NAMA not Dada as recession hits kids

“NAMA” could be soon be replacing “Dada” as a child’s first word, with research revealing that terms linked with the economic downturn are now commonly used by young children.

According to the survey, three in 10 parents said the word “recession” had entered their child’s vocabulary. “Unemployment” is the second most popular word, being used by every fifth child. Other words commonly used by their children include “credit crunch” (16%), “redundancy” (15%), “NAMA” (15%), “mortgage” (13%) and “interest rates” (10%).

Although not as popular children have also picked up on words such as “negative equity”, “overdrawn”, “recessionista” and “staycation”.

The survey from iReach found the bigger the family the greater impact the recession has on children’s use of economic-related words. General manager with iReach market research, Oisín Byrne, said parents are picking up this new language by listening to their parents and also from the TV.

“With this research we were trying to determine how the recession was impacting children as well as adults and we found that kids were really picking up on the hard hitting words related to the downturn,” he said.

Researchers also found the overall mood among Irish consumers dipped in March and has returned to pre-budget levels of last year.

At the start of this year it saw improvements in positive sentiment on the outlook for the Irish economy. However, March has seen significant economic announcements such as the costs of NAMA to taxpayers and the concerns about the future of Anglo Irish Bank, which the researchers said has had a “dramatic effect” on the economic sentiment of the Irish customer.

According to the March survey 46% of Irish adults, up from 30% a month earlier, think the economy is getting worse, which represents a 53% month on month increase in negative sentiment.