Childhood for sale?

Public Interest, Wntr, 2005 by Kay Hymowitz

IF there is one place where the culture wars seem to be reaching a truce of sorts, that place is the battlefield of childhood. Just about everyone, aside, perhaps, from the producers at MTV or the "creatives" who design blood-spattered video games, is fed up with the entertainment-industrial complex and its nefarious grip on their children. They are disgusted by mass culture's "wardrobe malfunctions," not only the ones they see on TV, but those in their children's closets. They are exhausted by the incessant whine of "gimme" that sours every family outing. So vulgar and so insidious is the commercial culture that surrounds children that it has prompted even some progressive academics to experience nostalgia for childhood past.

New books by two such writers, Born to Buy: The Commercialized Child and the New Consumer Culture [dagger] by Juliet Schor, an economist at Boston College and best-selling author of The Overworked American, and Consuming Kids: The Hostile Takeover of Childhood [double dagger] by Susan Linn, an instructor at Harvard University Medical School and director of the Media Center at Judge Baker Children's Center in Boston, set out to describe this tawdry new landscape of childhood and to offer corrective action in the name of a more wholesome upbringing. Writing for a popular audience, though with differing degrees of success, they make the case that corporate interests have polluted and transformed the environment of childhood. Some of their lament might be overstated--Linn, in particular, has a tendency to write as if she finds her own indignation against corporate greed more compelling than a strong argument. But their general thesis that there are a lot of corporate CEOs and marketers who are not loyal to your side in the combat zone of family life is hard to dispute.

IT was not always like this, of course. Though catalogues and magazines hawked children's toys and books to mothers as early as the mid nineteenth century, it wasn't until fairly recently that marketers sought to do an end-run around parents and seduce the young while the adults weren't looking. Schor and Linn point to corporate influence and a more permissive regulatory atmosphere introduced during the Reagan administration to explain some of this. But there were also vast social and demographic changes, including several described by Schor, that fertilized the environment for children's marketers. For one thing, fewer adults were looking. Working mothers and single-parent families fueled the popularity of fast-food restaurants, now one of the most powerful players in the child market. Late from the office, parents began letting children make more of their own decisions about clothes and food; they also started handing out what advertisers call "guilt money." Meanwhile, there was a revolution in technology, one that both added to the venues in which marketers could wave their wares at children and increased the number of big ticket items begging to be purchased: DVD players, computers, iPods, cell phones, Game Boys, PlayStations, to name only a few. And in a related development, there was an extraordinary increase in prosperity that put enough cash in the pockets of low-income parents to indulge their youngsters with $50 sneakers, cell phones, and fast-food meals, and of middle-class parents for winter ski trips, spring vacations to Disneyworld, $84 American Girl Dolls, designer clothes for 12-year-olds, and on and on.

As a result, as Schor puts it, "kids and teens are now the epicenter of American consumer culture." Sounds exaggerated? Consider that by 2002 children between the ages of 4 and 12 spent over $30 billion in purchases, up from $6.9 billion in 1989, about a third of it on sweets, snacks, and beverages. (Toys and clothes were second and third.) Older kids spend even more, distributing $170 billion into retail coffers. Shopping has become one of childhood's primary leisure activities; according to time-use diaries reprinted by Schor, children are spending more time at the mall and in the supermarket, both with harried parents and on their own, than they are playing outside. (These days they can even shop at a mall in Alpharetta, Georgia, catering exclusively to them.) Where once marketers appealed to women as the commanding officers of domestic purchases, now, according to Schor, "children have become conduits from the consumer marketplace into the household." Ford, Target, and Embassy Suites all advertise on Nickelodeon, the top-rated children's television channel. James McNeal, retired professor of marketing at Texas A&M and the dean of scholars on the subject of children's marketing, believes that in 2002, $310 billion in family spending was directly influenced by 4- to 12-year-old children, and that the number is growing at a rate of 20 percent a year. As the Nickelodeon motto has it, "Kids Rule!"

SUCH potentially deep pockets have led to intense competition among marketers who have had very few obstacles--outside of a rare public outcry--in the way of their dogged efforts to lure kids to their products. Both writers describe how marketers use the expertise of anthropologists, sociologists, brain-imaging specialists, child psychologists, and pollsters to plumb children's desires, analyze family dynamics, and develop techniques that seem consciously designed to make parents' lives miserable. You can thank one such researcher for urging marketers to exploit "the nag factor" when advertising to children. Others have hyped the benefits of appealing to children's "aspirational age," which is another way of saying of encouraging them to act like teenagers. They appeal to children's impulsiveness by introducing ever more exciting and more noxious products like "Blue Funky Fries" or "Mystery Color Ketchup."