are liable to exhaust family resources to raise their only kid, and the bustling way of modern life has squeezed parent-child time, prompting working couples to rely on money to mend the relations, Chen adds.

Xue Shengwen, a researcher at the Shenzhen-based CIConsulting, a leading industry information provider in China, warns of the dual effects of the children's economy. The increasing attention on child-raising is good news for the industry, but a childhood overfed with material satisfactions will create money worship and vanity, the researcher believes.

"Recent years have seen a popular saying that kids are the most worthy assets in which to invest our money. But high input doesn't necessarily mean high returns. New-generation parents should be more rational about children's consumption," Xue says.