Books in Brief
Consuming Kids: The Hostile Takeover of Childhood by Susan Linn (New Press, 287 pp., $24.95). My daughter will reach an important milestone on her next birthday, and I didn’t even know it before reading Consuming Kids. She’ll be putting “one foot in the adult world,” according to advertising executives who have spent millions to get her attention. She’ll be “on the cusp of a new phase in life,” and will be “looking for ways to express” a “new sense of individuality and independence.” She’ll be six.
Once upon a time, it would have gone without saying that six-year-olds require protection until they achieve emotional maturity, not to mention critical judgment. Ah, but that was before the little lambs started wielding some serious purchasing power–and businesses rushed to fleece them. “Comparing the advertising of two or three decades ago to the commercialism that permeates our children’s world is like comparing a BB gun to a smart bomb,” writes psychologist Susan Linn in her account of the exploitation of this new consumer group. Schools, toy manufacturers, and food companies have all gotten into the act. It’s a business that has more than doubled in the last decade to $15 billion a year, and advertisers seem to be getting their money’s worth. Today’s children–who, says Linn, spend almost forty hours a week with various media–are absorbing marketing messages before they can talk. According to a former CEO of Mattel, they start nagging for certain brands “almost as soon as their verbal skills set in.”
In fact, corporations willingly fuel the age-old power struggle between parents and children, coming up with products designed to appeal to–and reinforce–children’s drive for control. Some have even commissioned highly targeted studies that reveal how many nags a parent requires before caving in. One research consultant advises companies to invest in “relationship mining”: the study of how to get parents to buy things for their children that they really don’t want to buy.
The book’s strongest chapters are on marketing in schools; alcohol, tobacco, and food advertising; the media’s power to influence values; and the astounding levels of sex and violence found in children’s entertainment. Not all the book is as good. Much of Linn’s hand-wringing chapter on the First Amendment could have been painlessly edited out, as well as about half the references to childhood obesity being a national crisis. So, too, her repeated snide references to the “religious Right” and, indeed, anything remotely conservative. It was those mean old Republicans, you see, who deregulated children’s programming in 1984 and then, a decade later, slashed funding for PBS, forcing public television to prostitute itself to those eager to market Clifford sippy cups.
In the chapter about sex as commodity, Linn is careful to list her credentials as a supporter of abortion, sex education, etc.–all before describing pornographic song lyrics, videos (which feature sexual situations about ninety-three times an hour), and even Barbies (yes, Virginia, there is a Lingerie Barbie). Really, does one have to be a card-carrying member of the vast right-wing conspiracy to find a problem with a six-year-old watching R-rated movies on the cable television in her room? The book closes with various ways to “end the marketing maelstrom,” calling on policymakers to ban marketing to children (as other countries do) and increase funding for public schools, after-school programs, and, of course, PBS.
Linn asserts that “children are so assaulted by marketing that it has reached a point where parents can no longer cope with it alone.” But some of her suggestions make one wonder if the battle is already lost. Do parents really need to be told to remove televisions from children’s bedrooms? Apparently so. Over a quarter of children aged two and under have them. On average, children begin watching videos at six months and television at nine months. It’s probably safe to say that they’re not working the remote control by themselves.
–Susie Currie
