Thursday, August 24, 2006
While some children are starving others are shopping
Juliet B. Schor, the author of “Born to Buy: The Commercialized Child and the New Consumer Culture” (Scribner), ascribes children’s heightened acquisitiveness partly to increasingly aggressive marketing. “The very insidious thing about this,” she said, “is that kids get the message that they need this product — whether it’s a sugared cereal or the latest fashion trend — to be O.K., to be cool. That is potentially interfering with their intrinsic sense of self. Kids from the very beginning are learning that your self-worth depends on what you have and how the market evaluates you.”
We're breeding little consumers.
