Childhood And Markets

This book explores how young children and new families are located in the consumer world of affluent societies. The author assesses the way in which the value of infants and monetary value in markets are realized together, and examines how the meanings of childhood are enacted in the practices, narratives and materialities of contemporary markets. These meanings formulate what is important in the care of young children, creating moralities that impact not only on new parents, but also circumscribe the possibilities for monetary value creation. Three main understandings of early childhood - those of love, protection and purification - and their interrelationships are covered, and illustrated with examples including food, feeding tools, nappies, travel systems and toys. The book concludes by re-examining the relationship between adulthood and the cultural value of young children, and by discussing the implications of the ways markets address young children, also examines the realities of older children in consumer culture. Childhood and Markets will be of interest to students and scholars of sociology, childhood studies, anthropology, cultural studies, media studies, business studies and marketing.

This book sheds light on new research related to welfare state, child care policies, and small children's everyday lives in institutions in Europe. In uniting recent social childhood research, welfare perspectives and historical and comparative approaches, the book explores institutionalization as a feature of the modern child's life.

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.

Neoliberalism, with its worldview of competition, choice and calculation, its economisation of everything, and its will to govern has ‘sunk its roots deep’ into Early Childhood Education and Care. This book considers its deeply detrimental impacts upon young children, families, settings and the workforce. Through an exploration of possibilities for resistance and refusal, and reflection on the significance of the coronavirus pandemic, Roberts-Holmes and Moss provide hope that neoliberalism’s current hegemony can be successfully contested. The book provides a critical introduction to neoliberalism and three closely related and influential concepts – Human Capital theory, Public Choice theory and New Public Management – as well as an overview of the impact of neoliberalism on compulsory education, in particular through the Global Education Reform Movement. With its main focus on Early Childhood Education and Care, this book argues that while neoliberalism is a very powerful force, it is ‘deeply problematic, eminently resistible and eventually replaceable’ – and that there are indeed alternatives. Neoliberalism and Early Childhood Education is an insightful supplement to the studies of students and researchers in Early Childhood Education and Sociology of Education, and is also highly relevant to policy makers.

In recent years children have become an increasingly important consumer market, and there is growing concern about the 'commercialisation' of childhood. This book sheds light on these debates, offering new empirical data and challenging critical perspectives on children's engagement with consumer culture from a wide range of international settings.

"This book has three parts: (1) an overview; (2) myths and realities about children as a market (chapters 1-8); and (3) myths and realities about children's responses to marketing behavoiur (chapters 9-21). The first eight chapters describe myths and their realities regarding children as a market segment. I demonstrate the enormous market potential children hold todday is far beyond the penny-candy potential once attributed to them. I characterize children as not one but three markets - a current market spennding their own money on their own wants and needs; an influence market spending mom's and dad's money on their own wants and needs; and a future market for all goods and services. In the third part of the book - chapters 9 through 21 - I detail children's reactions to marketing, specifically, their responses to stores, products, including social products, brands, advertising, promotion, public relations, and packaging." -Preface.

This Little Kiddy Went to Market investigates the way that corporations are targeting younger children with a barrage of advertising and marketing designed to turn them into hyper consumers who define themselves by what they have rather than who they are. The book argues that school reforms, driven by corporate needs, are largely to blame. It be...

The children's and teenagers' market has become increasingly significant as young people have become more affluent and have an ever growing disposable income. Children as Consumers traces the stages of consumer development through which children pass and examines the key sources of influence upon young people's consumer socialisation. It examines: * the kinds of things young people consume * how they use their money * how they respond to different types of advertising * whether they need to be protected through special legislation and regulation * market research techniques that work well with young people. Children as Consumers will be useful to students of psychology, sociology, business and media studies, as well as professionals in advertising and marketing.