Kid stuff: raising children in a consumer culture

Christian Century, Jan 11, 2005 by Lillian Daniel

Consuming Kids: The Hostile Takeover of Childhood.

By Susan Linn. New Press, 304 pp)., $24.95.

It's Not the Media: The Truth About Pop Culture's Influence on Children.

By Karen Sternheimer. Westview Press, 288 pp., $26.00.

The Cute and the Cool: Wondrous Innocence and Modern American Children's Culture.

By Gary Cross. Oxford University Press, 272 pp., $29.95.

AS THE CHRISTMAS SEASON ends and parents push their way through crumpled wrapping paper and parts of half-assembled toys, they may wonder: How did we get from a baby born in a manger to this? How did we reach the state where Care Bear Nativity sets, Chia pets and Ronald McDonald have the iconic force once reserved for the holy? When did the giving season turn into a purchasing season? And where did I hide those receipts, so that my children can exchange the very gifts they once begged for?

Into the mess of American materialism step three authors with very different perspectives on the hold that consumer society has over kids. Susan Linn, an instructor in psychiatry at Harvard Medical School, points the finger at the advertising industry, which targets children with more force than parents can counter. Not only does the average child see more than 40,000 commercials a year, but children are also bombarded by marketing on the previously sacrosanct Public Broadcasting System. The Sesame Street characters of PBS, along with the Teletubbies and Clifford the big red dog, now sell products themselves.

And cute critters don't just sell toys. Linn reports that of 81 G-rated animated children's movies, more than half contained an episode of a character drinking or smoking. This at a time when teenage girls are leading the way for new smokers (drawn in by ads that imply smoking dampens appetite) and when Media Week named Budweiser 2001 Advertiser of the Year, saying that "if there was one campaign this year that cut through the increasingly dense media clutter and became a fixture in playgrounds, offices and bars around the country, it was the Budweiser series of ads." (The italics are Linn's.)

Linn is worried not only about what is happening on the playgrounds, but about what is not happening: she fears that children are forgetting how to play. The average child lives in a home with three televisions, three radios, a video game console and a computer. Two thirds of children between the ages of eight and 18 have televisions in their own bedrooms, as do over a quarter of children under the age of two. Where once Lego building blocks encouraged creativity, they now come in specific kits with instructions on building the item pictured on the cover.

Meanwhile, the television drones on during school hours as well as leisure time, thanks to Channel One. Linn quotes Joel Babbit, former president of Channel One, on the advertising clout of this network: "The advertiser gets kids who cannot go to the bathroom, cannot change the station, who cannot listen to their mother yell in the background, who cannot be playing Nintendo." No wonder school marketing enthusiast Ed Winter told Business Week, "Marketers have come to realize that all roads eventually lead to the schools."

And what of the trend in children's programming in which adults and parents come off as bumbling boobs, while children are portrayed as capable and cunning? The most competent adults children see may he Cap'n Crunch, Ronald McDonald and Lingerie Barbie.

Linn puts her hopes in real-life adults, who, unlike the adults in children's commercials, act intelligently on behalf of children. She ends her book with a list of steps for parents, policy makers and clergy. With the zeal of a reformer and the heart of a dreamer, she calls for turning off the television at home, providing better funding for public schools and public media, and enacting laws that forbid marketing to children altogether. Linn's dire summary: "It's not just that our kids are consuming. They are being consumed."

Not so, says Karen Sternheimer. She turns her critical eye on those who blame music, advertisers and television for children's problems. Studying the reaction to the Columbine High School shootings, this University of Southern California sociologist describes how Americans quickly traced the rampage to the lyrics and video of a song by the band Pearl Jam. While the courts have consistently rejected "the media made me do it" as a legal defense, the public seems to find it persuasive.

POSING THE OLD chicken-or-egg question, Sternheimer draws on voices that remind us that music provides a way to express feelings. As Hilary Rosen wrote in Billboard magazine: "You can try to ban music that expresses the views of the alienated and unhappy ... [but] you won't ban the angst or the anger." Rolling Stone editor Jann Wenner opined that targeting and censoring popular culture would "make the geeks even more isolated and humiliated," and argued that the real problem that needs to be addressed is the proliferation of guns.

Sternheimer worries that advertising, music and the media have become easy scapegoats in a culture that does not want to address more complicated issues. Arguing directly with Linn's claim that advertising is linked to youth obesity and eating disorders, Sternheimer points out that it's more likely that childhood obesity has risen in conjunction with adult obesity.