RESEARCH General Home & Garden

KIDS AS CONSUMERS
'Tis the season – always – for children in the marketplace

Craig Chamberlain, Education Editor
(217) 333-2894;cdchambe@uiuc.edu

12/1/02

CHAMPAIGN, Ill. — Christmas is high season for the child-consumer.

"It’s become a time when children’s consumption takes on an aggressive dimension," says Dan Cook, a professor of advertising at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign. "Kids claim it as their time; advertisers see it as open season on the kids."

But Christmas or not, children’s culture and consumer culture have become "virtually indistinguishable," Cook said. The commercial marketplace is now a key arena where children work out their sense of self and of peer relationships, he said. And parents can find themselves stuck between giving in to a child’s purchase demands and the fear their child will be an outcast if they don’t.

Cook is working on a book about the development and dimensions of the children’s wear industry, but he also studies and writes about other aspects of the "commodification of childhood," as he terms it. His interest, in particular, is on the market for children ages birth to 12, a market that has almost tripled in size since 1990.

The development of children’s consumer culture can be traced back over the last century, beginning with the decline in child labor, Cook said. Children came to be viewed less in economic terms and more in sentimental or "sacred" terms. At the same time, the view developed that children are "autonomous and individualized actors," for whom consumption is a matter of personal choice and even self-expression.

Parents often hold the sentimental view, wanting to know if a product is safe, whether it serves developmental, educational or health needs, or nurtures their child in some other way, Cook said. Marketers increasingly have promoted the other view, which grants children "personhood status" and strives to see everything from their perspective and with their purported desires in mind.

Some of the most effective marketing appeals draw on both points of view, getting the child interested in the product, while at the same time giving parents the message that denying their child’s wants means denying them self-expression or empowerment, he said.

For those parents who want to foster a different attitude about consumerism in their children, Cook suggests "the one thing that won’t work is to try to shelter your child from the market."

Instead, he recommends that parents take an active and critical posture toward media and consumption, starting with a recognition of their own place in the "generational accumulation" of consumer attitudes. They need to reflect on their own buying habits, since just saying no to their children’s demands can easily be seen as hypocritical or an unfair use of power.

He encourages parents to actively "deconstruct" commericals with their children and have conversations about what they convey. "Make media criticism as much a part of the household routine as doing the laundry."