Review: Consuming Kids: The Hostile Takeover of Childhood

By Susan Linn. New Press, 288 pages, $24.95.

The cleverly ambiguous title of Susan Linn's new book, Consuming Kids: The Hostile Takeover of Childhood, illustrates how differently one can approach the subject of advertising geared toward children. While marketers see kids as a new generation of consumers, Linn, associate director of the Media Center at Judge Baker's Children Center in Boston, fears kids are becoming products to be consumed by marketers. She dives right into the shocking proportions of this multibillion-dollar industry that has it all – even its own award celebration honoring the most profitable manipulation of children. She gives a vivid sense of the scale of the commercial messages targeted to children, from hospitals handing out Teletubby gift packs to the corporate-sponsored newscasts of Channel One, which reaches 12,000 schools.

Linn argues that marketing to children is bad for almost every conceivable reason, among them because it sexualizes young girls, promotes materialism, violence, and obesity, and decreases creativity and critical thinking. This last, she warns, even poses a direct threat to democracy. The book is sometimes interspersed with letters from angry parents, lending her argument a sense of urgency. While the advertising industry often tries to lay the blame on parents for not preventing the negative effects of media, she observes that "one family is hard-pressed to successfully combat a $15 billion industry." Most of the agents of advertising Linn describes never question whether what they do is actually good for the children; they're solely concerned with whether it's effective.

In a structure typical of political books, she spends most of her pages outlining the problem and then offers attempts at solutions at the very end. This is a near hopeless cause in a United States rooted in commercialism, however. She constantly complains children's media don't have the kids' well-being at heart, but neither do the adult media have adults' well-being at heart. In the United States, TV, for example, was not set up to educate or enlighten (as in many other Western countries) but to deliver audiences to advertisers. Media for kids just amplifies this problem. (David Moisl)