Consuming Kids: The Commercialization of Childhood

Lucy Hughes:
[from "The Corporation"] And somebody asked me: 'Lucy, is that ethical? You're essentially manipulating these children.' Well, is it ethical? I don't know. But our role at Initiative is to move products, and if we know you move products with a certain creative execution, placed in a certain type of media vehicle, then we've done our job. They are tomorrow's consumer - tomorrow's adult consumer - so start talking with them now, build that relationship when they're younger, and you've got them as an adult.

Michael Brody:
I'll say it. These marketers are very similar to pedophiles. Okay? They are child experts. If you're going to be a pedophile, or a child marketer, you have to know about children and what children are going to want.

Robert Reiher:
There's a lot that's happening around us, and the public is not aware - just like they're not aware of neuro-marketing. That's another whole new scary thing to put a child on a MRI, and watch what is being lit up inside his brain based on the stimulus, and then saying, 'wow, this works, this is good, look what happens.'

Juliet Schor:
I interviewed a number of people who sat and watched children take baths and showers, watched how they interact with shampoo and soap and health and beauty products as that category is called, in order to go back and write a report for their clients on what to do with the packaging. It's creepy. It's just absolutely creepy the way children are being dissected and put under the microscope by marketers.

Josh Golin:
When children play with toys that are based on media products, they play less creatively because they're not spurred to make up their world. They're not spurred to make up their own story lines. What they do is they just regurgitate what they've already seen using products that are based on the film or on the television show.

Susan Linn:
Suddenly it became okay to create a television program for the sole purpose of selling a toy.

Fred Furth:
[Kellogg's Lawyer] In an American democratic capitalistic society, we almost learn, top to bottom, to care for ourselves, and what the last thing we need the next 20 years is a national nanny.

Enola Aird:
The Congress of the United States, under pressure from advertisers and marketers, actually robbed - took away from the FTC - the right, the authority to regulate advertising and marketing to children.

Enola Aird:
So the philosophy becomes cradle to grave: Let's get to them early. Let's get to them often. Let's get to them as many places as we can get them. Not just to sell them products and services, but to turn them into life-long consumers.

Susan Linn:
This generation of children is marketed to as never before. Kids are being marketed to through brand licensing, through product placement, marketing in schools, through stealth marketing, through viral marketing. There's DVDs, there's video games, there's the internet, there are iPods, there are cell phones. There are so many more ways of reaching children so that there is a brand in front of a child's face every moment of every day.

[first lines]

Himself (McNeal, James U.):
[pioneering youth marketer] The consumer embryo begins to develop during the first year of existence. Children begin their consumer journey in infancy. And they certainly deserve consideration as consumers at that time.

Enola Aird:
Psychologists and anthropologists and sociologists and behavioral scientists are used by marketers to really shape and cement children's brand preferences. They want to be part of the fabric of children's lives.

Juliet Schor:
They do blink tests on kids, for example. They develop ads, and then see how frequently a kid blinks or turns their eyes away. And when they see the kid blinking more, they change the ad to make it more mesmerizing. There's stuff they just can't take their eyes off, and it's not an accident. They've gone over and over and over with extensive high-tech kinds of testing devices to find the precise configuration of characters, colors, music, words and so forth that kids can't resist.

Juliet Schor:
Companies have moved away from exaggerating the product characteristics to a whole new form of advertising, which is symbolic advertising. The product is pushed not on the basis of what it can do, or how it tastes, but of its social meaning. So kids are taught to want candy, or sugared cereals, or soda because it's cool. It will define them as an individual. What you buy is who you are.

Allen Kanner:
The commercialization of childhood is permeating their lives. We're talking about a profound remaking of their psyche.

Betsy Taylor:
In that world of materialism, kids are not allowed to be kids anymore. They have to grow up fast. We see it in the way they're being asked to dress, the violence they're being asked to navigate. And what's getting squeezed out is childhood.

Diane Levin:
I go to visit pre-schools, and I'll see four-year-old girls in what I often call 'crotch skirts,' modeled after Bratz dolls.

Michael Rich:
The Federal Trade Commission report that came out, looking at the marketing of media to children, showed that indeed the media industry was marketing material to children that even their own rating systems said were too young for that material.

Russ Mitchell:
[ABC News] The studios confirmed to congress today that children as young as 9 years old were tested for their reactions to R-rated violent movies.

Robert A. Iger:
[Walt Disney Company] Clearly there were times during the period discussed in the FTC report when we allowed competitive zeal to overwhelm sound judgment and appropriate standards...

Michael Rich:
So the very people who are making the product are telling you what's appropriate for kids.

Juliet Schor:
One thing that happened when the movie studios tightened up on letting kids into R movies was that the sexual content, drug content, alcohol, tobacco, profanity, adult content migrated into the PG-13 movies. So they're a lot more like what R movies used to be.

Herself (Carlsson-Page, Nancy):
And a Hollywood movie that's rated for older viewers, PG-13 or R, has a whole line of toys and products marketed to children 3, 4, and 5 years old.

Susan Linn:
It's really hard to find baby paraphernalia that's not plastered with media characters. You can find unbranded baby stuff, but you can find it in high-end toy stores. But if you go to just places where poor or middle class families shop, it's all branded, so the babies start out life with the notion of consumption. And that's not an accident. What they want is cradle to grave brand loyalty. That's what they talk about - share of mind. They talk about owning children for life.

Robert Reiher:
What's the most important thing for a 0-2 year old? The single most important thing is the social dynamic - the bond that occurs, and the intimacy that occurs between mother and child. Forget the rest of it. That piece lays the bond of trust and the foundation for all higher learning later. That has to occur. So if you're sacrificing the trust, the bond, the attachment issues for the sake of having a Baby Einstein or computer or videos in the room, you're missing a huge understanding of child development. The space that is necessary to think is being jeopardized. You're immersed. You're outside yourself. You're taken out. When do you have quiet time and unstructured time? When is a child able to be a child and play?

Juliet Schor:
[about banning youth marketing] There's no way we can really make childhood healthy in this country without a government effort. We've done it in other areas. We do it in the area of child safety. We have laws about putting helmets on kids, seat belt laws, tobacco marketing to kids. But somehow we think it's okay to make children fair game for marketers who just want to profit from them, irrespective of the impacts on their health and well-being.

[last lines]

Susan Linn:
We have to look at this as an issue of rights: the rights of children to grow up and the freedom of parents to raise them without being undermined by commercial interests. In that sense, it's like the civil rights movement, or the women's movement, or the environmental movement. I think that we are at the beginning of a growing movement.

Enola Aird:
This is a lot more than about selling products and services. If we care about nourishing the human spirit, if we care about human relationships, then we've got to care about this issue.