Childhood for sale?

Public Interest, Wntr, 2005 by Kay Hymowitz

Intent on attracting "cradle-to-grave" brand loyalty as well as actual purchases, marketers try to get their logos in the face of even the youngest child. They have been astoundingly successful. One study says that kids have brand awareness by the age of three. And they try to get a foothold everywhere kids might be, including schools. Anyone who has not set foot in a public school recently might be shocked to find what is now considered part of a decent education: soda and candy vending machines and fashion and snack-food ads on the widely used Channel 1 in-classroom news service. Linn even describes a Wisconsin elementary school that kept a life-sized "Got Milk?" poster of Britney Spears, wearing black leather and studs and also hawking her latest CD, in its cafeteria.

Muckrakers have long been on to advertisers' wily ways, but as both Linn and Schor point out, kids--undisciplined, naive, and easily influenced--are no match for the seductions of Madison Avenue. The most striking illustration of the power of the market is the transformation of children between 8 and 12 into "tweens." Not so long ago, preadolescent children were barely a blip on the marketing radar, good as an audience for toy and Frosted Flakes ads but little else. But in the late 1980s, researchers began to notice that an increasing number of them were "latchkey kids"--hungry, bored, and unsupervised. Using the dubious justification of "empowering children," marketers introduced a profusion of food, fashion, and entertainment products and ads for their new "home alone" prey. They flattered youngsters by running ads with teenaged models and actors with plenty of "attitude" sporting the latest must-have item. Such children would come to understand that "part of cool is having something that others do not," as one ad executive explained to Schor. By the late 1990s Americans were discomfited to see the results of one of industry's great recent marketing successes: empowered eight-year-old girls craving--and buying--thong underwear and lip gloss and modeling themselves after a tarted-up singer so omnipresent that some of them could even find her picture in their school cafeteria. It was a brilliant, if disreputably conceived, revolution, one that has by this point turned tweens into a global phenomenon.

PEOPLE in the advertising business--and many conservatives--make the point that parents are the guilty party in all of this. After all, they are the ones buying (or at least giving the money to their children to buy) belly shirts, R-rated video games, and the like. Parents certainly deserve criticism; who else can be blamed for the fact that two-thirds of American children now have televisions in their bedrooms or that one-year-olds are crying for their "Teletubbies?" But Linn and Schor are right to find this argument too easy. The truth is that hundreds of times each day, between television, the Internet, billboards, school vending machines, and curriculums, kids are prodded to do things that responsible parents don't particularly want them to do--whether eating purple spaghetti or dressing like a streetwalker. This is at the very least a morally ambiguous state of affairs and, potentially, one of capitalism's most serious cultural contradictions. A free society benefits from open markets; it also needs adults to see to it that children grow up to be virtuous citizens. Could it be that the former undermines the latter?