It’s the holiday season, the time to spend time with friends and family making the memories we’ll treasure forever. It’s also the time we are herded into the stores to spend about 25% of the year’s total personal spending. As we flit 
from store to store deciding which mass-produced item best expresses our individuality, maybe it’s a good thing to think about how the consumer culture has grown up and how it is now actively targeting our children.
“Born to Buy: The Commercialized Child and the New Consumer Culture” by Juliet B. Schor
Ads aimed at kids are virtually everywhere — in classrooms and textbooks, on the Internet, even at slumber parties and the playground. Product placement and other innovations have introduced more subtle advertising to movies and television. Companies are enlisting children as guerrilla marketers, targeting their friends and families. Even trusted social institutions such as the Girl Scouts are teaming up with marketers. Drawing on her own survey research and unprecedented access to the advertising industry, New York Times bestselling author and leading cultural and economic authority Juliet Schor examines how a marketing effort of vast size, scope, and effectiveness has created “commercialized children.”
Schor, author of The Overworked American and The Overspent American, looks at the broad implications of this strategy. Sophisticated advertising strategies convince kids that products are necessary to their social survival. Ads affect not just what they want to buy, but who they think they are and how they feel about themselves. Based on long-term analysis, Schor reverses the conventional notion of causality: it’s not just that problem kids become overly involved in the values of consumerism; it’s that kids who are overly involved in the values of consumerism become problem kids. In this revelatory and crucial book, Schor also provides guidelines for parents and teachers. What is at stake is the emotional and social well-being of our children.
(Please click here for an archive of our past spotlighted books)
