All parents have faced the requests that come from children in the aisles of the supermarket, but a new study say Australian parents are better at resisting these demands than those in other countries.

‘Pester power’ is a common tactic employed by disenfranchised young shopping companions, and research from the University of South Australia shows Australian parents are nearly three times more resilient than those in the US.

The study by the Ehrenberg-Bass Institute for Marketing Science shows Australian parents give in to pester power 26 per cent of the time.

By comparison, the most recent figures from the United States show kids are given 97 per cent of the things they ask for in store, and in Austria, there is a 52 per cent pester power success rate.

The asking rate is much higher too. In the US, kids ask for something for the trolley once every 75 seconds on average, but Australian kids make one request about every 180 seconds.

Ehrenberg-Bass Institute Senior Research Associate Bill Page has investigated the interaction between parents and children in supermarkets and the influence children have on their parents’ supermarket visits.

Page pored over more than 1800 hours of data recording how parents and children interacted during grocery shopping trips.

“Certainly Aussie parents’ levels of giving in are not anywhere near the levels seen in other countries,” he said

“Just over half the shoppers we studied didn’t have any conflict at all with their children, but a few were constantly battling.

“Overall, though, it seems as though kids in our supermarkets are comparatively well behaved.”