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Childhood for sale?

Article Excerpt
IF there is one place where the culture wars seem to be reaching a truce of sorts, that place is the battlefield of childhood. Just about everyone, aside, perhaps, from the producers at MTV or the "creatives" who design blood-spattered video games, is fed up with the entertainment-industrial complex and its nefarious grip on their children. They are disgusted by mass culture's "wardrobe malfunctions," not only the ones they see on TV, but those in their children's closets. They are exhausted by the incessant whine of "gimme" that sours every family outing. So vulgar and so insidious is the commercial culture that surrounds children that it has prompted even some progressive academics to experience nostalgia for childhood past.

New books by two such writers, Born to Buy: The Commercialized Child and the New Consumer Culture [dagger] by Juliet Schor, an economist at Boston College and best-selling author of The Overworked American, and Consuming Kids: The Hostile Takeover of Childhood [double dagger] by Susan Linn, an instructor at Harvard University Medical School and director of the Media Center at Judge Baker Children's Center in Boston, set out to describe this tawdry new landscape of childhood and to offer corrective action in the name of a more wholesome upbringing. Writing for a popular audience, though with differing degrees of success, they make the case that corporate interests have polluted and transformed the environment of childhood. Some of their lament might be overstated--Linn, in particular, has a tendency to write as if she finds her own indignation against corporate greed more compelling than a strong argument. But their general thesis that there are a lot of corporate CEOs and marketers who are not loyal to your side in the combat zone of family life is hard to dispute.

IT was not always like this, of course. Though catalogues and magazines hawked children's toys and books to mothers as early as the mid nineteenth century, it wasn't until fairly...

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