Modern Childhood > Articles
Why Pink Makes Me See Red
Full text of article in the Daily Mail, 2009
She’s six. She’s full of life and potential. And she’s obsessed with pink.
Pink bedroom, duvet and furniture. Pink toys and books. Pink clothes.
Her parents don’t particularly like it. In fact, they feel slightly uneasy about paying out for all this pink stuff. Might it affect the way she thinks about herself? Could it turn her into some sort of ‘pink princess’ who’ll later succumb to other stereotypes? An obsession with body image perhaps, or too early an interest in ‘boyz’, sexy clothes and make-up…?
But there doesn’t seem much choice. The stuff in the shops is almost exclusively pink, and their daughter really loves the colour. All her friends at school are into pink, and no caring parent wants their little girl to feel left out. Anyway, she’s entitled to have a favourite colour, isn’t she? And she looks so sweet in that fluffy little outfit.
So they cough up for another round of pink products, and the invasion of childhood by market forces continues on its inexorable path.
Please don’t misunderstand me. I’ve nothing against pink. Some of my best friends wear it – grown women who’ve made a rational choice about which colour they reckon suits them best. I’ve nothing against marketing either – as an adult, I enjoy the creativity and wit with which adverts keep me informed about goods and services available.
What bothers me about the pink plague now infecting the majority of three- to eight-year-old girls is that they aren’t old enough to make rational choices. Their brains simply aren’t sufficiently developed for the application of reason. So when marketers turn their big guns on young children, they’re not so much entertaining and informing as brainwashing them.
Until children reach the middle years of primary school, they operate mainly on emotion – the neural networks underpinning rational thought are still in the process of formation. Deep emotional attachments made in the first six or seven years are likely to influence the way they behave for the rest of their lives. As St Ignatius Loyola once famously said, ‘Give me a child till he is eight years old, and he is mine for ever.’
Big business is all too aware of this. In 1992 marketing guru James McNeal alerted corporate America in his book Kids As Customers to the money-making potential of young children. As he put it: ‘Kids are the most unsophisticated of all consumers – they have the least and therefore want the most. Consequently, they’re in a perfect position to be taken.’
This rallying cry coincided with the arrival of children’s commercial TV channels and the increasing global reach of screen-based technology. Within a few years – especially in the UK – televisions and other electronic equipment began moving inexorably into children’s bedrooms. So over the last decade – with increasingly sophisticated TV ads, product placement, web-based ‘advergames’, internet pop-ups and ads on social networking websites – marketers have acquired access to children’s minds beyond Loyola’s wildest dreams. And also well outside most parents’ radar.
Multinational corporations now employ child psychologists and million dollar budgets to help them play mind games with little children.
And it’s well worth the effort. There’s ‘guilt money’ to be gleaned from harassed parents trying to juggle work and child-rearing. There’s ‘pester power’ to be harnessed, for selling not just children’s products, but foodstuffs, holidays, even cars. Even six-month-old babies can be trained to respond to corporate logos and chummy little characters. The baby sees the character repeatedly on screen, then perched in the supermarket trolley, points to it on the shelf… and the parent buys the product.
Most important of all, there’s brand loyalty to be carefully nurtured while brains are still young and malleable.
The pink plague dominating our high streets is a very visible symptom of this commercial takeover of early childhood. Marketers know that, round about three years of age, children become aware of their gender. At the same time, they become prey to an extremely powerful human impulse – the need to belong to the group. For countless millennia, anyone who didn’t conform to the norms of their tribe could expect a lingering death. The yearning for inclusion is probably written into our DNA.
So, once children reach nursery age, marketers taking account of this ‘inclusion gene’ aiming their messages specifically at boys or girls, with clearly defined gender norms. In the nursery and primary playground, children cleave with emotional intensity to the symbols of their gender, so that peer pressure is dragged in to serve the commercial process.
The forces of consumerism have now infiltrated children’s culture so successfully that it’s become extremely difficult for a little girl to resist the lure of pink. Or for a boy to regard it with anything other than disgust. And politically correct parents who’ve diligently avoided talking about the gender wars are horrified to find their offspring suddenly devoted to blatant stereotypes.
But gender stereotyping aside, that bonny bouncing six-year-old in her pink bolero and tiara raises a host of other questions about the way we’re rearing our children. Or rather, about the way we’re letting other people rear them.
In the past, the major influences in young children’s lives were their parents, family and playmates – local children also influenced by the real-life adults in their lives. No matter what these adults’ personal value systems, we can assume the vast majority cared about the long-term well-being of the infants they were rearing.
But in our brave new global village, parents and family are being gradually pushed out of the picture. According to last week’s Childwise survey, today’s children spend up to six hours a day on screen-based activities. So market forces increasingly influence their tastes and habits. And marketers don’t have children’s welfare at heart – they just want to sell more stuff.
Little girls should be outside in the sunshine, laughing with their friends, playing imaginatively with whatever comes to hand – making dens, dressing up with old clothes and scraps of material, choosing the roles they play…
They shouldn’t be holed up indoors, staring at screens, learning how to pester their parents for the latest ‘must-have’ toy and being groomed for a lifetime of consumption.
Today’s pink plague is a wake-up call to us all.
Marketing to children under eight is downright immoral and should be stopped immediately.