Consuming Kids

The Hostile Takeover of Childhood

By Linn, Susan

Publishers Summary:
A shocking exposé of the $15 billion marketing maelstrom aimed at our children and how we can stop it. With the intensity of the California gold rush, corporations are racing to stake their claim on the consumer group formerly known as children. What was once the purview of a handful of companies has escalated into a gargantuan enterprise estimated at over $15 billion annually. While parents busily try to set limits at home, marketing executives work day and night to undermine their efforts with irresistible messages. In Consuming Kids, psychologist Susan Linn takes a comprehensive and unsparing look at the demographic advertisers call "the kid market," taking readers on a compelling and disconcerting journey through modern childhood as envisioned by commercial interests. Children are now the focus of a marketing maelstrom, targets for everything from minivans to M&M counting books. All aspects of children's lives—their health, education, creativity, and values—are at risk of being compromised by their status in the marketplace. Interweaving real-life stories of marketing to children, child development theory, the latest research, and what marketing experts themselves say about their work, Consuming Kids reveals the magnitude of this problem and shows what can be done about it.

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ISBN
978-1-56584-783-5
Publisher
New Press


REVIEWS

Library Journal

Reviewed on March 15, 2004

"Every aspect of children's lives-their physical and mental health, their education, their creativity, and their values-is negatively affected by their involuntary status as consumers in the marketplace," argues child psychologist and advocate Linn (Harvard Univ.) in this forceful expos of the $15 billion industry of marketing to children. Undercover at the KidScreen Advertising and Promoting to Kids conference in New York City, she discovers how companies bui...Log In or Sign Up to Read More

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