PARENTING
Helping parents resist the siren song of marketers. by Valerie Weaven-Zercher
The branding of childhood is almost clich茅 by now. Who hasn't heard the statistics? Kids recognize logos by 18 months old. The typical first-grader can name 200 brands. The average American kid watches 40,000 commercials a year. The corporate takeover of childhood is so evident that even Parents, a glossy magazine chockablock with advertisements, can publish-with no trace of irony-an article subtitled "How Corporations Turn Our Kids into Consumers."
Less examined until recently, however, are the ways parents themselves have become marketing targets. The increase in marketing to children can actually distract parents from seeing how businesses target them directly, writes journalist Pamela Paul, author of Parenting, Inc. Indeed, long before the child in the shopping cart can point to the SpongeBob fruit snacks or beg for the Cinderella bed sheets-in fact, even before he or she is born-parents' desire to raise safe, healthy, smart, and happy offspring is being rigorously studied and engineered. The "mom market" is estimated to be $1.7 trillion annually, according to Paul, with the toy market aimed at babies between birth and age 2 totaling more than $700 million Juicy Couture Charm Bracelet a year.
If numbers aren't proof enough that a new era of parenthood consumption has dawned, a visit to a baby or children's superstore should suffice. There you'll find videos to make your baby a genius, $150 diaper pails, luxury strollers, and crib mobiles operated by remote control. One baby superstore chain has stores containing more than 20,000 products. Then there are the services that accompany the burgeoning raft of consumer goods: baby sign-language classes, toddler gyms, and baby-name consultants.
Walking through Babies R Us after reading Paul's book or jour- nalist Susan Gregory Thomas' Buy, Buy Baby (both of which investi- gate the rise in marketing to par- ents), it's easy to look askance at such overkill. Yet even those who consider themselves critical of consumer culture sometimes find the anxiety of early parenthood destabilizing. There's a "subtle form of persua- sion enforced by not only mar- keters but also by colleagues and friends," says Katherine Turpin, assistant professor of religious education at Iliff School of Theology, and a mother of three who has written about branding and faith. Even parents who shelter themselves from commercial media can find it "hard to resist the attractions of consumer culture," Turpin says, "especially when they are layered over with a middle-class ethos of obtaining 'what's best for our kids.'"
But you don't have to be middle-class to be vulnerable to advertisers' claims. Thomas says that many electronic toys for young children are marketed to working-class parents-especially parents who speak English as a second language-who may think they aren't qualified to offer their kids a sufficiently Fake Tissot Watches "educational" start in life. "They become convinced that the toy itself becomes the teacher, that there's value in giving the toy that role," Thomas says.
CONSIDERING THE EVIDENCE, it is tempting to view marketers as corporate bullies out to hoodwink anxious parents. In an era of Web-based viral marketing, however, that portrayal is not entirely accurate. These days, parents who blog often review products, such as the latest baby sunglasses or personalized onesies, and corporations are only too happy to provide them with free product samples. Then there's network marketing, which follows in the tradition of Tupperware parties. Parents-usually mothers-sign up as consultants ; with companies to sell baby cloth- j ing or educational toys to their 路 friends, relatives, and neighbors, s Thomas says both phenomena are j due to young parents' tendency to \cf0 depend on friends rather than! family for advice and support. 脥 "Gen Xers tend to be very suspicious of authority," Thomas says. "They take their cues from their peers."
While the most effective route to a Gen-X parent's purse is through her Gen Xers are susceptible to parent-targeted marketing via more traditional advertising venues as well, "We were the first generation to grow under uncensored, unprotected Thomas says. "When inner life is so informed and shaped by the rubric of marketing, it's almost impossible to disentangle yourself." In Buy, Buy Baby, Thomas quotes fellow journalist John Seabrook, who has written about the "marketer within"-the voice of marketers that many Gen Xers internalized during a childhood bathed in television commercials. "Marketing no longer seems like an alien, external, manipulative force," Seabrook said. "Rather, it's just part of your world."
Gen-X parents may be particularly vulnerable to marketers for a more psychological reason as well. "Marketers say Generation X shops compulsively to stem their childhood fears of abandonment," Thomas writes in her book, citing her own childhood as a latchkey kid who watched TV in an empty house with her brother every afternoon. "To reverse that legacy, Gen Xers overstimulate, overschedule, overshop for, and over-obsess about their own children."