How Consumer Culture Controls Our Kids
How Consumer Culture Controls Our Kids

Author: Jennifer Hill

Publisher: Bloomsbury Publishing USA

Published: 2015-11-02

Total Pages: 283

ISBN-13: 1440834830

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This gripping book considers the history, techniques, and goals of child-targeted consumer campaigns and examines children's changing perceptions of what commodities they "need" to be valued and value themselves. In this critique of America's consumption-based society, author Jennifer Hill chronicles the impact of consumer culture on children—from the evolution of childhood play to a child's self-perception as a consumer to the consequences of this generation's repeated media exposure to violence. Hill proposes that corporations, eager to tap into a multibillion-dollar market, use the power of advertising and the media to mold children's thoughts and behaviors. The book features vignettes with teenagers explaining, in their own words, how advertising determines their needs, wants, and self-esteem. An in-depth analysis of this research reveals the influence of media on a young person's desire to conform, shows how broadcasted depictions of beauty distort the identities of children and teens, and uncovers corporate agendas for manipulating behavior in the younger generation. The work concludes with the position that corporations are shaping children to be efficient consumers but, in return, are harming their developing young minds and physical well-being.

How Consumer Culture Controls Our Kids
How Consumer Culture Controls Our Kids

Author: Jennifer Hill

Publisher: Bloomsbury Publishing USA

Published: 2015-11-02

Total Pages: 346

ISBN-13:

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This gripping book considers the history, techniques, and goals of child-targeted consumer campaigns and examines children's changing perceptions of what commodities they "need" to be valued and value themselves. In this critique of America's consumption-based society, author Jennifer Hill chronicles the impact of consumer culture on children—from the evolution of childhood play to a child's self-perception as a consumer to the consequences of this generation's repeated media exposure to violence. Hill proposes that corporations, eager to tap into a multibillion-dollar market, use the power of advertising and the media to mold children's thoughts and behaviors. The book features vignettes with teenagers explaining, in their own words, how advertising determines their needs, wants, and self-esteem. An in-depth analysis of this research reveals the influence of media on a young person's desire to conform, shows how broadcasted depictions of beauty distort the identities of children and teens, and uncovers corporate agendas for manipulating behavior in the younger generation. The work concludes with the position that corporations are shaping children to be efficient consumers but, in return, are harming their developing young minds and physical well-being.

The Material Child
The Material Child

Author: David Buckingham

Publisher: John Wiley & Sons

Published: 2013-04-26

Total Pages: 282

ISBN-13: 0745637442

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Children today are growing up in an increasingly commercialised world. But should we see them as victims of manipulative marketing, or as competent participants in consumer culture? The Material Child provides a comprehensive critical overview of debates about children’s changing engagement with the commercial market. It moves from broad overviews of the theory and history of children’s consumption to insightful case studies of key areas such as obesity, sexualisation, children’s broadcasting and education. In the process, it challenges much of the received wisdom about the effects of advertising and marketing, arguing for a more balanced account that locates children’s consumption within a broader analysis of social relationships, for example within the family and the peer group. While refuting the popular view of children as incompetent and vulnerable consumers that is adopted by many campaigners, it also rejects the easy celebration of consumption as an expression of children’s power and autonomy. Written by one of the leading international scholars in the field, The Material Child will be of interest to students, researchers and policy-makers, as well as parents, teachers and others who work directly with children.

Children and Consumer Culture in American Society
Children and Consumer Culture in American Society

Author: Lisa Jacobson

Publisher: Bloomsbury Publishing USA

Published: 2007-12-30

Total Pages: 217

ISBN-13: 0313015023

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Children play a crucial role in today's economy. According to some estimates, children spend or influence the spending of up to $500 billion annually. Journalists, sociologists, and media reformers often present mass marketing toward children as a recent fall from grace, but the roots of children's consumerism — and the anxieties over it — date back more than a century. Throughout the twentieth century, a wide variety of groups — including advertisers, retailers, parents, social reformers, child experts, public schools, and children themselves — helped to socialize children as consumers and struggled to define the proper boundaries of the market. The essays and documents in this volume illuminate the historical circumstances and cultural conflicts that helped to produce, shape, and legitimize children's consumerism. Focusing primarily on the period from the Gilded Age through the twentieth century, this book examines how and why children and adolescents acquired new economic roles as consumers, and how these new roles both reflected and produced dynamic changes in family life and the culture of capitalism. This volume also reveals how children and adolescents have used consumer goods to define personal identities and peer relationships — sometimes in opposition to marketers' expectations and parental intentions.

Born to Buy
Born to Buy

Author: Juliet B. Schor

Publisher: Simon and Schuster

Published: 2014-08-19

Total Pages: 251

ISBN-13: 1439130906

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Ads aimed at kids are virtually everywhere -- in classrooms and textbooks, on the Internet, even at slumber parties and the playground. Product placement and other innovations have introduced more subtle advertising to movies and television. Companies are enlisting children as guerrilla marketers, targeting their friends and families. Even trusted social institutions such as the Girl Scouts are teaming up with marketers. Drawing on her own survey research and unprecedented access to the advertising industry, New York Times bestselling author and leading cultural and economic authority Juliet Schor examines how a marketing effort of vast size, scope, and effectiveness has created "commercialized children." Schor, author of The Overworked American and The Overspent American, looks at the broad implications of this strategy. Sophisticated advertising strategies convince kids that products are necessary to their social survival. Ads affect not just what they want to buy, but who they think they are and how they feel about themselves. Based on long-term analysis, Schor reverses the conventional notion of causality: it's not just that problem kids become overly involved in the values of consumerism; it's that kids who are overly involved in the values of consumerism become problem kids. In this revelatory and crucial book, Schor also provides guidelines for parents and teachers. What is at stake is the emotional and social well-being of our children. Like Barbara Ehrenreich's Nickel and Dimed, Mary Pipher's Reviving Ophelia, and Malcolm Gladwell's The Tipping Point, Born to Buy is a major contribution to our understanding of a contemporary trend and its effects on the culture.

Understanding Children as Consumers
Understanding Children as Consumers

Author: David Marshall

Publisher: SAGE Publications

Published: 2010-04-30

Total Pages: 281

ISBN-13: 1847879276

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Looking at consumption from the child's perspective this book differs from the competition by uncovering what being a consumer means to the children themselves - from their perspective - giving them a voice in the debate

Purchasing Power
Purchasing Power

Author: Elizabeth M. Liew Siew Chin

Publisher: U of Minnesota Press

Published: 2001

Total Pages: 284

ISBN-13: 9780816635115

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What does it mean to be young, poor, and black in our consumer culture? Are black children "brand-crazed consumer addicts" willing to kill each other over a pair of the latest Nike Air Jordans or Barbie backpack? In this first in-depth account of the consumer lives of poor and working-class black children, Elizabeth Chin enters the world of children living in hardship in order to understand the ways they learn to manage living poor in a wealthy society. To move beyond the stereotypical images of black children obsessed with status symbols, Chin spent two years interviewing poor children in New Haven, Connecticut, about where and how they spend their money. An alternate image of the children emerges, one that puts practicality ahead of status in their purchasing decisions. On a twenty-dollar shopping spree with Chin, one boy has to choose between a walkie-talkie set and an X-Men figure. In one of the most painful moments of her research, Chin watches as Davy struggles with his decision. He finally takes the walkie-talkie set, a toy that might be shared with his younger brother. Through personal anecdotes and compelling stories ranging from topics such as Christmas and birthday gifts, shopping malls, Toys-R-Us, neighborhood convenience shops, school lunches, ethnically correct toys, and school supplies, Chin critically examines consumption as a medium through which social inequalities -- most notably of race, class, and gender -- are formed, experienced, imposed, and resisted. Along the way she acknowledges the profound constraints under which the poor and working class must struggle in their daily lives.

Doing Good Together
Doing Good Together

Author: Jenny Lynn Friedman

Publisher: Free Spirit Publishing

Published: 2010

Total Pages: 0

ISBN-13: 9781575423548

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MARCH is Community Social Services Awareness month! Is your organization looking for service project ideas? An increasing number of schools, workplaces, and organizations are doing family service projects as a way to make positive change in their communities. The 101 projects in Doing Good Together answer this growing demand for family service with hands-on projects focused on easing poverty, promoting literacy, supporting the troops, helping the environment, and more.

Rethinking Children as Consumers
Rethinking Children as Consumers

Author: Cyndy Hawkins

Publisher: Taylor & Francis

Published: 2016-09-13

Total Pages: 205

ISBN-13: 1317205871

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Children are significant consumers of services such as health, welfare, educational institutions and the environment. Alongside this, the marketization of childhood means that children are exposed to advertising and marketing through a wide range of media on a daily basis. Examining key debates on children’s power, status and citizenship issues, it considers the wider implications of how consumerism impacts on children‘s health, well-being and life chances. This timely book explores childhood and consumerism through four key strands: children as consumers of services; children as consumers of space; the link between citizenship and consumption; the influences of the marketization of childhood. Rethinking Children as Consumers will be essential reading for students, researchers, practitioners and policy makers who are interested in the topic of consumerism across early childhood, childhood, youth and society.

Sold Separately
Sold Separately

Author: Ellen Seiter

Publisher: Rutgers University Press

Published: 1993

Total Pages: 280

ISBN-13: 9780813521985

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"A radical approach to children's TV. . . . Seiter argues cogently that watching Saturday cartoons isn't a passive activity but a tool by which even the very young decode and learn about their culture, and develop creative imagination as well. Bolstered by social, political, developmental, and media research, Seiter ties middle-class aversion to children's TV and mass-market toys to an association with the 'uncontrollable consumerism'--and hence supposed moral failure--of working class members, women, and 'increasingly, children.' . . . Positive guidance for parents uncertain of the role of TV and TV toys in their children's lives."--Kirkus Reviews "Sold Separately is about television and toys, and the various roles that they play in the lives of children and parents. In particular, Seiter examines toy advertising, both in print media and on television; TV commercials; toy-based video for girls, with an in-depth look at "My Little Pony"; action TV for boys, using "Slimer and the Real Ghostbusters" as her case study; and the stores where toys are sold, both Toys "R" Us and the more upscale shops . . . contains many provocative observations."--Women's Review of Books "Ellen Seiter has a holiday message for yuppie parents who feel guilty shopping at Toys "R" Us. The mass-produced toys that dominate the chain's shelves need not be the enemy of every right-thinking parent. "Ghostbuster" figurines and "My Little Pony" can share the toy chest with those sensible wooden blocks."--Chronicle of Higher Education "Emphasizing problems of socioeconomic class, gender, and race stereotyping, this study acknowledges the usual parental complaints about toys like Barbie and G.I. Joe, but insists that they do play an important role in children's culture, especially for working class families. A thought-provoking analysis."--Wilson Library Journal "In this thought provoking study, Seiter reasonably urges parents and others to put aside their own tastes and to understand that children's consumer culture promotes solidarity and sociability among youngsters."--Publishers Weekly "An important book for those desiring an overview of the toy industry's impact on consumer culture . . . it] presents a fair and well-balanced view of the industry."--Kathleen M. Carson, associate editor, Playthings "A refreshing, thoughtful, and insightful investigation of an enormously important subject--consumer culture for kids. . . . I can't recommend it highly enough."--Janice Radway, Duke University, author of Reading the Romance