Companies Generating Young Consumers
Take a good look at your 10-year-old. Chances are, she looks like Maja Kahn, profiled in Newsweek’s cover story, “The Tween Years”: a tight blue tank top, dark blue flare-legged pants and nine necklaces to match the four earrings in her ears. If she’s like many other tweens, she wears sexy lingerie, daubing herself with scented body oil that bears such labels as “Follow Me Boy.”
Even 10 years ago, it wasn’t like that. “Act your age,” parents admonished grade-schoolers - meaning, drop your babyish misbehavior.
Now, to parents who seem more and more impotent, it means something more wistful, such as: “Please don’t act Posh Spice’s age.”
By 12, the words children use to describe themselves in focus groups include “flirtatious, sexy, trendy, cool.” Fifty years ago, says Newsweek, when girls talked of self-improvement, they meant doing good works or improving their grades. Now, “in adolescent girls’ private diaries and journals, the body is a consistent preoccupation, second only to peer relationships.”
The Toy Manufacturers Association reports the audience for toys now maxes out at age 10, not 14. “Even 7- and 8-year-olds are scorning Barbie,” reports Kay Hymowitz, a Manhattan Institute senior fellow and author of the provocative new Free Press Book, “Ready or Not: Why Treating Children as Small Adults Undermines Their Future - and Ours.”
How did this happen?
On the one hand, says Hymowitz, it is the result of marketers doing what marketers do. If that means undermining “childhood by turning children into teen consumers,” well, then, so be it. The creepiest part of her book is the unself-conscious pronouncement of marketers about the importance of seducing your kids:
“It isn’t enough just to advertise on television,” one ad executive explains. “You’ve got to reach the kids throughout their day - in school, as they’re shopping at the mall … or at the movies. You’ve got to become part of the fabric of their lives.” When PBS introduced Teletubbies (under the absurd excuse that toddlers need education to become comfortable with technology), marketers were thrilled because heretofore “the 1-to-2-year-old niche hasn’t been filled very well.” The 1-to-2-year-old niche?
As Hymowitz says, although “no one has ever explained how it could possibly be educational for babies to watch television,” it is clear that toddlers who spot ‘Tubbies on bottles or bibs “will cry for them and PBS will rake it in.”
On the other hand, the triumph of the marketers was made possible by experts who have trained parents to see their role as “allies, trainers, partners, friends, facilitators, co-learners and advocates.” Anything, writes Hymowitz, but authorities on how to live life.
The price children pay was suggested most poignantly by the president of the Cartoon Network, who, when asking kids to suggest contest prizes, was amazed at the number who spoke not of an all-expense-paid trip to Disneyland, but of spending a “whole day with my mom or dad.”
Kids, not Jerry Falwell, are now telling marketers they don’t like to see cartoons in which their fragile, elusive, uncertain parents are mocked.
Parents such as Allie’s mother, who sympathizes with pressure on her 10-year-old daughter, what with getting up at 6:30 and going to sleep by 11 after a full day of classes, homework, skating lessons, TV-watching, phone-talking and violin practice. When she thinks of “how much (Allie’s) been exposed to, it just amazes me,” Mom told Newsweek. “I’m not worried, though. I don’t look at her and say, `Oh, it’s too bad she’s not a child anymore.’ I just say to myself, `She’s a child of the ‘90s.”’
With such a child-mother of the ‘60s at her side - a best friend but not bedtime-setter - what choice does Allie really have?