Modern Childhood > Info & links > The Commercialisation Of Childhood
In my 2009 book, 21st Century Boys, I called the central chapter ‘School versus cool’, because I believe that advertisers selling the culture of ‘cool’ now have at least as much effect on children’s lives as their school teachers. Sadly, I think that in many cases they also have at least as much effect as parents – modern marketing techniques are aimed at creating peer pressure in the playground that translates into pester power in the home. This is such a recent phenomenon that parents are often unaware of the extent to which their children are being groomed to become the next generation of ‘superconsumers’, and how detrimental this can be to family life.
If you click on ‘What Children Need For Healthy Development (on the fingers of one hand)’ you’ll note that all the essential ingredients of a balanced childhood are free. Since marketers have considerable control of the screen-based media that now provide most of our information, it’s not surprising that knowledge about child development has gone missing. Instead, they urge us to substitute
- indulgence for love (‘Buy your child some happiness!’)
- over-protection for discipline (‘Don’t set boundaries – use our products!’)
- sedentary technological fixes for play
- screen-based activity for human communication.
And we’re urged to crack on with education (for which they can provide endless products, from birth onwards) instead of giving children the personal care on which education must be founded.
The following article, written for the politicians who will one day have to take action on this issue, sums up how this has happened.
Growing Up In A Marketing Maelstrom
(Published in The House Magazine for parliamentarians, 2008)
It’s been difficult to take Westminster’s recent discovery of the ‘commercialisation of childhood’ seriously. Since politicians’ unswerving devotion to economic growth over the last twenty years has encouraged the commercialisation of everything – childhood included – the sudden indignation about the evils of junk food and Bratz dolls has a rather hollow ring.
The price of one’s wry smile, however, is a nation of increasingly unstable children. It’s not easy growing up in a world where the only values on offer are those of the marketing men, where parental love is measured in presents rather than presence, and where you learn at the tender age of four that the wrong brand of crisps in your lunchbox is social suicide. Our children are growing up in what American campaigner Susan Linn has called a ‘marketing maelstrom’, and it’s having a profound effect on their development.
Parents and politicians have been slow to recognise how extensively marketeers have muscled in on childhood. Multi-million pound budgets and the services of top child psychologists are now devoted to the cause of ‘winning children for the brand’ – like St Ignatius Loyola, big business has realised that, if you can catch them young, they’ll be yours for life. And since the vast majority of children in the UK now have a TV in their bedroom, hidden from parental eyes, marketeers are perfectly placed to groom their young consumers.
The next generation is thus being trained to value themselves in terms not of any human worth, but of their possessions. So ownership of this week’s consumer must-have is now the driving force of playground politics and the marketeers’ definition of ‘edgy cool’ is the new infant religion.
This culture of cool also affects role models and youthful aspiration. There are no old-fashioned heroes for children to worship any more, just celebrities. The tales of honour, heroism and achievement with which adults used to nourish their young have given way to photo-journalism about narcissism, conspicuous consumption and instant stardom. The constant daily message received by children is that success is measured in ownership, money is the new currency of love.
All this, of course, is directly counter to what psychology tells us about real human needs. There are rafts of research showing that happiness doesn’t come from having more stuff. It comes from having friends, family and social interaction, from the feeling that there’s more to life than mere self-gratification, and from spending time doing something you personally think worthwhile. So – not unnaturally – children fed this marketing line become steadily unhappier. The nation’s rising tide of behavioural problems and childhood depression is testament to that.
In his book on Happiness economist Richard Layard blames competitive consumerism for the splintering of communities: ‘Our fundamental problem today is a lack of common feeling between people – the notion that life is essentially a competitive struggle. With such a philosophy, the losers become alienated and a threat to the rest of us, and even the winners can’t relax in peace’. This lack of common feeling is apparent in the recent UNICEF survey about children’s well-being – one reason British children were ranked the unhappiest in the developed world was that only 48% considered their peers ‘kind and helpful’. When fewer than half our children actually trust each other, we should be afraid. Today’s playground bullies and victims are tomorrow’s crime and mental health statistics, and Layard’s interest in ‘happiness’ has a sound economic basis.
But it’s not just the economy, is it, stupid? It’s the social, emotional and moral health of the nation too. A teacher I interviewed for my book, Toxic Childhood, said ‘Sometimes it seems that what we’re trying to teach the children at school is at odds with everything they’re learning outside.’ She voiced the frustration of countless primary school teachers, who daily try to instil old-fashioned values like honesty, conscientiousness, hard work and concern for others into their infant charges.
But what children see on their TV screens is in direct contradiction to these values. Dishonesty and dishonour regularly triumph, on the sports field, in celebrity marriages, and even – can such things be? – in political circles. Why bother being conscientious or working hard work you can become famous overnight on Big Brother or The X Factor? And kindness is no longer a virtue in popular TV programmes – bullies and smart-arses are today’s stars: kind characters are inevitably weak, and usually victims.
In a secular, consumer-driven society, it seems that the only ethical value recognised by most adults is a vague sense of moral relativism. To many children, alone in their bedrooms or out there in the jungle of the streets and the playground, this translates as ‘anything goes’. We have left them for too long at the mercy of the market and, unless we act soon, the consequences could be grim.
It’s no good relying on Ofcom, the watchdog without a single decent tooth in its head. Any lingering hope of effectiveness is dispelled by its recent half-hearted ban on junk food advertising (which still allows junk food to be advertised in all the programmes most popular with children) and the non-response to Big Brother’s racial bullying scandal (on the day 25,000 people complained, the chief ‘regulator’ amused the Oxford Media Convention by saying he might write a mild letter to Channel Four in a week or so).
We need, at the very least, a watchdog with lots of teeth and the will to use them. And we need more than vague murmurs from politicians about the ill-effects of commercialisation of childhood. Any decent society should strive with all its heart to further the social, emotional and moral well-being of its children – and not just for the sake of crime reduction or economic stability.
We should look after them because they’re worth it.
See also Articles: Why pink makes me see red and Child exploitation, 21st century style.
In the USA there’s now a Campaign for a Commercial-Free Childhood. This clip from their film Consuming Kids gives a flavour of what’s going on.
For information on children and consumer culture in the UK, see the book Consumer Kids by Ed Mayo and Agnes Nairn.
One important area of consumer culture is junk food marketing. The organisation Sustain has a Children’s Food Campaign you can find here.
For non-commercially-sponsored information on food and behaviour, see www.fabresearch.org
Neal Lawson’s 2009 book, All Consuming, gives the background on consumer culture in the UK.
And for those of you with time on your hands, The Century of Self by BBC documentary-maker Adam Curtis, shows how we all got into this fine mess in the first place. This link takes you to the first fascinating episode.