Lunchbox Hegemony? Kids & the Marketplace, Then & Now

If you want to catch a glimpse of the gears of capitalism grinding away in America today, you don't need to go to a factory or a business office.

Instead, observe a child and parent in a store. That high-pitched whining you'll hear coming from the cereal aisle is more than just the pleadings of single kid bent on getting a box of Fruit Loops into the shopping cart. It is the sound of thousands of hours of market research, of an immense coordination of people, ideas and resources, of decades of social and economic change all rolled into a single, "Mommy, pleeease!"

"If it's within [kids'] reach, they will touch it, and if they touch it, there's at least a chance that Mom or Dad will relent and buy it," writes retail anthropologist, Paco Underhill. The ideal placement of popular books and videos, he continues, should be on the lower shelves "so the little ones can grab Barney or Teletubbies unimpeded by Mom or Dad, who possibly take a dim view of hypercommercialized critters."

Any child market specialist worth their consulting fee knows that the parental "dim view" of a product most often gives way to relentless pestering by a kid on a quest to procure the booty of popular culture. Officially, marketers refer to the annoyance as children's "influence" on purchases, unofficially it is the "nag factor." The distinction is important because businesses are discouraged from explicitly inciting children to nag their parents into buying something, according to advertising guidelines from the Better Business Bureau.

Do Kids Use Products, or Vice Versa?

One strain of academic thought asserts that media and consumer products are just cultural materials, and children are free to make use of them as they will, imparting their own meanings to cartoons, toys, games, etc.

There's little doubt that children creatively interpret their surroundings, including consumer goods. They color outside the lines, make up rules to games, invent their own stories and make imaginary cars fly. If we lose sight of children's ability to exercise personal agency and to transform the meanings imposed on them by advertising (as well as those imparted by parents), we will forever be stuck in the belief structure which grants near-omnipotence to the corporate realm.

Granting children magical transformative powers of the imagination, however, only further romanticizes an already oversentimentalized view of childhood. Children are human. Imaginations can be colonized. The materials they use to create their own meanings are pre-programmed with brand identification, with gender, race and class clichïàs and with standard good-bad dichotomies. And, as any marketer will tell you, exposure to target market is nine-tenths of the brand battle.

It's Not Just the Corporations

How has this kid consumer world come to be? Easy explanations abound, from spoiled children to over-indulgent or unengaged parents. Easiest of all is to accuse corporations of turning kids into blank-faced, videogame-playing, violence-saturated, sugar-mongering, overweight, docile citizens of the future. Pundits and politicians from far-left to far-right have found ideologically comfortable soapboxes from which to voice their opposition to the corporate incursion into childhood.

Soulless advertisers and rapacious marketers alone, however, cannot account for the explosion of the kids' 4-12 market, which has just about tripled since 1990, now raking in around $30 billion annually, according to latest estimates.

Don't get me wrong, the target of the critique is on track. What is troubling, though, is not just that kids demand goods by brand name as early as two years old. It's the habit of thought which conveniently separates children from economic processes, placing these spheres in opposition to one another, and thereby allowing anyone -- including corporations -- to position themselves on the side of "innocent" children and against "bad" companies or products.