Has anyone heard about this book yet? It's fairly recent, by Juliet B. Schor, who also wrote The Overspent American and The Overworked American.
I am about 3/4 of the way through it and there is so much in it I am dying to talk to other parents about. I happen to be going through a period of being not thrilled with the latest purchases I've made for ds and frustrated with his daily requests for toys and his thinking that every time we go shopping or every time he goes to a birthday party or family get-together he may get a toy so starts agitating for one till it makes me want to scream. This is one area of parenting that I feel truly overwhelmed by and sometimes I feel as though dh and I are trying to hold back an unstoppable tide and I just don't have the strength to do it. And ds doesn't watch any TV at all!
Anyway, the book is about the commercialization of childhood and the negative effects of turning our children into consumers. Loads of creepy info on how companies do their extensive, amazingly sophisticated research on kids and develop their strategies on how to market stuff to kids. ANd how pernicious, how invasive, how incredibly subtle and devious it all is! Sure, the reaction to this can easily be "It's alarmist" and I can see myself having this reaction as well, but I have got to say this is one well-researched and backed up book.
So I'm throwing this out there in the hope that other people here have either read the book or will look into doing so. It's also a weirdly fascinating read, disgusting and compelling at the same time. For example, the marketers have an entire language referring to stuff they do and stuff about kids that I find both of the above like: "age compression" = marketing stuff originally for older kids to younger and younger kids i.e. why 6-year-olds adore Britney Spears; "kidspace" = the conceptual area of what kids think about and are concerned with; "future market" refers to exposing very young kids to images of stuff (mainly alcohol and cigarettes) so that they will be more likely to buy them when they're older, and so forth. Clearly, kids are a goldmine and this book is all about such mining.
I am about 3/4 of the way through it and there is so much in it I am dying to talk to other parents about. I happen to be going through a period of being not thrilled with the latest purchases I've made for ds and frustrated with his daily requests for toys and his thinking that every time we go shopping or every time he goes to a birthday party or family get-together he may get a toy so starts agitating for one till it makes me want to scream. This is one area of parenting that I feel truly overwhelmed by and sometimes I feel as though dh and I are trying to hold back an unstoppable tide and I just don't have the strength to do it. And ds doesn't watch any TV at all!
Anyway, the book is about the commercialization of childhood and the negative effects of turning our children into consumers. Loads of creepy info on how companies do their extensive, amazingly sophisticated research on kids and develop their strategies on how to market stuff to kids. ANd how pernicious, how invasive, how incredibly subtle and devious it all is! Sure, the reaction to this can easily be "It's alarmist" and I can see myself having this reaction as well, but I have got to say this is one well-researched and backed up book.
So I'm throwing this out there in the hope that other people here have either read the book or will look into doing so. It's also a weirdly fascinating read, disgusting and compelling at the same time. For example, the marketers have an entire language referring to stuff they do and stuff about kids that I find both of the above like: "age compression" = marketing stuff originally for older kids to younger and younger kids i.e. why 6-year-olds adore Britney Spears; "kidspace" = the conceptual area of what kids think about and are concerned with; "future market" refers to exposing very young kids to images of stuff (mainly alcohol and cigarettes) so that they will be more likely to buy them when they're older, and so forth. Clearly, kids are a goldmine and this book is all about such mining.
