One of the most powerful books I’ve read since starting The Simple Dollar is Juliet Schor’s Born to Buy. The book discusses the tactics and impact of marketing consumer goods to young children, turning them into buyers at a very young age. I found the book so compelling that I eventually wrote a nineteen part series discussing the book in detail.

Recently, I came across Buy, Buy Baby by Susan Gregory Thomas, which seems to focus on a similar topic. How pervasive is marketing to small children? How much of an impact does it have on them as a budding consumer? What kind of long term effect does it have?

Even more so than Born to Buy, Buy, Buy Baby focuses specifically on marketing targeting infants and toddlers.

Learn Something New Every Day
The book opens by examining the marketing of “learning” toys, such as the products of LeapFrog. Many parents tend to happily buy such products because they believe that they foster children into learning something new every day. However, the evidence that such products actually bring about learning beyond a level that children would get from an ordinary environment is very thin. Many learning toys merely package together things that can be found inexpensively or for free elsewhere, promote them with a heavy dollop of parental guilt and desire for their children to be intelligent, and sell the items at an elevated price.

“There’s a New Mom in Town”
Another tactic that often attracts parents – particularly mothers – to particular products is the promotion of motherhood and other “relatable” mothers as product salespeople. Simply by showing a mother who “has it all” in the product pitch (usually meaning cute children and a happy family with a few relatable minor foibles), the product becomes simultaneously relatable and aspirational, which makes mothers like this powerful salespeople. This is a big reason for the huge connection between “mommy blogs” and marketing promotions. If you read many “mommy blogs,” you’ve probably noticed the huge number of products given away on them. That’s why – “mommy bloggers” make great spokespeople.

“It’s Like Preschool on TV”
The idea that school is a good thing is a deep cultural value in America. Not only does it provide the children with education, it also gives the parents the free time with which to work and create income for the family. Turning that very thing into a product makes great sense for marketers, and the television provides a great medium for this through videos like Baby Einstein and shows like Sesame Street. It gives the parents some time to do household tasks and “educates” the children. The problem with this is that much of the value of preschool comes from interaction with peers and with the teacher, something that’s impossible to do with a video. Even with interactive toys, the “interaction” is scripted and limited. It’s not really preschool on TV, no matter how it’s pitched.

A Vast and Uncontrolled Experiment
Even more disconcerting is the deep connection such programs tend to build with the onscreen characters and children, which is followed by the characters becoming pitchmen for everything from toys to toothbrushes. Children tend to relate with onscreen characters during the learning programs and build a positive relationship with that character, who seems to be heroic and/or loving and/or caring and/or funny. Then, when they interact with that character again, it tends to be in a commercial environment that’s tightly controlled, such as seeing Big Bird toothpaste on the grocery store shelf or Pokemon toys in their fast food restaurant. They want to continue that emotional connection – heroic and/or loving and/or caring and/or funny – but now the emotional connection they desire requires a purchase. Is it any wonder, really, that young children get very upset when their parents say “no” to buying an item depicting their favorite character? Often, it’s not the item they want. They want heroism, love, care, or laughter.

Elmo’s World
Continuing with that train of thought is the idea that a child’s interaction with a particular character (which represents some set of deep emotional connection) is becoming present in more and more forms. It’s not just the show and a toy. There’s clothing. There are ordinary products with the character on it (toothpaste or snacks, for example). There are games. There are books and magazines. There are live shows. The connection is available in many different facets of the child’s life, enabling that emotional connection to continue and, to some degree, deepen. If Elmo represents the fulfillment of some emotional need that your child has, then that same emotional connection (and need for fulfillment) will pop up again and again and again in more and more situations, usually connected to products. It’s not just true for Elmo, either – there are countlesss characters that show up in a diversity of media and consumer products.

The Princess Lifestyle
Such characters are sometimes even tuned to specific “lifestyles” that often have deep connections to product lines from other companies. In this chapter, Thomas focuses on Disney Princesses (which create an impression of a particular type of glamorous lifestyle) and Barbie (another particular flavor of glamorous lifestyle) and how these lines not only connect themselves to many other products that reinforce that lifestyle (princess shampoo!) but also help set the stage for products that the children will want as teenagers (jewelry, makeup, etc.) and even as adults.

Anything to Get Them to Read
Some people advocate using these types of deep emotional connections that the young foster with these characters as a tool to get them to read and to engage in other learning opportunities. If a book about your child’s favorite character convinces them to read, isn’t that a good thing? The problem is that the children often see such books as mere continuations of their relationship with the character, not as a compelling experience on its own. Thomas digs into this phenomenon and shows that such character-specific books often focus little on the literary or educational content and instead focus on protecting and furthering the brand, with hundred-page documents outlining every little detail about the marketed character and almost no attention paid to the plot or values in the book itself.

Developing Character in Preschool
Corporations have even taken this to the point by supplying large amounts of the type of reading and educational material described earlier in the book for free to preschools that are often starved for materials. The packages often include videos, books, and other materials for the kids that do include some degree of educational value but often strive to reinforce or build the connection to a particular character.

A Defense of “Nothing”
So, what can you do? The author’s general recommendations revolve around minimizing or eliminating emotional connections to characters. Minimize television watching – or eliminate it. Buy toys that are open-ended and not based on specific characters. Avoid products that depict such characters. You can’t do these things absolutely without being a hermit, but each choice you make is a step in the right direction.

Is Buy, Buy Baby Worth Reading?
For me, this book really differentiates itself from Born to Buy is that Buy, Buy Baby focuses on an even younger age group than Born to Buy. They’re both very thorough in their research and frightening in their implications and conclusions of how the emotions of young children are tinkered with for the purpose of altering the buying patterns of both them and their parents.

They’re both tremendous books that cover some similar ground. However, I think I’d recommend Born to Buy to parents of children that are already three or four years old (or older), while I’d probably suggest Buy, Buy Baby to the parents of younger children (or parents-to-be). Honestly, I’d probably give either one of them to thoughtful parents as a baby shower gift depending on which one I was able to easily find. They’re both tremendous books that happen to cover a similar topic area.

Check out additional reviews and notes of Buy, Buy Baby on Amazon.com.

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During this series, a lot of people wrote to me and asked why I was covering this book in such detail. One reader’s comment: “i get the point don’t expose kids to ads.” Saying that, though, is a really disturbing oversimplification of what’s being said here.

The point of this book is not to merely avoid exposing kids to ads. The point of this book is to show how pervasive marketing is in the lives of children. It’s not just television – it’s movies, video games, magazines, and so on. It’s about marketing to students in schools. It’s about even using children as marketers by having kids do the marketing work themselves, convincing their friends to try it and also to demand the product from their parents. Just shutting off the television isn’t enough.

I grew up with a sense that money was to be spent, not saved. If you had a windfall, the healthy response was to go buy something fun. In my house, we watched a lot of television – it was pretty much always on – and thus looking back I can see how the television repeatedly altered my views on things. Since it was perceived as the normal thing to spend money when you got it, and there were lots of messages floating around about the things a kid should want, I bought in big time.

The end result? I grew up and became a shopaholic and it nearly wrecked us. My story is one that a lot of people share, from the childhood of learning to want the things that were marketed to you to the early adulthood of spending like crazy to the crisis situation with tens of thousands of dollars in credit card debt.

The key is that first step. I have at least some control over the lessons that my children take in, right now. They learn from my choices and from the things I choose to teach them. If I put a high value on consumer culture, they will, too. If I leave the television on and am influenced by it, they will be, too. If I don’t teach them that much of what they hear about products is pure advertising, they’ll believe the advertising and come home wanting products.

This book woke me up to one of the biggest responsibilities I have as a parent – or even as a citizen. I’m raising children who are going to be productive members of society one day, and they’ll be making choices for themselves based in part on the things I’ve taught them and showed them over the years. What am I teaching them? What am I encouraging society to teach them? What will they learn? These questions go way beyond avoiding ads and into something much more fundamental about building them into self-reliant people who will make good financial decisions throughout their life.

I certainly hope I’m teaching them the right stuff.

Here’s a checklist of all of the entries about this book:
Introduction
The Changing World of Children’s Consumption
Playing Less and Shopping More
From Tony the Tiger to Slime Time Live
Nickelodeon and the Anti-Adult Bias
Pester Power
The Virus Unleashed
The Commercialization of Public Schools
Dissecting the Child Consumer
Inside the Child Brain
Habit Formation
Who’s Responsible: Parents or Advertisers?
How Consumer Culture Undermines Children’s Well Being
Patterns of Media Use
Consumer Involvement as an Undermining Force
Empowered or Seduced?
Decommercializing Childhood
The Invention of Modern Childhood

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The book closes with a very strong section that discusses the role that parents and local communities play in shaping the growing commercial identities of children. There’s also an interesting bit about how the definition of childhood has changed over time. Both are intriguing and worth discussing.

The Changing Meaning of Childhood
Schor offers a very good description of the development of the modern idea of childhood over time. In the far past, children once past the infant and toddler stage were largely treated as miniature adults, particularly when puberty arrived. A post-puberty child was considered to be a full adult – dressed like one, acted like one, and interacted with others like one. The separation of childhood into its own separate state, particularly one stretching past puberty, is a relatively modern human invention.

What does that mean? It means that the idea of protecting children is only a good idea in the short term. In the modern era, that boundary between adult in child is porous and becoming more so all the time. The real question is what’s coming through those pores? Is it material that values and respects people or demeans people? We can protect children from the “bad” stuff all we want, but profound change won’t occur until we start addressing these questions as a greater society. We’ll get there, but it will take time – there are profound cultural changes going on right now and the best thing we can do as individuals is to make these changes better for everyone rather than fighting them tooth and nail every step of the way.

Ten Things You Can Do
Over the last ten pages or so, Schor sprinkles a ton of suggestions for what parents can do in the home to minimize consumer culture influence. Many of these boil down to “spending more time together,” but they’re still excellent food for thought. Here are several of my favorites:

Eat together. A family meal is a perfect time to discuss things and bond more as a family. Establish it as a tradition.

Eat healthy food. Instead of just making an “easy” prepackaged meal (the end result of a clever marketing campaign), focus on making healthy and natural meals from scratch.

Try gardening. Gardening is an activity the whole family can participate in together, plus it drives right into the idea of eating healthier, natural food.

Turn off the television. Yes, that’s a pretty obvious theme, but it’s a good one. Replace TV night with game night or reading night.

Spend time in the outdoors away from urban areas. There’s no media interaction there, plus it’s incredibly healthy mentally and physically to get away on occasion.

Be open with your finances and consumer choices. If you can’t open the books, what are you hiding? You should be able to explain every choice and every bill to your child – not only will this educate your child, but it’ll keep you on track financially, too.

The next discussion, coming in two days, will be the final discussion and will wrap up the book.

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The final chapter of Born to Buy focuses on solutions, with the first part focusing in on solutions from a broad perspective, mostly calling for Congress to enact legislation.

Thus, this is the portion of the book I disagree with the most. I firmly believe that the best solutions start at home because, frankly, you can have a great deal of impact on one child, but it requires a huge amount of politial groundswell to even enact the simplest changes in terms of legislation. Not only that, I would actually oppose some of the stuff that Schor proposes here.

Let’s take a look.

Let’s Legislate Morality!
Here are a few of Schor’s suggestions, from pages 195 through 197:

Congress should pass a federal act mandating disclosure for all sponsored product placements in television, movies, books, radio, and the Internet.

Congress needs to address whether advertising to children is warranted at all.

Congress should also request a General Accounting Office or FTC report, similar to those that have been done on school commercialism and the marketing of movies and video games, which catalogues the full range of current marketing practices.

Congress should enact comprehensive legislation to restrict school commercialism.

I only agree with one of these four. Can you guess which one?

For anyone who’s been reading this blog for a while, it’s probably pretty clear that I’m only in favor of that last one. Children go to school for the purpose of being educated – their minds are opened by teachers who are supposed to be filling them with tools to navigate our complex world. When marketing starts being slipped in there, then you’re taking advantage of the teacher-student relationship and undermining the entire point of schooling.

What about the other three? Why would I oppose things like those? I’m largely indifferent to the first one, except that it would create costs for actually enforcing it – the FTC would have to hire people to make sure this was enforced and it would largely be ignored anyway, so it comes off as a waste of taxpayer money to me. The second one has a lot of problems, particularly in terms of restricting freedom of speech – when you start banning things and restricting freedoms, it’s easy for “ban creep” to occur until you’re blocking things that people should have access to. The third one is similar to the first one – a lot of money is spent on something that very few people will ever look at. By the time it’s compiled, marketing techniques will have evolved and all that research will be outdated at the taxpayer’s expense.

For the most part, I think it’s a waste of time to legislate things, especially on a national stage, that aren’t cut and dried – all such laws do is create more business for lawyers and eventually get overturned by a judge who can’t make a reasonable decision on such a sticky issue. For example, an advertising ban would be a giant restriction of freedom of speech, for example, but to only ban children’s advertising requires a law that defines a very unclear area that can’t be enforced well and will quickly be trampled over. The only legislative solutions here are far-reaching enough that anyone who values free speech would oppose it because of the other restrictions it would trigger.

Instead, the answers that are most useful are closer to home. If you want to ban advertising in schools, start in your local school district. Advocate for a ban on ads in schools coupled with a tax levy to help the schools recover the lost income. That’s one good way to start.

Next time, in the last section of the book, we’ll look at solutions that are closer to home.

The next discussion, coming in three days, will cover the last half of the final chapter, “Decommercializing Childhood,” starting on page 200 at the subheading “The Invention of Modern Childhood” and finishing out the book.

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This is the next to last chapter in the book, following the previous chapter which was clearly the peak of the book’s argument. Here, Schor addresses most of the arguments that the marketing industry puts up in their defense concerning marketing to children.

I actually found this chapter to be pretty thought provoking because in the end, it’s all about the moral accountability. It is extremely difficult to legislate “ethical” ads without basically banning all ads (and that’s never going to happen), so we’re left with a reliance on the moral accountability of the industry, and if you have a client demanding results or else your head will roll, it’s pretty easy to see how someone would bend the moral rules a bit to keep their job.

The Three Arguments of the Marketers

Schor basically breaks down the arguments in favor of child marketing into three pieces.

Ads and Products Help Children to Feel Powerful
On page 179, Schor states:

It says that kids need to feel independent and master their environments to feel in control of their parents. Lisa Morgan argues that “kids want to be in control in a world where they create their own rules … we always try to put them in situations where they … demonstrate mastery of a specific situation.” Gene del Vecchio contends that “kids have very little control over the world in which they live. Therefore, they love to gain any measure of control over their sphere of existence … Control touches a strong need that children have to be independent.”

I agree with this point in general, but I disagree with where marketers take it. Marketers argue that this need for control is fulfilled through things like the power to choose a particular product over another. I argue that this need for control can be fulfilled through free play, not through having your child choose what kind of prepackaged food to buy.

When I read this, I actually imagined Calvinball. For those unfamiliar, Calvinball is a game from the comic strip Calvin and Hobbes in which the young boy, Calvin, makes up the rules of this game as he goes along. The analogy is pretty clear – being able to make up the rules of Calvinball as he goes along lets him feel powerful over that game, giving him that sense of fulfillment that the quote above is talking about.

Go out in the yard and play Calvinball with your kids instead of letting them feel “power” by choosing between two products on a store shelf.

Ads Create Other Benefits
On page 181:

… advertising is justifiable because it creates other benefits, such as free television, better products, and economic growth and employment. Psychologically, these are the most powerful arguments because they reinforce the utter inevitability of advertising.

Schor breaks this argument down quite well, pointing out that advertising is actually paid for by consumers who pay a premium for a name brand – that premium pays for the ads and thus for the programs supported by the ads. Also, ad campaigns are expensive, and thus without an established product or a huge company behind a rollout, it’s hard to advertise a new product – this reduces competition and innovation.

Advertisements don’t carry any hidden benefits except for the bottom line of the advertiser.

It’s the Parent’s Fault!
On page 183:

Industry’s final line of defense is that parents always have the option of protecting their children from advertising. They can turn off the television and just say no. When parents let their children watch, they are giving tacit approval. Of course, the proliferation of marketing in schools and other public institutions undermines this claim, but it remains a mainstay in the industry’s arsenal of arguments.

This is easily their most compelling argument, and they’re right – letting children watch television is a choice that parents do control, and when they allow their children to watch television or absorb consumer culture, the parents are opening the door themselves and letting the marketers into the room.

This doesn’t justify marketers using a heavy arm to market to kids, of course, but parents do have the power to seriously restrict media access, and they help the marketers when they fail to exercise that power.

The next discussion, coming in two days, will cover the first half of the final chapter, “Decommercializing Childhood,” starting on page 189 and continuing until the subheading “The Invention of Modern Childhood” on page 200.

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Three days ago, we talked about how kids absorb a reasonable level of media and also generally have a good relationship with their parents. However, in both cases, there were children far out on the long tail – some kids absorbed a huge amount of television, for example, and some kids had a poor relationship with their parents.

What was unclear is whether these two sets were related, a question answered by Schor in the final part of the chapter.

A Strong Correlation Between Media Exposure and Well Being
Right off the bat, Schor confirms it on page 167 (my own emphasis added):

The [statistical] estimates provide strong support for our hypotheses. High consumer involvement is a significant cause of depression, anxiety, low self-esteem, and psychosomatic complaints. Psychologically healthy children will be made worse off if they become more enmeshed in the culture of getting and spending. Children with emotional problems will be helped if they disengage from the worlds that corporations are constructing for them. The effects operate in both directions and are symmetric.

Here it is in a nutshell, folks: there is a direct relationship between the time your kids spend watching television and playing video games and their emotional, psychological, social, and physical health. The more time they spend with media sources, the worse off they’ll be.

Obviously, this doesn’t apply to every child, but the correlation is very statistically significant. Schor spends a big part of this section focusing on the statistical evidence for this and it’s strong – p-values approaching .5 in some cases, for all of you statistical junkies. That’s a strong correlation.

A Strong Correlation Between Parental Involvement and Attitude and Well Being
Similarly, there’s a very strong correlation between parental involvement and the well-being of the child. From page 171:

The descriptive data show that the Boston children articulate extremely positive attitudes toward their primary parents. These attitudes may form a protective shield against the negative portrayals of parents in consumer culture and insulate these children from the kinds of conflicts found among the suburban kids. By contrast, although Doxley children are also positive about their parents, they are less so. They report more fighting with their parents about issues of access to consumer culture.

As an aside, throughout this chapter it was made rather clear that the Boston parents were more involved in the day-to-day life of their children than the Doxley parents. The Doxley parents seemed to be more focused on involving the kids in a mountain of extracurriculars, carting them off to soccer practice all the time, for example. That time lost to the extracurriculars was replacing time with the family, as the Doxley kids only had slightly less media use time than the Boston kids.

The statistics given by Schor are again quite strong, exhibiting a very strong relationship between parental involvement and attitude and children’s well being. There was almost a direct correlation here – the kids that spent more time with their parents did better, especially if their parents were genuinely involved and interested in their children.

What Parents Can Learn
The take-away message from this entire study can be summed up in one sentence: instead of letting your kid watch television or read magazines by themselves, take them out in the yard and play catch with them or play a board game with them or take them for a walk in the woods. That’s what being a parent is really about, and in this chapter, Schor statistically demonstrates that doing this will benefit your child. Not only that, I’ve found over and over again that quality time with your children can benefit you personally as well – it’s a win-win.

Just spend good quality time with your kids, do it regularly, and make that time come out of the time you’d spend watching television. You’ll all benefit from it.

The next discussion, coming in two days, will cover the entire ninth chapter, “Empowered or Seduced?”, starting on page 177.

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As was discussed last time, this portion of Born to Buy focuses in on a very detailed survey of ten to thirteen year old kids in Boston and one unnamed affluent suburb of Boston. In the middle portion of the chapter, the media use and psychological health of the children are laid out but not connected.

Media Use
In a nutshell, the children surveyed watched television for an average of about 10 hours a week (the median was in the 6 to 10 bracket, but a small fraction of the children watched huge amounts of television – 30+ hours a week) and consumed other media sources about the same amount of time, if not more (media sources include videos, movies, computer use, and video games). That means the average child in this survey was spending about three hours every single day either watching television (or a video), using a computer, or playing video games.

For me personally, depending on the content of the stuff that they’re doing and the involvement of the parents, I don’t think this is a overly ridiculous amount, but exceeding it can easily make it so, as can exposure to morally and ethically conflicting material without parental involvement.

Modern life is full of media sources. If you’re reading this, as a parent in the modern world, you’re going to be completely unable to totally isolate your child from them without being hypocritical (after all, given Schor’s definition, The Simple Dollar would be an example of media use). The key, at least from my eyes, is parental involvement.

Take, for example, this nugget from page 153:

We asked only one or two questions about what children were watching and found that 19 percent in Doxley and 57 percent in Boston watch MTV or VH1 regularly., and quite a few watch every day.

This is an example of parental involvement (or lack thereof) in media use. If you’re near a television, flip on MTV right now. I’d say there’s at least an 80% chance that whatever you see on there represents some sort of value that you’d not want to see in your children, and that value is being glorified. If your child watches that stuff without context, then your child is going to adopt those values as being the right ones to have.

Well Being
In terms of well being, most of the children were pretty well adjusted, too. In the study, the children were shown to have a low average level of depression but were regularly bored and sometimes had headaches (but within what’s considered a normal range). In other words, much like the spectrum of media use, most of the children were in a reasonable range, but there were a handful of outliers (15-20%) that showed serious signs of poor wellness.

Similarly, the surveys indicated a generally positive relationship with parents. Again, about 80% of the kids seemed to have a generally good relationship with their parents – trust, love, and at least some mutual respect. The concern, again, is with that 20% of outliers – the ones who fight with their parents over and over again.

It’s easy to conclude from these two studies that there isn’t a well-being problem in children today, and for the most part that’s correct. The majority of kids today are well-adjusted and at least reasonably healthy. The concern, though, is with those outliers – what’s causing them to be out there on the tip? Even more worrisome, is there a connection between media use and personal and emotional problems? This data set is a perfect place to look – it seems to be a pretty normal sampling of kids with lots of data on these issues. Are they really connected? We’ll look at that next time.

The next discussion, coming in three days, will cover the final portion of the eighth chapter, “How Consumer Culture Undermines Children’s Well Being,” starting on page 167 at the subheading “Statistical Results: Consumer Involvement Undermines Children’s Well-Being” and finishing out the chapter to page 176.

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If the rest of the book wasn’t troubling enough, this chapter basically took it over the line. After reading it, I wanted to march downstairs, toss out every toy with a licensed character on it, and pitch the television out in the dumpster.

Chapter eight of Born to Buy describes the results of an extensive survey on the connections between children, media, consumer culture, and physical, emotional, and psychological well-being. The results are pretty disheartening, to say the least – there’s a direct correlation between media exposure and obesity, media exposure and antisocial behavior, media exposure and violent behavior, and media exposure and mental health issues.

Needless to say, this chapter was very intense for me. There were many specific aspects described here that reminded me of my childhood in many different ways, and I attribute most of those remembered experiences to setting the groundwork for my own rampant consumerism and subsequent financial meltdown. Let’s dig in to some of the more interesting – and troubling – specifics.

A Look at Some Specific Results from the Survey
As Schor describes on page 144:

The Survey on Children, Media, and Consumer Culture has now been taken by 300 children between the ages of ten and thirteen, in and around Boston, Massachusetts. These children come from varied socioeconomic and racial backgrounds, and span the spectrum from avid spenders and TV watchers to kids who are mostly isolated from commercial culture. Three hundred may sound like a small number in comparison to national polls, which typically start at a thousand, but within the psychological literature that are most closely related to this study, 300 children is actually a large sample size. Most important, it’s far bigger than is needed to establish statistical reliability and confidence in the findings.

In other words, this data holds up to scientific rigor. I went through a few of the references and Schor’s survey here is spot-on – it’s good science.

So what kinds of questions and answers were given? Schor provides a long list of questions and responses on pages 149 to 151. One result, however, really surprised me: 88.0% of surveyed children either agree or strongly agree that when they go somewhere special, they usually like to buy something.

In other words, a special event revolves around the acquisition of material goods for more than seven out of eight children. Somehow, that makes me really sad inside.

Another aspect of the survey I found disturbing is that a large portion of the children consistently believed that the brand of a product was directly connected to the quality of it – perception above reality. These are children aged ten to thirteen years old, and the majority of them are already convinced that two identical tee shirts can be distinguished in terms of quality if one of them says abercrombie and fitch on it.

The pervasive consumer culture is real, and it is altering how children perceive the world. The next piece of the chapter looks at the effects of that alteration.

The next discussion, coming in two days, will cover the next portion of the eighth chapter, “How Consumer Culture Undermines Children’s Well Being,” starting on page 153 at the subheading “Patterns of Media Use” and continuing until the subheading “Statistical Result: Consumer Involvement Undermines Children’s Well-Being” on page 167.

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I’ll be frank: I feel that the responsibility for consumer education falls squarely on the shoulders of parents. Parents are the ones that make the choice to turn on the television and allow their children to watch it. Parents are the ones that allow their children to drive purchasing decisions. Parents are the primary educators of their children. Most important, parents are the ones making food choices, and they’re the ones choosing to put prepackaged foods or fresh foods on the table. Add those up and it’s pretty clear to me that marketing is like a never-ending flow of water – but parents are the tap, able to slow down or turn off the flow as desired. You’re a parent, you’re responsible.

I’m a parent of two kids and I know quite well that this is a difficult stance to take. It’s really easy to get irate at marketers and blame them for creating clever packaging. I’ve watched my son nearly bounce off the wall for specific treats already – and I’m aware that the biggest part of that is clever methods by marketers. Seriously, what child wouldn’t want smiling, cheese-flavored fish crackers in a brightly colored bag? The marketers make it tough – they make the crackers out of whole grain and the nutrition facts on the package indicate that they aren’t entirely unhealthy…

And that’s where the rubber meets the road. I’m a parent. I’m the one making that purchasing decision. Beyond that, my son is sitting there taking cues from me – parents are the first role models that a child has, not the marketers. It’s up to me to make the right decision – all marketers do is make that right decision a little bit tougher.

Schor’s Counterargument
Schor makes a strong counterargument to this case on page 130:

A second industry theme is that parents can “just say no.” Paul Kurnit takes the view that “if you don’t want your child to eat pre-sweetened cereals, don’t buy them. If you don’t want your child to eat at McDonald’s, don’t take your child to McDonald’s. I mean, on some level it is truly that simple.” [Child marketer Amanda] Carlson concurs: “They [the parents] should set the guidelines. They should set precedents. They should be good examples, which they’re not, in terms of how to eat healthfully.”

A careful look at industry practices suggests things aren’t as simple as Kurnit and others claim. The soft drink companies have demanded exclusive access in schools. The chains dominate highway rest stops, airports, malls, and other public places, so fast or junk food is usually all that’s available. Agriculture and food lobbies have pushed through food disparagement laws in twelve states where they’re politically powerful. (These laws make certain statements about food products illegal.)

The argument that Schor is making is that governments have given the food industry unfair advantage over consumers, and I do agree that these moves do make it harder for parents to make good choices.

But the answers are out there and they’re not really very hard to follow, either. In Michael Pollan’s excellent book on modern eating, In Defense of Food (which I discussed a while back), he basically boils down everything a parent needs to know about a healthy modern diet into just seven words: Eat food. Not too much. Mostly plants.

Obviously, a bit of clarification is needed here – by “food,” he means not prepackaged stuff, but as much fresh stuff as you can get into the diet. Stick to the fresh produce section and the meat counter at your local grocery – that’s where the vast majority of your grocery shopping should be.

What about the convenience situations, like when you’re on a road trip and the only easy options are fast foods? That’s easy, too – plan in advance and pack a “road picnic.” It takes about ten minutes and enables you to stop off at a nice park to eat a meal instead of at Mickey D’s. If you just want to cure the munchies, pack a bag of baby carrots or a 100% juice box instead of an order of fries and a giant Slurpee.

What about emotional contradictions, with things like GoGurt? On page 131:

Carlson explained that the marketers are “using words like health … wholesome. Teddy Grahams are probably wholesome … You have the goodness of graham … There’s definitely a halo. I mean, parents will look at Lucky Charms and say, ‘Well, it’s oats.’ They look at Go-gurt that has twelve grams of sugar and say, ‘Well, it’s yogurt. It’s got that bacteria in it that’s good for you.’” Taking advantage of these emotional contradictions has contributed to a pervasive loosening of parental rules around food. Faced with the barrage of food advertisement, too few parents have been able to hold their ground.

When I read this, I don’t blame the barrage of food advertisement, I blame the inability of a parent to walk down the yogurt aisle and compare the nutrition facts label between several kinds of yogurt and make the choice that’s best for their kids. Reading, understanding, and knowing how to use a nutrition facts label is vital for any parent in the modern world – if you can’t do that or are unwilling to, you’re shortchanging your child.

Sure, there are obstacles, but the ultimate responsibility is up to the parent.

The next discussion, coming in two days, will cover the first portion of the eighth chapter, “How Consumer Culture Undermines Children’s Well Being,” starting on page 140 and continuing until the subheading “Patterns of Media Use” on page 153.

The post Born to Buy: Who’s Responsible, Parents or Advertisers? appeared first on The Simple Dollar.

When Sunny Delight first came on the market in our area in about 1989, my best friend at the time became borderline obsessed with the stuff. I personally thought it was awful – it tasted like a mix of stale orange juice and pure Karo syrup, but my pal would regularly choose it over orange juice, even bringing a jug of it with him when he came over to our house because it was so much “better” than orange juice.

At the time, I just sort of nodded my head and would occasionally drink some of it, at one point even convincing my mother that I liked the stuff, resulting in her buying it a few times when it was on sale. Eventually, though, she got the hint: I simply didn’t drink the stuff unless my friends were around.

Was it marketing, or did my friend really like Sunny D? When I read through this part of Born to Buy, I couldn’t help but wonder.

Kids Versus Adults

From page 122:

Themes of kid empowerment and antiadultism are used to sell ostensibly mundane items such as snacks and cereal. [Food advertiser Amanda] Carlson described the agency’s approach for one sugary snack: “It’s empowering because it’s a snack that’s really very kid-proprietary, it’s not for adults … sometimes it’s licensed so it has shapes that only kids would like. There’s also an element of separation in there because it separates me from you: This is my snack. It’s a little irreverent. It’s something your mom might not want you eating, so that gives you power.”

When I first read this book, shortly after the birth of my first child, this section didn’t really make much sense to me. Sure, I had memories of childhood where I did things with my cousins and with my friends that were very much kid-oriented – we played with toys, had an old beat-up shed as a “clubhouse,” and so on. What I didn’t really remember was how that extended to food.

Already, with my son just two years old, I see it. Just last night, we had homemade pizza, and as it was being assembled, I realized that at least part of the ingredient selection for the pizza was due to my son’s preferences. He loves black olives, far more than his mother does, so I moved the black olives around so that a little more than half the pizza was coated in them (I like them, too). On the other hand, he doesn’t like mushrooms, so I moved the mushrooms around to only cover part of the pizza (I like them, so they covered part of the “black olive” section). In effect, it wound up almost being three pizzas in one – one piece with light black olives, one piece with heavy black olives, and another piece with heavy black olives and mushrooms.

My son was immediately able to identify which portion of the pizza was his – lots of “tires” (as he calls black olives) and no “mushy rooms” (as he calls mushrooms). It was a distinct portion just for him – different than what mom and dad were eating. I think this distinctiveness was part of the appeal – it’s a sign of independence and freedom.

Right now, the bridge hasn’t been made to food marketing, but it’s easy to see how it would be. “This is a pizza for kids!” it would say, and it would show off his favorite ingredients and probably come with a toy car and a premium price. It offers that same sense of independence and distinctiveness – natural things that growing children strive for.

No wonder kids want junk food that’s marketed to them. It tugs on their natural developmental tendencies.

Food as Addiction
On page 125, Schor makes a great case that the marketing of junk food to kids often uses adult behavior as a model, but transforms it into something palatable for kids:

If the idea of food as drugs sounds far-fetched, consider the findings of Wynne Tyree, director of research at JustKid, Inc.: “Kids say they use sugar like adults use coffee – to give them a boost. Since coffee isn’t allowed, and they have no other means to ‘get them going’ or ‘give them energy,’ they use soda, chocolate, candy, and sugary fruit drinks. It gives them the jolts they say they need throughout the day.”

In other words, some of the marketing relies on another natural aspect of childhood development – emulative play. Kids often pretend to be adults – think of a little girl taking care of her doll. Now, imagine a kid observing their zombie-like parent stumbling into the kitchen in the morning, eager to get their fix of coffee to help them get started.

It’s a behavior that kids are going to emulate – when they feel a natural energy lag, they’ll do what their parents do. They’ll find something that will pep them up, and marketers are quite happy to provide them with a boost in the form of a really sugary soda or an energy drink. Why do you think many soda ads and energy drink ads depict people burning a lot of energy in a very loud fashion?

I’m not condemning adults drinking coffee – I don’t drink any, but my wife often does. I am saying, though, that it makes sense that children would want to emulate it and, from there, marketers would take advantage of this natural emulation that children perform.

These examples have one thing in common: they take advantage of natural child development. Almost all children exhibit a certain set of natural behaviors – it’s part of the development of their mind as they grow. Sure enough, marketers are on board each step of the way.

What can you do to help? Be a model parent. Eat healthy foods so that when your kids emulate you, they eat healthy, too. Don’t exhibit substance addictions unless you’re fine with your children emulating it. They look to you for many of their cues – don’t give them bad ones.

The next discussion, coming in three days, will cover the latter half of the seventh chapter, “Habit Formation,” starting on page 130 at the subheading “Who’s Responsible: Parents or Advertisers?” and finishing out the rest of the chapter.

The post Born to Buy: Habit Formation appeared first on The Simple Dollar.

Most of this section covers the nuts and bolts of how companies engage in research when it comes to children and, quite frankly, most of it comes down to money. Many of the more intense research programs pay the children (or parents of the children) when they “volunteer” to participate in a focus group or another marketing research program.

I found two quite interesting pieces in this section.

Is Marketing Research Child Labor?
On page 115, Schor mentions:

Watching the bedraggled crowd at one focus group site as the evening (a school night) wore on, I wondered why this phenomenon has stayed out of public view. We don’t let eleven year olds staff fast food joints at 8:30 on weeknights. Why hasn’t there been any discussion of their work at the local focus group facility?

I think I can actually answer that question. It’s because information work – white collar work – is perceived differently than labor. In other words, work in a focus group is seen as existing under different rules than work in a fast food restaurant.

You can see it quite often in the adult world, where IT workers are required to have their cell phones on at all times. On the other hand, factory workers clock out and completely forget about their workplace. Businessmen are chained to their Blackberries, but waitresses go off duty and forget about the restaurant. Construction workers leave their cranes behind at the end of the day – but other workers come home with a briefcase or a laptop in hand.

Unfair labor laws exist all over the place for blue collar jobs, but not for white collar jobs. Why is this? In the past, blue collar jobs were the ones that could be exploited for profit, as white collar jobs merely existed to manage the work of blue collar jobs.

In the information economy, though, white collar workers are now doing much of the actual productive work, but the perception that white collar jobs don’t demand any labor protections still exists.

It’s this same perception that allows children to be at the focus group until very late, earning their pay for being in the marketing program, but they’re not allowed to flip burgers at the restaurant.

An interesting double standard, isn’t it?

Childhood Friendships for Fun and Profit!
Another interesting aspect of all of this pops up on page 116:

I encountered other troubling aspects of the research process, such as the use of one child to recruit others. In these cases, full disclosure to both children and parents is much harder to ensure. The research cannot be certain about how a situation is being described and the preconceptions friends are coming with. The recruiting child also has a financial incentive to get others to participate, which raises the potential for exploitation.

This sounds an awful lot like multi-level marketing to me – Amway/Quixtar for kids, in other words, where people make income at least in part by recruiting others into the system. The only catch here is that it’s kids effectively doing it to other kids – they’re convincing playground chums to sign up in order to make profit for themselves.

It’s hard enough for adults to distinguish social marketing techniques – have you ever been seduced by a salesman into buying a product, for example, or witnessed it happening? It’s even worse when you introduce such factors to kids who are at least as prone to social acceptance and don’t have the years of life experience needed to build up a good filter against such marketing.

There are times when I genuinely feel uncomfortable about the issues I face raising my kids today.

The next discussion, coming in two days, will cover the first half of the seventh chapter, “Habit Formation,” starting on page 119 and ending after page 129 at the subheading “Who’s Responsible: Parents or Advertisers?”.

The post Born to Buy: Inside the Child Brain appeared first on The Simple Dollar.

I’m reminded of an experience I had interacting with a marketer in college who was apparently doing some test marketing on those college credit card booths. I was walking by such a booth and was basically eyeing it from a distance away before I walked by. A marketing guy ran up to me and asked why I didn’t stop and I gave him several reasons which he wrote down.

I didn’t really think about it at the time, but later when I reflected, I realized I had basically just told him how to make this credit card offer more juicy for college students – and I felt sort of used and rather idiotic.

This experience floated through my mind when I read through much of this section.

Where Good Ideas Come From
Marketers have gotten very good at harnessing children’s creativity. The chapter opens with a great example of this, on page 99:

Picture the following scene: Caitlin, a five-year-old girl, and Mary Prescott, a thirty-something woman with a video camera, are sitting on the floor of Caitlin’s bedroom. Caitlin’s mother is in the kitchen, because Mary has explained that for this project, she needs private time with Caitlin. They’re talking about baths and what Caitlin does when she takes one. The client, a health and beauty aids company with a bubble bath product, wants to explore Caitlin’s feelings about bath time and learn what she actually does while she’s bathing. After some talk, caitlin leads Prescott and her camera into the bathroom, where Mary spies a shelf full of empty shampoo and bubble bath bottles. She learns that Caitlin plays with them during her bath, which leads to the consumer insight that kids turn soap containers into toys. Prescott explains that had she done the research in a focus group facility or even in the kitchen, she wouldn’t have happened upon the empty containers. And they were the key finding of the study.

Many of you were probably wondering why Mary was even in the home in the first place; it’s because Caitlin’s family was paid an unspecified but apparently sizable amount of money for such intrusive research.

Anyway, to the point: this pretty much uncovers where great marketing ideas come from. My son has a soap container in the bathtub that’s in the shape of a car, and it wasn’t very long ago at all that I was reflecting on how intelligent that idea was. My son plays with it in every bath he takes and has a lot of fun having the car drive off the bath ledge and splash into the water.

But, on another level, I recognize that the shape of the bottle is part of why I chose to buy that particular variant of the soap (the same soap, a brand we always use, comes in “normal” bottles, too). I paid a slight premium for the bottle because it was easy to think of my son having fun in the tub with it – and likely we’ll keep the bottle when it’s empty or else refill it with more soap.

Was this a good choice? You could really argue both ways about it, but we’d all probably agree that the real winner is the soap company. Because they came up with a clever idea for a bottle shape – likely as a direct result of Prescott’s study – they likely made a bit more profit on that bottle than a normal one. Even if they just made another $0.10 because of the bottle, if 500,000 parents make the same choice I do over the next year, that’s $50,000 in the corporate coffers for likely just a few days’ worth of research work.

What’s happening here is effectively survival of the fittest. Companies are continually making products that are more attractive to consumers – and they evolve over time. Quite frankly, the items on our grocery shelf today are far more attractive, interesting, and useful than the items of thirty years ago, and that makes the actual decisions that need to be made while shopping that much more difficult. With research like this, it’s not surprising at all that new ideas are being pumped out all the time – they just go straight to the source of the creative ideas. In this case, they mined Caitlin’s creativity – she likes playing with the bottles in the bathtub, and a few years later, it results in a compelling product that my son’s playing with in the bathtub.

Marketing is a very strong force, indeed.

Why Kids Participate in Marketing Studies
A while back, I talked about the marketing for P-O-X, a game designed and marketed to pre-teen boys in which the “alpha boys” were given the product for free in a marketing effort and participated in a whole lot of focus group testing. When I thought about this, I realized that the draw of free stuff encouraged the kids to participate, but I really couldn’t help but wonder if there wasn’t more to it. I know that when I was a kid, I would not have spent days and days in focus group meetings just to get a free toy. So why would kids participate?

Schor has a great answer on page 108:

But Sharon Fogg, Laura Groppe, and others are adamant that kids participate because they are thrilled to have someone who is actually listening to them and acting on their advice. These marketers portray a world in which parents and teachers are not paying attention or empowering kids.

That makes complete sense. Participating in a focus group or even one-on-one with a marketer can feel really empowering on some level, even for an adult – your comments are being used to guide the decisions of a large corporation. In the eyes of a kid? That feels like an amazing amount of power.

Since it’s obvious why marketers would want input from their target audience and it’s pretty clear why the kids would want to participate, this seems like a very natural marketing technique.

The question is would you encourage or allow your child to participate in a marketing panel? I actually would – and I’d use it to have a lot of follow-up conversation with my child. Why? Such a panel is a perfect time for a kid to comprehend how marketing works.

Would you let your child participate in such a forum? Why or why not? Would you let a marketer in your home for research like what was described above with Mary and Caitlin? I think there’s some interesting personal boundary lines here.

The next discussion, coming in two days, will cover the latter half of the sixth chapter, “Dissecting the Child Consumer,” starting on page 109 “Inside the Child Brain” and ending on page 118.

The post Born to Buy: Dissecting the Child Consumer appeared first on The Simple Dollar.

A significant portion of this chapter has to do with Channel One, which is basically a ten-minute “news” program delivered directly to schools – coupled with two minutes of commercials, of course. Schools who participated were given a lot of equipment, along with the promise of delivering compelling content to the students in exchange for merely guaranteeing that a certain number of students watched each day.

For a while in junior high, we were jammed into a classroom and Channel One was turned on for all of us to enjoy. Most of the students slept through the news portions, but I do remember an ad for Pepsi that was very loud – much louder than the rest of the programming – and it triggered some of the slumbering students to wake up and pay attention to what was going on.

At the time, I was basically indifferent to all of this. I told my teacher that I thought it was dumb, and he basically agreed but said that if it encouraged kids to think about current events, then it was worthwhile – and I pretty much bought that idea.

Now I’m not so sure, and Schor makes a very good case against it in this section, along with other in-school marketing techniques.

Does Marketing in Schools Matter?
On page 86, Schor states:

Studies comparing Channel One to non-Channel One schools show that the program affects kids’ attitudes. A study of two Michigan high schools found that Channel One students are more likely to agree that “a nice car is more important than school,” that “designer labels make a difference,” and that “wealthier people are happier than the poor.” Channel One students have also been reported to feel that the products advertised are good for them, because they’re being shown in the classroom.

In other words, students by default trust what’s presented to them in the classroom.

It’s easy to talk about educating children to guard against this kind of stuff. It’s also easy to blame school administrators and teachers for letting this in the classroom. Frankly, though, the blame for things like this falls on society in general. Every time we vote down a proposition to fund schools, we push them a little closer to things like Channel One. Every time we don’t get involved and pressure our politicians to adequately fund schools, we force school administrators to make tough choices about what compromises have to be made. As Schor says on page 90, “the main impetus for commercialization is the chronic underfunding of schools.”

If you really want to make a difference with things like this, get politically involved. Send letters to your senators and your representative in Congress and every person representing you in the state legislature. Look for political action committees to join to help get more funding for schools. Don’t just sit there and complain about it if it bothers you – do something. What’s my “something”? I’m getting involved with my district’s school board.

Is private school the answer for my child? Perhaps. It’s quite expensive, but it does have a lot of benefits. No matter what you choose, though, the answer is to be involved – and not just in your child. Look for ways to change the larger issues as well.

Creative Thinking
I will give the marketers credit for creativity. Most of this chapter lists various ways marketers have found their ways into classrooms. Here are three that I was particularly impressed by.

General Mills paid Minnesota teachers $250 each to paint ads for Reese’s Puffs cereal on their cars and instructed them to place the cars next to where the school buses parked.

[...] word problems in a McGraw-Hill math textbook that included Nike, Gatorade, Topps trading cards, and Disneyland as examples.

In 2001, NetworkNext announced 500 contracts with schools to show ads in return for a mobile computer unit to use for PowerPoint and other presentations. When the teacher shows a slide, banner ads for Rock Star video games, Wal-Mart, Visa Buxx cards, and Coty products appear on the screen.

In other words, marketers use every technique you can imagine to infiltrate the classroom, an area where in theory a student is supposed to trust the teacher and have their mind open to absorbing new ideas. It’s not just limited to stuff like Channel One – it’s in every aspect of schools.

When I was in school, our school was given a mountain of paper book covers that depicted ads for various companies. Not only that, there was a stipend given to pay some student workers to cover all of the textbooks for the school in these covers. Since these covers could reduce actual wear and tear on the books and extend their life a year or two at no cost to the school, our school obviously went for it for at least one year. Thus, every time we sat down to learn and looked down at the cover of our book, we saw ads.

It goes on and on and on – and the root cause of it is schools that don’t have enough money to do the things they want to do. So they find other methods – and marketers are happy to help.

Curriculum Editing
Even more interesting is the idea that companies and marketers are actually developing teaching materials for the classrooms, providing teachers with the curriculum and materials needed to teach a topic. A pair of great examples comes from Schor on page 93:

A Kellogg’s breakfast curriculum presents fat content as the only thing to worry about when choosing breakfast food. There is no mention of sugar or salt in Kellogg’s cereals. A first grade reading curriculum has the kids start out by recognizing logos from K-Mart, Pizza Hut, M&M’s, Jell-O, and Target.

These are just two of the examples from the book, but they get the idea across loud and clear: marketers present ready-made materials for teachers to use in the classroom that slip in some corporate marketing, again taking deep advantage of the level of classroom intellectual openness and trust.

Most good teachers would see right through this stuff and not present it, but let’s be frank – there are a lot of teachers out there that would be happy to have a curriculum already made for them and would justify such marketing stuff as “consumer education.”

It again comes down to one thing: be involved. And by that, don’t just be directly involved in your children’s education. Step up to the plate and make an effort to seek societal change, because when students are engaged in brand marketing at such a young age and in a trusted environment like a classroom, the next obvious step is for them to become consumers, continuing the trend of overspending and self-confidence that relies on the stuff you have, not on the person you are.

The next discussion, coming in three days, will cover the first half of the sixth chapter, “Dissecting the Child Consumer,” starting on page 99 and ending on page 108 at the subheading “Inside the Child Brain.”

The post Born to Buy: The Commercialization of Public Schools appeared first on The Simple Dollar.

This chapter basically dissects how exactly a children’s fad is marketed – in this case, a potential fad in the making called POX that was doomed by very bad timing. Thus, I found it worthwhile during this section to think about fads when I was a kid – and I couldn’t help but think about Wacky Wall Walkers for some reason.

For those unaware, Wacky Wall Walkers were a short-lived fad circa 1983. They were simply sticky seven-legged things that looked like an octopus, but if you chucked them at a smooth wall (like glass or some wallpaper), they’d seemingly “walk” down them, meaning they’d slowly fall down the surface to the floor.

The piece of the puzzle I remember was racing down the cereal aisle with my brother, each of us seeking to grab a box of cereal that contained one of these precious toys. They were only in Kellogg’s cereals, and I recall them not being in every box, so we’d dig through the boxes looking for ones that indicated that they contained a Wall Walker.

What I didn’t fully realize then is how ingenious this really was for Kellogg’s. These Wall Walkers couldn’t have cost Kellogg’s more than a nickel wholesale, but adding that nickel’s worth of an item to the cereal and combining it with a great advertisement campaign made the Wall Walker – and thus the cereal – something that I had to have.

Alpha Kids
Schor, starting on page 71, discusses an interesting branch of marketing to children (with my own bolding for emphasis):

The plan called for identifying what are known as alpha kids, or as Matt Schneider, president of Target Productions, the company that coordinated the operations for this campaign, called them, alpha pups. These are the coolest, most socially dominant, trendsettingest kids in the community. In this case, the kids were found through an elaborate, labor-intensive process of interviewing thousands of kids on playgrounds, in arcades, and at other kidspaces, and asking, “Who’s the coolest kid you know?” until they got to the one that said “Me!” [...] They had identified 1,527 boys who fit the criterion of ultimate cool and were willing to participate in the program. They boys attended an “indoctrination” where they watched a video about POX, became official “secret agents,” and accepted a secret mission and set of instructions on how to “infect” ten friends. Then they were given a backpack filled with tattoos, shirts, and hats, plus ten POX units, which they had to pass along to a a list of friends whose names would then be provided to the company. In return for their cooperation, each kid received $30.

You can read more about the POX marketing effort here.

In a nutshell, their marketing plan went far beyond simply selling on television – they actually went into the neighborhoods, identified the “cool” kids, and then bribed those kids to play with and talk about POX. They gave the kids each ten free units (to give to all of their friends) and $30 cash – basically, a bribe. It’s pretty easy to see how that kid would then go home and hand out the toys to the people in his inner circle – the “cool kids” – and then they would use their possession of these items as a symbolic badge of something the cool kids have, thus pressuring the other kids to have them, too.

In other words, the marketing here is directly tied into a child’s need for social acceptance. The “cool kids” have these toys, so they’ll want one too – except the cool kids were given the toys and basically paid to play with them.

For me, this takes marketing to a whole new level, one that I can’t really control as a parent. When a child’s interaction with his peers is interfered with by marketing, it becomes really clear to me that it’s important to equip your children with some good consumer skills and social skills – and equip them young – so that they see right through this kind of thing. It’s all about the education.

One of the quotes that has deeply driven me in my life comes from Dr. Martin Luther King Jr.:

I have a dream that my four little children will one day live in a nation where they will not be judged by the color of their skin, but by the content of their character.

A person’s color, gender, religion, or family background is not the important part about them. Neither are the things that they have. This is true on the playground and in our daily life when we think about trying to keep up with the Joneses.

It’s only the content of the character that really counts, and that’s the one lesson I hope I can teach my kids, more than anything else. If you really get that, then the alpha kid influence really doesn’t mean that much at all – it doesn’t matter what stuff a person has, it matters what kind of character that person has.

Cashing in on Friendship
It goes beyond the “alpha kids,” too. From page 77:

An even more serious consequence is the corruption of friendship itself. Marketers are teaching kids to view their friends as a lucrative resource they can exploit to gain products or money. They even counsel kids to be “slick” with their friends.

A bit of background: this snippet is actually discussing a specific instance of this very marketing technique, called Girls Intelligence Agency. GIA basically gives products to girls, then instructs them to have slumber parties where they distribute the product to the other people there and then solicits reactions from them. In other words, the girls participating in GIA have become paid marketers to their friends, whether they directly realize it or not.

One reaction a person might take from this is a desire to simply withdraw from all of it. I know I feel kind of strange thinking of my daughter going to a friend’s house for a slumber party and then having the host of that party shilling for some random consumer product to my daughter in an environment where she feels safe and relaxed and has probably let her guard down. It’s the “guard down” aspect that worries me. I think Schor says it well on page 78:

But friendship is important precisely because it is insulated from commercial pressures. It is considered one of the last bastions of noninstrumentality, a bulwark against the market values and self-interested behavior that permeate our culture. It’s part of what we cherish most about friendships. And that’s precisely why the marketers are so keenly interested in them.

What’s the solution to all of this nonsense? Point it out to your kids. Educate them. It’s pretty evident that normal interaction with society, even if you keep television out of the picture, will result in marketing efforts targeting both you and your kid. The best way to respond is to be prepared, and the best way to do that is to not isolate your kid. Expose them to the world and teach them to ask critical questions – I know that’s something I’ll strive for as my kids get older. That doesn’t mean you should fire up the ol’ television as soon as the kids get home, but it does mean that a good education in every respect – and that includes consumer education – starts at home.

The next discussion, coming in two days, will be a fun one, covering the fifth chapter, “The Commercialization of Public Schools,” starting on page 85 and ending on page 98.

The post Born to Buy: The Virus Unleashed appeared first on The Simple Dollar.

Trans-Toying
For several pages, Schor discusses the idea that marketers are able to turn basically anything into a toy, making it seem like something fun for a child to play with. Think about it: which would your child rather have, oatmeal that seems like oatmeal or oatmeal that seems like a toy? From page 63:

Trans-toying is most noticeable in the supermarket aisle, where packaged goods companies have gotten ingenious in their attempts to turn what we eat into things kids can play with. Frito-Lay has come up with colored Cheetos, now available in a mystery color version. You have to eat them to see what color your mouth and tongue become. Lucky Charms changes what it does with every box. Quaker Oatmeal contains dinosaur eggs and other hidden treasures. And Ore-Ida has come out with Funky Fries, which are blue, or sugar coated, or cocoa flavored.

This is a pet peeve of mine, one that Born to Buy has just given me a perfect excuse to rant about. If you can’t identify what the food product is and how it’s produced, you shouldn’t be eating it. But even if you lower that standard for yourself, you should never feed this stuff to your kids.

Whenever you put a plate of food in front of your child and in front of yourself, your child is getting more than just energy for the day. They’re getting nutritional building blocks for their growth, a stage in their lives that they’ll never be able to repeat. They’re also getting cues on how they should eat as an adult, because if it’s junk you’re giving them and junk you’re eating, it’s junk that they’ll believe is good. Actions speak louder than words.

Sure, maybe you think carrots are atrocious and you’d rather eat a Mickey D’s double cheeseburger. That’s still no excuse to put chocolate-flavored french fries in front of your kid. Read what’s on the ingredients label before you give it to your child – if you wouldn’t serve a great big plate full of one of the ingredients to your child, why would you give it to them at all?

Michael Pollan sums up a great eating philosophy in just seven words: Eat food. Not too much. Mostly plants. By food, he’s referring to actual real food, not high fructose corn syrup or whatever ungodly ingredient is used to make Cheetos stain your tongue blue.

A Misunderstanding of Wealth
On page 64, Schor really nails one particular problem with rampant consumerism in America:

Other research has found that people who watch more television have pronounced biases in their perceptions of how wealthy Americans are, because television disproportionately shows wealthy and upper-middle-classs lifestyles. Heavy viewers think that affluence is the norm, vastly exaggerating the proportion of the population with swimming pools, maids, and other luxuries.

In other words, television paints wealthy and upper-middle-class lifestyles as the norm and heavy watchers believe that it is the norm. The people on television become the Joneses to catch up with.

I read this portion of Born to Buy on a Friday morning, so just to test it out, I went downstairs and flipped through every channel that I thought a teenager might stop on. I saw a show about a $10,000 birthday bash for a four year old girl (Party/Party on Bravo), a “documentary” about Angelina Jolie’s life (True Hollywood Story on E!), a show about models infighting with each other (America’s Next Top Model on MTV), a show about a woman getting a $6,000 makeover (Style Her Famous on style.), a sitcom about a family with a butler living in Bel-Air (Fresh Prince of Bel-Air, on TBS), and two different channels showing music videos, each depicting individuals wearing more gold and diamonds than I’ve ever seen in my life.

Regardless of your feelings on the entertainment value of these programs, they all focus in on a lifestyle that is above the financial capacity of almost everyone in the viewing audience. If you watch such programs over and over again, your sense of “normal” begins to reset.

It makes sense why luxury products will pay for product placement on shows. If you see show after show where people are driving a shiny, expensive car, you’ll begin to see that car as normal. If you see everyone drinking bottled water, you begin to see that as normal. If you see everyone listening to an iPod, you begin to see that as normal.

I’m not claiming people are stupid by any means. Most people can pretty clearly identify what’s going on in an individual situation. The problem is when you see it over and over again – it begins to ever so slowly shape your sense of normal.

The next discussion, coming in two days, will cover the whole fourth chapter, “The Virus Unleashed,” starting on page 69 and ending on page 84.

The post Born to Buy: Pester Power appeared first on The Simple Dollar.

Since the last discussion, I spent a lot of time thinking about the idea of parents living vicariously through their children. I know personally of several examples of this – parents who are permissive with their children and buy their children lots of things because the parent never had these opportunities as a child.

I see where these parents are coming from. They’re looking back at their own childhood and trying to perceive the inadequacies there as an idea of how to improve as a parent. They look back on their own missed experiences and decide that their child will be exposed to those experiences, and they feel personal joy when they see what their child is gaining.

From my perspective, the real filter here isn’t whether you’re giving your child all the opportunities you never had, but whether you’re working to open up the right kind of opportunities. Giving your child an iPod simply because you would have loved one when you were a kid doesn’t really help them become a stronger person, but spending a week with them in the countryside of a foreign nation and exposing them to new cultures in a way you dreamed of as a child can change their world.

Anyway, on with some more thoughts on Born to Buy.

Where Kids Rule, Adults Are the Enemy

On page 54, Schor writes:

Industry insiders and outsiders confirm the antiadultism in much of today’s youth advertising. As one marketer explained to me: “Advertisers have kicked the parents out. They make fun of the parents … We inserted the product into the secret kid world … [It's] secret, dangerous, kid only.” Media critic Mark Crispin Miller makes a similar point: “It’s part of the official advertising world view that your parents are creeps, teachers are nerds and idiots, authority figures are laughable, nobody can really understand kids except the corporate sponsor. That huge authority has, interestingly enough, emerged as the sort of tacit superhero of consumer culture. That’s the coolest entity of all.”

A while back, I saw an ad for Verizon DSL that really stuck under my skin for a while. In it, a young girl is using the internet to look at a website. Her father attempts to be involved with her learning experience, but he is basically blown off for not being adept at it.

This ad is targeting a mix of people, but it reinforces the idea that a parent is a doofus and that the child is better off without his “interference.” The child is seen as being intelligent and the unintelligent parent is seen as little more than a distraction.

I personally think the ad is fairly humorous, but the underlying implication is there, and it’s repeated in ad after ad after ad. Children seek acceptance and a sense of being valued by adults, and this type of ad caters perfectly to it. The child is seen as equal or superior to the parent with the aid of the product.

If you watch Nickelodeon or The Disney Channel for very long, you’ll see lots of ads with this theme: kids are smarter or cooler than parents or teachers. In one isolated ad, it’s an interesting gimmick – in enough ads, it becomes a reinforced stereotype.

This is, to me, one of the most compelling reasons to limit your child’s television exposure. If my child goes downstairs to watch Hannah Montana, this type of ad is something they’ll see several times. On an individual basis, a child might be able to discern what’s really going on, but with lots of different ads using lots of different angles to reinforce that idea, I’m not surprised that children with a lot of television exposure would seek an antagonistic relationship with their parents.

My solution is as usual: spend a lot of time with my kids away from the television. I’d rather go out in the yard and toss the football around with my son or try to teach my daughter how to do a cartwheel than do something by myself while they watch the latest offering from Nickelodeon. Which of those two experiences reinforces a positive parent-child relationship – and which one reinforces a negative one?

Dual Targeting
A significant portion of this section focuses on dual targeting, a phenomenon where ad campaigns target both parents and children by highlighting different aspects of a product. Schor gives my favorite example on page 59:

Another example of this strategic thinking is Alpha-Bits. The regular version is targeted to moms, because the letters are seen as educational and beneficial for kids and it has less sugar than Alpha-Bits with marshmallows, which is targeted only to kids.

For those unaware, Alpha-Bits is a cold breakfast cereal where the individual pieces of cereal are shaped like letters. As a kid, I have vivid memories of my older brother spelling out obscene messages using Alpha-Bits in his cereal bowl.

It’s easy to see where this goes: the makers of Alpha-Bits is happy if either the parent or the child goes into the cereal aisle and picks out an Alpha-Bits product. So they simply make a “mom” version and a “kid” version and market each to that audience, focusing specifically on the attributes attractive to each. The version for moms is a pretty healthy cereal and a potential educational opportunity – seems good. The version for kids is a marshmallowy sugary fun time – seems good.

This happens over and over again. McDonald’s targets kids with their Happy Meals and parents with their salad line and burgers. Kool-Aid tells parents that it’s an inexpensive way to get Vitamin C and shows kids partying with Kool-Aid Man. (How can I compete with Kool-Aid Man, really? He’s big and red and bursts through walls!)

For me, this is a prime reason to get kids involved in your buying process as early as you can. If you can’t explain to them exactly why you’re buying a product, then why are you buying it? Let them see exactly how you shop – and force yourself to live up to that standard that you want to preach. Actions speak far louder than words.

The next discussion, coming in three days, will cover the final portion of the third chapter of Born to Buy, starting at the subheading “Pester Power” on page 61 through the remainder of the chapter.

The post Born to Buy: Nickelodeon and the Anti-Adult Bias appeared first on The Simple Dollar.

At this point, Schor’s book delves deep into marketing of children’s products, and as I read through this chapter, I couldn’t help but repeatedly see it echoing in my own life.

During my own childhood, advertising was a repeated influence on me in ways that I really only understand as an adult. I wanted products and food based on the cues I got from advertisements and clever packaging. The sad thing is, many of the tricks still work on me as an adult. It’s a constant psychological battle – a fight between the reality of our own hopes and dreams versus the reality that we’re being sold.

Let’s dig in.

Same Trick, Different Pony
On page 44, Schor writes:

In contemporary marketing, the naturalization of consumer desires has been codified into a set of timeless emotional needs all children are believed to possess. Standard practice consists of matching those universal needs to particular products and advertising messages, in which the role of the ad or product is to satisfy the need. Kids need to be scared to help them overcome their fears, so make a scary movie. Kids need to belong, so suggest that if they buy brand X, they’ll have friends.

That last sentence reminded me of the huge advertising push for the BK Kids’ Club when I was a young lad. Looking back on it, it was pretty clear that those ads were selling me on the idea that if I went to Burger King, I’d have friends via the BK Kids’ Club. Saying that as an adult is patently silly, but it worked like a charm on a lonely ten year old boy. I hinted about going to Burger King regularly and built it up to a big event in my mind when we would go.

The funny thing is, advertisements work the same way on adults, just using different techniques. Car commercials show some attractive individual driving a car (like a current one in which a woman of apparently Brazilian descent purrs about being a “new kind of woman” who needs a “new kind of car”) and thus subtly hints that this is the car that the beautiful people drive. Humor is used in a similar fashion – we laugh and get positive feelings towards the product.

This is part of the bargain when watching television – or exposing yourself to any media. The difference between adults and kids, though, is that many adults have the tools to realize this manipulation. Do my kids? I don’t think so, but I want to teach them the skills before they fall into the traps – that means watching some television with them, but keeping the amount pretty small.

The Costs of Being Cool
Schor, on page 47, states:

In a recent survey of 4,002 kids in grades 4 through 8, 66 percent reported that cool defines them. [...] although cool is hard to pin down, in practice it centers on recurring themes, and these themes are relentlessly pushed by marketers in their conception and design of products [...] One theme is that cool is socially exclusive, that is, expensive.

In 1997, the younger sister of one of my friends wanted a Tickle Me Elmo for Christmas. 1997 was the year where the toy went bonkers in popularity, triggering parents to actively seek out this toy – and often go too far doing it. I was part of a melee in Des Moines attempting to get one. Part of the desirability of this toy was the fact that it was exclusive. They were hard to get, and having one was a symbol that a child could show off to prove their “coolness” (as much as it applied to that age range).

This desire of “coolness” is something that’s pretty hard for parents to avoid. I know – I was something of a social outcast in my school days and I really don’t want my children to have some of the low points of that experience. It’s truly not fun to be picked last every time at soccer or to be ridiculed for something completely out of your control.

Marketers know this, and they sell to this. That’s why the most successful toys market – at least in part – to parents as well. They sell parents on the idea that just this one little purchase will go a long way towards putting an aura of “cool” on their child in their peer group.

That’s a powerful weapon, and frankly, as a parent, I’m searching for ways to combat it. It’s easy to talk big now and say how I’ll never give into such crass marketing. It’s entirely another to see my child come in the door in tears because he was picked on at school, and then to observe that the trendiest item for a child that age is something I could easily acquire, something that could wipe those tears away and make the social ladder something bearable again.

I’m not battling the expectations of my own children – I’m battling the expectations of peers. Anyone got any battle tactics?

The next discussion, coming in two days, will cover the next portion of the third chapter of Born to Buy, starting at the subheading “Kids Rule: Nickelodeon and the Anti-Adult Bias” on page 51 through the subheading “Pester Power” on page 61.

The post Born to Buy: From Tony the Tiger to Slime Time Live appeared first on The Simple Dollar.

This section of the book really got me thinking about my own family and the behaviors we choose over the course of an average week. I tend to think that in many way we’re the typical American family except lighter on the television and heavier on the reading.

But is that good enough? This section really made me reconsider that a bit, pointing me in the direction of some fascinating studies. Let’s dig in.

Quality Time Versus Shopping

From page 31 (with my own emphasis added):

In 1997, the average child aged six to twelve spent more than two and a half hours a week shopping, a full hour more than in 1981. [...] They spend as much time shopping as visiting, twice as much time shopping as reading or going to church, and five times as much as playing outdoors. [...] More children go shopping each week (52 percent) than read (42 percent), go to church (26 percent), participate in youth groups (25 percent), play outdoors (17 percent), or spend time in household conversation (32 percent).

This paragraph actually made me think pretty carefully about the time I spend with my own children. We often turn our weekend grocery trip into a family event, with all four of us leaving the house, going to the grocery store and perhaps to a department store, and loading up on a week’s worth of groceries. During that trip, our primary focus is on our shopping selections – getting the task out of the way. Meanwhile, our children often spend time looking around and observing stuff to buy while we’re making our item selections. The inevitable end result is this:

He sees ol’ dad tossing lots of stuff in the cart, so he looks around for stuff he might want as well. The colorful packaging looks interesting and the item looks tasty, so let’s grab it!

This is obviously an opportunity for some basic consumer education, but wouldn’t he get more out of life if the kids stayed at home with one of the parents, played, read some books, and took a nap while the other parent went to the store?

Shopping is a mentally engaging activity and it’s often hard to distinguish why people are putting stuff into the carts – frankly, I often can’t comprehend the stuff my wife puts in the cart. Given the complexity of a large grocery store, what lesson will a two year old take home other than “grab some things, put them in the cart, and take them home”?

It might be better to shop with him a little less and read with him a little more.

Taken as a Whole…

After several pages of quoting a giant pile of studies on changing time habits of kids and the increases in child obesity, anxiety disorders, and substance use disorders over the same timeframe, Schor states on page 36:

Taken together, these findings are not comforting. They how that American children are worse off today than they were ten or twenty years ago. This conclusion is especially notable when we consider that during the past fifteen years, child poverty fell substantially, from a high of 22% in the late 1980s to its current rate of 16%. The decline in child poverty should have led to improvements in measures of distress, because child poverty is correlated with adverse physical and psychological health outcomes. The deterioration of the well-being indicators suggests that some powerful negative factors are undermining children’s well-being.

In other words, there’s statistical evidence of some significant negative shift in the physical and mental health of children over the last thirty years or so, but at the same time child poverty (the usual cause of poor child health) has gone down.

My belief is that this is a more universal phenomenon than just a children’s phenomenon. Obesity rates have gone up like a rocket over the last thirty years among adults – just look at this obesity trend map. Not only that, depression rates are steadily increasing as well.

Along those same lines, child mental health issues often follow into adulthood, meaning children with psychological problems such as depression often grow into adults with those same problems. With more children suffering psychological ailments than ever, it follows that there will be more adults with psychological ailments.

This really reinforces that there’s a significant problem at work here, and I’m looking forward to digging into that problem through the remainder of the book.

The next discussion, coming in two days, will cover the first half of the third chapter of Born to Buy (“From Tony the Tiger to Slime Time Live“), covering pages 39 through 51 and ending at the subheading “Kids Rule: Nickelodeon and the Anti-Adult Bias.”

The post Born to Buy: Playing Less and Shopping More appeared first on The Simple Dollar.

Reading this section really pounded home one fact into my mind: this is a big issue. Hundreds of billions of dollars are at stake when it comes to the purchasing decisions made that involve your child, and given the unethical things people are willing to do for much tinier sums, how is it surprising that companies will target that huge market with whatever message will get their point across.

One scene from my own childhood kept coming back to me. Hardee’s, a fast food chain, was including small plastic figurines of the California Raisins in their kid’s meals. These little plastic toys, pressed out of a factory somewhere, likely cost Hardee’s a penny or two a pop. Yet I was insistent – insistent – on collecting all ten of them. I had to have them, and after several weeks of nonstop cajoling, I did eventually collect the complete set of them after lord knows how many trips to Hardee’s. Any time we’d get close, I’d start shouting loudly from the back seat, “IS THE NEW RAISIN OUT YET?” and not let it go until either my mother gave in, drove a bargain with me, or wound up ordering me that it was simply not happening.

I was ten years old and not really mature enough to consider the actual food quality and nutritional value of a fast food value meal, especially as compared to the value of a two-cent plastic raisin toy and the financial state of my parents. It’s not a value judgement I was equipped to make or even able to look at rationally, and that in itself is why I’m reading this book.

No wonder the marketers are all over the youth group.

Here are two bits that really stood out at me this time.

Do You Believe In Numbers?
How big is that market? On page 23, Schor drops the following fact:

[James] McNeal estimates that children aged four to twelve directly influenced $330 billion of adult purchasing in 2004 and “evoked” another $340 billion.

In other words, children aged four to twelve are primarily responsible for $670 billion in annual purchases. I tried to get a grasp on what that number actually meant, so I turned to census data from 2000 and assumed that all of the children between the ages of 0 and 9 there had become the set of children aged 4 to 12 in 2004 (in other words, they aged four years from 2000 to 2004). That data indicates that there are roughly 40 million children in that four to twelve age group discussed above.

This means that the average child (aged four to twelve) in the United States in 2004 – just one child – directly affected $16,750 worth of purchases. That’s in one year. If you choose to believe that there’s not money to be made in marketing to children, think again – if you can start a fad, you’ve got access to more money than you can imagine.

Think of that fact from a marketer’s perspective. They would only need to alter one dollar of that influence to bring in $40 million to their product. And what’s one dollar, really? Thus, a savvy marketer will pull out all the stops to convince that child to advocate for a particular brand – they’ll toss up commercials making that brand appear cool to kids, play self-esteem games with them, and even use sources that parents trust for marketing, like the Children’s Television Workshop or the Boy Scouts of America.

With Monopoly Comes Uniformity – and The Wal-Mart Versus Target Battle
On page 28, Schor throws down this comment after noting that most consumer industries are dominated by two or three companies:

Economic theory predicts that when two opponents face off, the winning strategy for both entails their becoming almost identical. This model explains why gas stations congregate at intersections, why Democrats and Republicans cleave to the political center, and why Coke and Pepsi are hard to tell apart with a blindfold. What it means for consumers is that true variety and diversity of products is hard to find.

In other words, when there are just a small number of companies competing in a market – and that’s true for a lot of specific items in the United States – those companies will find the optimum strategy for their product that ensures the balance of sales and expenses that results in the most profit. Once that point is discovered, everyone will trend there, leaving marketing being the only major difference between the choices.

The only real difference between Wal-Mart and Target is marketing. Some people pride themselves on shopping at Wal-Mart because they get “bargains,” when quite often Wal-Mart’s prices are basically the same as their competitor. On the other hand, some people won’t shop at Wal-Mart because they don’t treat their employees well – when, in truth, Target does the same things and gets a free pass. The difference is all in the marketing – Wal-Mart has been more directly confrontational with organized labor, so organized labor spends marketing dollars trying to create a more unfriendly image for Wal-Mart, when the truth is that almost all of their practices are shared by Target, too.

The comments in this thread basically illustrate my point. For the most part, the commenters are just parroting the marketing of the two companies. The “Target is classier than Wal-Mart” marketing meme is spread far and wide and justified in many creative ways – it’s a matter of brand perception and marketing, not the reality of walking into the actual stores themselves. In the area where I live, the nearest Wal-Mart is a substantially nicer shopping experience than the nearest Target, for example.

In short, I’m completely indifferent about which one I would choose. They do so many things identically that it makes little difference which one I choose to shop at, so I generally choose the one that offers the best prices on the items I’m buying. This is something I hope to teach to my children: brand doesn’t always mean what everyone says it means.

The next discussion, coming in three days, will cover the second half of the second chapter of Born to Buy (“Playing Less and Shopping More”), covering pages 29 through 38.

The post Born to Buy: The Changing World of Children’s Consumption appeared first on The Simple Dollar.

When I look at the cover of Born to Buy, the first thing I see is that baby sitting in a gift bag, and I immediately make a mental substitution to place my six month old daughter in there, with her curly hair and big brown eyes peeking over the top. The symbolism of that whole scene – my wonderful baby daughter, full of laughs and baby squeals, already being subjected to consumerism and marketing – raises a deep feeling of concern inside of me.

I’ve made plenty of mistakes in my own life when it comes to consumerism and allowing marketing to influence me, and it was my infant son who convinced me to step back and look at the mess I was making.

He’s now two and particularly in love with Cars. He requests the movie all the time – we say no most of the time and severely limit his screen time – but that’s not what concerns me. What really gets me is when we go to the store and stop in the diaper aisle – he expresses a very strong preference for the diaper brand that depicts Cars characters on them. It doesn’t take much imagination to see that same logic growing into a flurry of spending and a lack of consumer control at an older age.

With that in mind – and with a strong sense of my own failings – I wanted to read through Born to Buy again in order to get a deeper understanding of how marketing is reaching out to children, even those as young as two. Hopefully, we’ll all learn something along the way.

Here are three interesting parts in the first chapter that stood out to me.

Do Responsible Parents Expose Their Children to Brands?

First, a quote from page 11 of Born to Buy (with my own emphasis):

Children have become conduits from the consumer marketplace into the household, the link between advertisers and the family purse. Young people are repositories of consumer knowledge and awareness. They are the first adopters and avid users of many of the new technologies. They are the household members with the most passionate consumer desires, and are most closely tethered to products, brands, and the latest trends. Children’s social worlds are increasingly constructed around consuming, as brands and products have com to determine who is “in” or “out,” who is hot or not, who deserves to have friends, or social status.

It’s pretty easy for me to remember such things from childhood and also to see it in children and teenagers today. When I was a teenager, the most fervent topics of conversation among the people I hung out with were video games (an incessantly costly consumer product) and basketball shoes (an overly expensive fashion statement). You were socially judged by the brand of basketball shoes you wear, and even the lowliest schlub could raise his social status by wearing a pair of Reebok Pumps or pulling out a copy of Super Mario Bros. 3.

The patterns repeat themselves today, with the teenagers I’m able to regularly observe using their cell phones incessantly and constantly talking about who has the best one – and drooling over one girl’s iPhone. Clothing with obvious brand insignias also are a part of the social hierarchy as well – the logo on your shirt can mean the difference between acceptance and ridicule.

It’s pretty challenging for a middle-class parent to avoid this social trap. On the one hand, encouraging your child to be a rampant consumer in order to get ahead in the social game is basically setting them up for a sense of “keeping up with the Joneses” later on. On the other, denying them any access to this puts them at a social disadvantage, something I don’t want to foist on my children, either. I remember quite well the feeling of being rejected because of some label on my clothing – and it took me a significant amount of later maturity to realize how stupid it all was. Just because it was stupid doesn’t mean it didn’t hurt.

What is the right balance for parents? Everyone’s going to have a different answer on this one. My feeling is that brand exposure is inevitable for children, so you have to ride the tide to a degree – just couple that exposure to consumerism with a healthy dose of constructive consumer education. I like the way one of my friends who is a parent of teenagers handles it – he just adds more relevant information to their decision, but abides by what they choose, letting consumer education be more like an ongoing laboratory.

As I heard more than a few times growing up: Teach your children well / Their father’s hell did slowly go by / And feed them on your dreams / The one they pick’s the one you’ll know by

Can Families Downsize?

Another quote, also from page 11 (again, with the emphasis my own):

One part of my research for the spending book was interviews with people toward the far end of the downshifting spectrum – those who were intentionally rejecting the consumer lifestyle rather than working less. I discovered that downshifters who were raising children were almost impossible to find. At the time, I reasoned that children are expensive or that most parents would not want to impose a regime of reduced consumption on their kids.

Eventually I realized that this dearth of downshifting among parents revealed a significant trend in consumer culture. [...] how many parents opt to downshift or simplify? It’s a radical step many children don’t welcome.

Not too long ago, I discussed a book called Downshifting, which covered this concept well. It defined downshifting as reducing the amount of time you work (and the intensity of it) and reducing the complexity – and cost – of your life.

My natural instinct is to want to downshift, but I understand the inherent conflict with downshifting and children, particularly as described above. I see it this way: unless you’re committed to an active rejection of society, it’s hard to do a major downshifting with children in tow.

I hear quite often from individuals who advocate this kind of rejection of consumer society. They tell me that any consumer exposure for children is inherently wrong, and I’m told in no uncertain terms that I am a bad parent for even allowing my son a Cars blanket. I absolutely reject that line of thinking. It’s my job as a parent to educate my children in the realities that life will throw at them. If I were to severely downshift and force them into rejecting consumer culture, I will have failed them as a parent.

I might personally want to downshift, but by doing so, I’m not doing my full job as a parent. My job is to participate in the education of my children, and a big part of that is how to interact with the consumer world. I’m my child’s primary consumer education teacher, and if I fully reject consumerism, I’m not doing my job as a parent.

The Usual Parent Reaction

From page 17:

Many adults respond to the critique of media and consumerism by shrugging it off, on the grounds that this culture is inescapable. Some are fatalistic; others contend that the critics exaggerate or are missing the true causes of kids’ distress. Many reason that they themselves grew up on television with no untoward effects.

There are times when I’m reading Born to Buy where I want to call Juliet Schor an anti-American Marxist who hates all corporations. I think this is a fairly typical reaction, actually.

I think part of the reason for that feeling is that many of us have come to accept a consumer-oriented society as completely normal and suggestions for living in other ways are strange. We live in a world where all of our friends, acquaintances, and peers are involved in this consumer culture as well, and when this culture is damningly criticized, it often comes off as something of a personal insult. How dare you criticize my way of life!

If I’ve learned one thing over the last two years, it’s that you can’t improve your life without criticizing it. If you genuinely believe everything you’re doing is right, then there’s no reason to work on improving things – the only way to get better is to realize where you’re at now is worse than were you could be.

So what’s the “better” that’s being strived for here? It’s a call to improve as parents – and as people. I like to believe I’m doing a good job as a parent, but I’m far from egotistical enough to believe I’m a great parent. One thing I know I want to do as a parent is equip my child with the intellectual tools they need to not fall into consumerism traps like the ones I fell into as a young adult. The best way to do that is to check my parental ego at the door and realize that I need to learn something, especially if that something is backed up by a lot of research, far beyond what I’m capable of doing as an individual.

Even if it means listening to the arguments of an anti-American Marxist who hates all corporations.

The next discussion, coming in two days, will cover the first half of the second chapter of Born to Buy (“The Changing World of Children’s Consumption”), covering pages 19 through 29 and ending at the subheading “Playing Less and Shopping More.”

The post Born to Buy: Introduction appeared first on The Simple Dollar.