Generic Pain Relievers Work. So Why Do I Buy Name Brands for My Children? When staring at the slew of options in the pain relief aisle, what do you take off the shelf - the Tylenol or Advil, or the cheaper (sometimes as much as three times cheaper) generic version? Generics are required to meet the same Food and Drug Administration safety and efficacy standards as name brands, and you can turn the box over and see clearly that both contain the same active ingredient. But for many consumers, that's not enough to persuade us to bypass the familiar in favor of the CVS or Walgreens brand - and even if we're willing to go generic for ourselves, we may make a different choice for our children. Medical professionals, it seems, are not paying extra for the name brands. Economists at the University of Chicago's Booth School of Business examined data from more than 66 million shopping trips and found that doctors, nurses and pharmacists bypassed the brands for the generic version of adult pain relief products far more often than laypeople did. "As far as we can tell, in a world where everyone was as well informed as a pharmacist or nurse, the market share of the brands would be much, much smaller than it is today," Matthew Gentzkow, one of the study authors, told the NPR Planet Money correspondent David Kestenbaum. If consumers were better informed, he said, "a significant share of the willingness to pay for brands in this category would disappear." But, while more information might lead us to make a more economically rational choice for ourselves, would it change our behavior when we buy pain relievers for our children? For me, there are many factors in this decision other than cost. What flavors do the liquid or chewable brand names and generics come in? If the generic offers grape and cherry and my child will only swallow bubble gum, I'm shelling out for whatever does the trick. And there's the dye-free conundrum: if the generic has those extra chemicals and the name brand doesn't, maybe it's worth it for you to pay more to avoid them. I'm more careful when buying for my children than when buying for myself, in part because if my own headache is a little less relieved, I know I'll survive - but if the baby is still bothered by the teething, neither of us is getting any sleep. I know in my head that the results must be the same - but I'm still inclined to take the "safe" route. Do you buy generic pain relievers for yourself and brand names for your children, go generic across the board or stick with the brands you've always used?