Please can you buy it for me? Our children as consumers and what we can do about it
The average American child gets 70 new toys a year. That is a mind-boggling number. When today’s parents were children, that number was much lower. So what is behind this rise in children’s possessions? As with all such questions, there is no simple answer. It seems we are living amidst a “perfect storm” of rising media exposure, changing marketing trends, shifting cultural values, shifting parenting practices, and increased stresses on family time that together have brought us a new phenomenon: the child consumer.
According to Juliet Schor in her book, Born to Buy, children recognize logos by 18 months, ask for products by brand name by 2 years, and by 3 1/2 years they believe that certain brands will reflect well on them as cool, strong, smart, etc. By first grade, they can come up with over 200 name brands. Where does this knowledge come from? Experts say that media exposure is the prime source. Indeed, over a third of preschoolers have a TV in their bedrooms; that percent goes up as children age, with 68% of 8–18-years-olds having a TV in their bedroom. Kids who have TVs in their bedrooms watch an average of 1 1/2 hours more television a day than kids without TVs in their bedrooms. While the average American child spends 900 hours a year in school, he spends 1,500 hours a year watching television. Among preschoolers, time spent using screen media (television, DVDs, videos, videogames, and computers) is more than three times that spent with books.
By 2004, $15 billion was spent annually on advertising and marketing aimed directly at children. That amount is 150 times greater (or 15,000% more) than was spent in 1983. No wonder the child consumer has emerged! In the 1990’s, marketers recognized children as an untapped gold mine: they have money of their own to spend ($24 billion), they influence their parents’ purchasing (to the tune of $300 billion), and they are capable of developing brand loyalty that will last into adulthood. The average American child sees 40,000 television commercials a year. Ninety-seven percent of children 0-6 and 93% of 1-year-olds own items featuring a character from television or videos. The average American child makes 3,000 requests for products a year (for parents who are counting, that averages out to just under 9 requests a day). Marketers count on those requests, and even have a term for it: pester power. Those items with pester power include toys, but also include snack foods, cereals, and drinks. Marketers have been studying children and crafting messages that they know will “grab” children: it’s no wonder that studies have shown that the more advertising a child sees, the more materialistic the child is and the more parent-child conflict there is.
There has been a cultural shift toward materialism that is reflected in our children. Materialism as a life goal is now fully embraced by our culture: just look at the ads at Christmastime that imply you should be buying gifts for yourself. College majors shifted along with this change in values: those leading to higher paying jobs are much more popular now compared with 30 years ago. Jobs in which salaries and status are high are largely preferred over jobs that offer self-fulfillment and/or service to the community. These kinds of large cultural shifts in values are always played out in children; they are, after all, part of the culture.
Parenting today is quite different from what it was even 20 years ago. Parents tend to be older, more educated, and have higher incomes. They also tend to have fewer children. All this means there is more money to spend on each child. Additionally, parenting is no longer about respect and authority; it has become much more about democracy and negotiation. Children typically have a voice in family decisions (the “influence factor” that marketers go after). Parents, driven to a large degree by the cultural pressure around them, want to give their children “the best,” and all the advantages they see them as needing. This translates into more “stuff.” Marketers have seized on this impulse.
Another contribution to the rise of the child as a consumer is changing family structure. Single parent and two-working-parent households have less time to spend together as a family. Parents who don’t have a lot of time for their children are more likely to buy things for their children, probably out of the guilt of not being with them. While getting a gift is nice, it means far more to children to have the actual time together that the parent spends buying the gift. Taking ten minutes when you first get home to reconnect through playing or reading with your child can re-orient everyone and buy you more peaceful time to prepare dinner than a new toy would.
So kids today have more stuff. Why should we care? Children who are materialistic seem to fare worse. More materialistic children like school less and perform worse in school than less materialistic children. Beyond that, as Tim Kasser reports in his book The High Price of Materialism, the more focused a person (even a child) is on material possessions, the more likely he is to suffer from anxiety, depression, low self-esteem, problems in relationships, and general unhappiness. So we’re selling our children a focus on something that appears will bring them more unhappiness than happiness. A recent study showed that people who are materialistic are more dissatisfied with their lives because they tend to have unrealistic expectations and as a result live with envy and anger.
What do children really need? They don’t need seventy new toys in a year. In their thought-provoking book The Irreducible Needs of Children, T. Berry Brazelton and Stanley Greenspan talk about children’s need for ongoing, nurturing relationships as well as limit setting, structure, and appropriate expectations. They also call for everyone to speak out on behalf of all children: in order to protect our future, we all need to think about what is best not just for out own children, but for all children. In Sweden and Norway, it is now illegal to market directly to children: because they are much more susceptible to advertising, children are considered worthy of special protections so that they cannot be exploited. Whereas American children are now viewed as a “market” to “own,” in the language of advertisers, isn’t it refreshing to imagine a country which instead protects the vulnerable, and views its children as precious treasure rather than full of treasure to plunder?
If you’d like to shut down the creation of a child consumer at your house, try some of these tips:
Turn off the TV:
when no one is watching, don’t have it on as background noise; set limits on how much TV your kids watch and stick to the limits. Having a token system, where children are given a certain number of 1/2 hour tokens a week and then turn them in when they choose to watch television, is one way of doing this.
Teach your children about advertising and marketing:
point out commercials to young children so they learn to distinguish them from movies and TV shows; point out how marketers are trying to “get” them—studies show that kids want products less when they understand that a commercial is trying to persuade them to ask for it or buy it. Also, talk with children about the differences they notice between an advertised product and what you really get.
Talk with your kids about what they see on TV:
advertising, in particular, teaches children that buying is good and will make them happy. You may want to begin an on-going conversation about self-fulfillment and where it comes from (having meaningful relationships, working at something, achieving a goal you’ve been striving for, caring for others, giving) and where it does not come from (materialism and buying more and more things).
Turn down the expectations for “stuff:”
I told my children that they would each be receiving five presents for Christmas; having been warned in advance, they were as delighted as ever on Christmas morning because each present had been carefully chosen and fit a need or desire just right.
Watch yourself:
parents who are focused on material possessions are more likely to have children who are. We are always models for our children in what we do—even in what we want. So when I noticed my children looking through catalogs, I realized it was time for me to cut it out.
Make family outings something other than trips to the mall or the store:
find fun ways of being together that don’t revolve around buying things. Try a picnic, a hike, a bike ride—old-fashioned pleasures are much less focused on “things.”
Help your child make good purchases:
by age 4, children can be ready for an allowance. Give each child a dollar a week, and give it to them in advance, at the first of every month. This way they have enough money to make a good purchase, instead of buying lots of little things they don’t necessarily want. When they first start buying things, kids do need to experiment and learn from their mistakes—if you buy a mini gumball machine at the dollar store and it breaks in an hour, you’ll consider quality along with appeal in your next purchase. You can also give them the opportunity to think about the purchase and come back later if they still want it. Often, they will decide they don’t want it after all.
Foster your children’s creativity:
the more a toy does (moves, talks, beeps, etc.), the less the child has to do, and the lower the “play value” of the toy. Buy your kids simple toys that are open-ended (like blocks, art supplies, play-dough and dolls). Studies have shown that kids play more creatively with less structured toys. Creative play is more satisfying to children: a few good toys will keep a child’s interest longer than a lot of junky or too-structured toys and will reduce their desire for more. Children will also play longer with open-ended toys, helping them fill time, not watch TV, and not need more toys or “something to do.”
Realize that you can’t completely knock out materialism
wanting things and focusing on buying and having is a method for coping with uncertainty and self-doubt. It is also a natural part of the tendency to compare ourselves to others—and this is a normal part of child development, beginning in the end of the preschool years and peaking in junior high school. You can teach children to make fair comparisons (to others in comparable situations), rather than to compare themselves to remote people and ideas (like people on TV, movie stars, or even a generalized “other”). People who make fair comparisons are happier with their lives.
Printed in the Family Post: Spring Issue 2007