Born to Buy is a throughly researched book on how corporations are marketing to young children in often harmful and shocking ways. Companies have found that the most effective way to get families to buy things is to bypass the parents and market directly to the kids--whom the parents give in to to appease them and "make them happy." And it is working.
- Children now are shoppers. They spend "as much time shopping as visiting, twice as much time shopping as reading or going to church, and five times as much as playing outdoors." p. 31
- The average American child spends 5 hours and 29 minutes a day with media--whose sole purpose is to get them to buys products. p. 33 (This is one of the best reasons to limit media consumption by kids. Stop feeding them advertising that makes them want to buy things that they don't need.)
- Children are increasingly materialistic. "More than a third of all children aged nine to fourteen would rather spend time buying things than doing almost anything else, more than a third 'really like kids that have very special games or clothes,' more than half agree that 'when you grow up, the more money you have, the happier you are,' and 62 percent say that 'the only kind of job I want when I grow up is one that gets me a lot of money.'" p. 37
- "Cool kids" are found in schools by companies and given free products so that they can start buying trends amongst their peers.
- Young girls are sexualized, dressed in clothing inappropriate for their age. Cool is associated with older kids, and so older kids are mixed in with younger kids in commercials to make younger kids believe that a product is cool.
- Child psychologists are hired to determine kids' fears and dreams, and products are sold claiming to fill these emotional needs of belonging, overcoming fear, finding friends, etc.
- Parents, teachers, and authority figures are portrayed as idiots and killjoys. Only the all wise, all caring corporation understands kids.
While corporations obviously bear much blame for this shameless marketing, parents are culpable as well, as 70% report that they are responsive to their children's "nagging" to buy products. This is often due to a lack of time to spend with kids and the resultant guilt or harried parents who find it easier to buy something than to tell their kids no and deal with a fit.
I'm hardly one that wants to raise my kids in a bubble. We seek to help our kids navigate real life from a Christian perspective. Our kids (age 10 and 6) watch movies, but we limit their live television watching. We record most of the shows that they watch, which allows us to fast forward through commercials. Parents often watch for inappropriate moral content and seek to protect their kids from this. But are we protecting our kids from marketing and materialism?
What do you think of corporations' marketing to children? How should parents respond to this?
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