Children And Consumer Culture In American Society

Author : Lisa Jacobson
Publisher : Bloomsbury Publishing USA
ISBN 13 : 0313015023
Total Pages : 217 pages
Book Rating : 4.21/5 ( download)

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Download or read book Children and Consumer Culture in American Society written by Lisa Jacobson and published by Bloomsbury Publishing USA. This book was released on 2007-12-30 with total page 217 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Children play a crucial role in today's economy. According to some estimates, children spend or influence the spending of up to $500 billion annually. Journalists, sociologists, and media reformers often present mass marketing toward children as a recent fall from grace, but the roots of children's consumerism — and the anxieties over it — date back more than a century. Throughout the twentieth century, a wide variety of groups — including advertisers, retailers, parents, social reformers, child experts, public schools, and children themselves — helped to socialize children as consumers and struggled to define the proper boundaries of the market. The essays and documents in this volume illuminate the historical circumstances and cultural conflicts that helped to produce, shape, and legitimize children's consumerism. Focusing primarily on the period from the Gilded Age through the twentieth century, this book examines how and why children and adolescents acquired new economic roles as consumers, and how these new roles both reflected and produced dynamic changes in family life and the culture of capitalism. This volume also reveals how children and adolescents have used consumer goods to define personal identities and peer relationships — sometimes in opposition to marketers' expectations and parental intentions.

Author : Lisa Jacobson
Publisher : Columbia University Press
ISBN 13 : 0231113897
Total Pages : 319 pages
Book Rating : 4.92/5 ( download)

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Download or read book Raising Consumers written by Lisa Jacobson and published by Columbia University Press. This book was released on 2004 with total page 319 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: In the present electronic torrent of MTV and teen flicks, Nintendo and Air Jordan advertisements, consumer culture is an unmistakably important--and controversial--dimension of modern childhood. Historians and social commentators have typically assumed that the child consumer became significant during the postwar television age. But the child consumer was already an important phenomenon in the early twentieth century. The family, traditionally the primary institution of child socialization, began to face an array of new competitors who sought to put their own imprint on children's acculturation to consumer capitalism. Advertisers, children's magazine publishers, public schools, child experts, and children's peer groups alternately collaborated with, and competed against, the family in their quest to define children's identities. At stake in these conflicts and collaborations was no less than the direction of American consumer society--would children's consumer training rein in hedonistic excesses or contribute to the spread of hollow, commercial values? Not simply a new player in the economy, the child consumer became a lightning rod for broader concerns about the sanctity of the family and the authority of the market in modern capitalist culture. Lisa Jacobson reveals how changing conceptions of masculinity and femininity shaped the ways Americans understood the virtues and vices of boy and girl consumers--and why boys in particular emerged as the heroes of the new consumer age. She also analyzes how children's own behavior, peer culture, and emotional investment in goods influenced the dynamics of the new consumer culture. Raising Consumers is a provocative examination of the social, economic, and cultural forces that produced and ultimately legitimized a distinctive children's consumer culture in the early twentieth century.

Author : Jennifer Hill
Publisher : Bloomsbury Publishing USA
ISBN 13 :
Total Pages : 346 pages
Book Rating : 4.47/5 ( download)

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Download or read book How Consumer Culture Controls Our Kids written by Jennifer Hill and published by Bloomsbury Publishing USA. This book was released on 2015-11-02 with total page 346 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This gripping book considers the history, techniques, and goals of child-targeted consumer campaigns and examines children's changing perceptions of what commodities they "need" to be valued and value themselves. In this critique of America's consumption-based society, author Jennifer Hill chronicles the impact of consumer culture on children—from the evolution of childhood play to a child's self-perception as a consumer to the consequences of this generation's repeated media exposure to violence. Hill proposes that corporations, eager to tap into a multibillion-dollar market, use the power of advertising and the media to mold children's thoughts and behaviors. The book features vignettes with teenagers explaining, in their own words, how advertising determines their needs, wants, and self-esteem. An in-depth analysis of this research reveals the influence of media on a young person's desire to conform, shows how broadcasted depictions of beauty distort the identities of children and teens, and uncovers corporate agendas for manipulating behavior in the younger generation. The work concludes with the position that corporations are shaping children to be efficient consumers but, in return, are harming their developing young minds and physical well-being.

Author : Elizabeth M. Liew Siew Chin
Publisher : U of Minnesota Press
ISBN 13 : 9780816635108
Total Pages : 278 pages
Book Rating : 4.02/5 ( download)

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Download or read book Purchasing Power written by Elizabeth M. Liew Siew Chin and published by U of Minnesota Press. This book was released on 2001 with total page 278 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: What does it mean to be young, poor, and black in our consumer culture? Are black children "brand-crazed consumer addicts" willing to kill each other over a pair of the latest Nike Air Jordans or Barbie backpack? In this first in-depth account of the consumer lives of poor and working-class black children, Elizabeth Chin enters the world of children living in hardship in order to understand the ways they learn to manage living poor in a wealthy society. To move beyond the stereotypical images of black children obsessed with status symbols, Chin spent two years interviewing poor children in New Haven, Connecticut, about where and how they spend their money. An alternate image of the children emerges, one that puts practicality ahead of status in their purchasing decisions. On a twenty-dollar shopping spree with Chin, one boy has to choose between a walkie-talkie set and an X-Men figure. In one of the most painful moments of her research, Chin watches as Davy struggles with his decision. He finally takes the walkie-talkie set, a toy that might be shared with his younger brother. Through personal anecdotes and compelling stories ranging from topics such as Christmas and birthday gifts, shopping malls, Toys-R-Us, neighborhood convenience shops, school lunches, ethnically correct toys, and school supplies, Chin critically examines consumption as a medium through which social inequalities -- most notably of race, class, and gender -- are formed, experienced, imposed, and resisted. Along the way she acknowledges the profound constraints under which the poor and working class must struggle in their daily lives.

Author : Molly Rosner
Publisher : Rutgers University Press
ISBN 13 : 197882209X
Total Pages : 154 pages
Book Rating : 4.92/5 ( download)

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Download or read book Playing with History written by Molly Rosner and published by Rutgers University Press. This book was released on 2021-05-14 with total page 154 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Since the advent of the American toy industry, children’s cultural products have attempted to teach and sell ideas of American identity. By examining cultural products geared towards teaching children American history, Playing With History highlights the changes and constancies in depictions of the American story and ideals of citizenship over the last one hundred years. This book examines political and ideological messages sold to children throughout the twentieth century, tracing the messages conveyed by racist toy banks, early governmental interventions meant to protect the toy industry, influences and pressures surrounding Cold War stories of the western frontier, the fractures visible in the American story at a mid-century history themed amusement park. The study culminates in a look at the successes and limitations of the American Girl Company empire.

Author : David Buckingham
Publisher : John Wiley & Sons
ISBN 13 : 0745637442
Total Pages : 282 pages
Book Rating : 4.40/5 ( download)

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Download or read book The Material Child written by David Buckingham and published by John Wiley & Sons. This book was released on 2013-04-26 with total page 282 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Children today are growing up in an increasingly commercialised world. But should we see them as victims of manipulative marketing, or as competent participants in consumer culture? The Material Child provides a comprehensive critical overview of debates about children’s changing engagement with the commercial market. It moves from broad overviews of the theory and history of children’s consumption to insightful case studies of key areas such as obesity, sexualisation, children’s broadcasting and education. In the process, it challenges much of the received wisdom about the effects of advertising and marketing, arguing for a more balanced account that locates children’s consumption within a broader analysis of social relationships, for example within the family and the peer group. While refuting the popular view of children as incompetent and vulnerable consumers that is adopted by many campaigners, it also rejects the easy celebration of consumption as an expression of children’s power and autonomy. Written by one of the leading international scholars in the field, The Material Child will be of interest to students, researchers and policy-makers, as well as parents, teachers and others who work directly with children.

Author : Mary M. Doyle Roche
Publisher : Rowman & Littlefield
ISBN 13 : 9780739129470
Total Pages : 162 pages
Book Rating : 4.73/5 ( download)

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Download or read book Children, Consumerism, and the Common Good written by Mary M. Doyle Roche and published by Rowman & Littlefield. This book was released on 2009 with total page 162 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Children, Consumerism, and the Common Good explores the impact of consumer culture on the lives of children in the United States and globally, focusing on two phenomena: advertising to children and child labor. Christian communities have a critical role to play in securing the well-being of children and challenging the cultural trends that undermine that well-being. Exploring themes in the tradition of Catholic social teaching, Mary M. Doyle Roche argues that children have a claim on the fruits of our common life and should participate in that life according to their age and ability. Roche utilizes the principle of the common good to analyze children's participation in the market and suggests opportunities for resistance and transformation in the context of the consumerism that pervades everyday life. Book jacket.

Author : Allison Pugh
Publisher : Univ of California Press
ISBN 13 : 9780520943391
Total Pages : 322 pages
Book Rating : 4.92/5 ( download)

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Download or read book Longing and Belonging written by Allison Pugh and published by Univ of California Press. This book was released on 2009-03-04 with total page 322 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Even as they see their wages go down and their buying power decrease, many parents are still putting their kids' material desires first. These parents struggle with how to handle children's consumer wants, which continue unabated despite the economic downturn. And, indeed, parents and other adults continue to spend billions of dollars on children every year. Why do children seem to desire so much, so often, so soon, and why do parents capitulate so readily? To determine what forces lie behind the onslaught of Nintendo Wiis and Bratz dolls, Allison J. Pugh spent three years observing and interviewing children and their families. In Longing and Belonging: Parents, Children, and Consumer Culture, Pugh teases out the complex factors that contribute to how we buy, from lunchroom conversations about Game Boys to the stark inequalities facing American children. Pugh finds that children's desires stem less from striving for status or falling victim to advertising than from their yearning to join the conversation at school or in the neighborhood. Most parents respond to children's need to belong by buying the particular goods and experiences that act as passports in children's social worlds, because they sympathize with their children's fear of being different from their peers. Even under financial constraints, families prioritize children "feeling normal". Pugh masterfully illuminates the surprising similarities in the fears and hopes of parents and children from vastly different social contexts, showing that while corporate marketing and materialism play a part in the commodification of childhood, at the heart of the matter is the desire to belong.

Author : Lawrence B. Glickman
Publisher : Cornell University Press
ISBN 13 : 9780801484865
Total Pages : 436 pages
Book Rating : 4.63/5 ( download)

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Download or read book Consumer Society in American History written by Lawrence B. Glickman and published by Cornell University Press. This book was released on 1999 with total page 436 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This volume offers the most comprehensive and incisive exploration of American consumer history to date, spanning the four centuries from the colonial era to the present.

Author : Daniel Thomas Cook
Publisher : NYU Press
ISBN 13 : 1479810266
Total Pages : 228 pages
Book Rating : 4.60/5 ( download)

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Download or read book The Moral Project of Childhood written by Daniel Thomas Cook and published by NYU Press. This book was released on 2020-02-18 with total page 228 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Examines the Protestant origins of motherhood and the child consumer Throughout history, the responsibility for children’s moral well-being has fallen into the laps of mothers. In The Moral Project of Childhood, the noted childhood studies scholar Daniel Thomas Cook illustrates how mothers in the nineteenth-century United States meticulously managed their children’s needs and wants, pleasures and pains, through the material world so as to produce the “child” as a moral project. Drawing on a century of religiously-oriented child care advice in women’s periodicals, he examines how children ultimately came to be understood by mothers—and later, by commercial actors—as consumers. From concerns about taste, to forms of discipline and punishment, to play and toys, Cook delves into the social politics of motherhood, historical anxieties about childhood, and early children’s consumer culture. An engaging read, The Moral Project of Childhood provides a rich cultural history of childhood.