In Juliet B. SchorÆs (2004) Born To Buy: The Commercialized Child and the New Consumer Culture, the author criticizes the growing tendency of ôpredatoryö marketers who target grade-school-age children. Schor (2004, p. 9) maintains that ôKids and teens are now the epicenter of American consumer culture.ö Schor argues that aggressive marketers have begun to bypass appeals to parents in favor of directly targeting young children, including setting up peers to sell products to friends, using public education sponsorship contracts to offer products to children in school, and other methods to get children to buy, buy, buy.
One of SchorÆs main themes is that children who are exposed to aggressive marketing and heavy consumerism are harmed by the process. Because of their youth and inability to resist marketing appeals or even distinguish them from programming, Schor (2004, p. 166) maintains, based on her study of 300 children, that children exposed to aggressive marketing are more likely to suffer psychological ailments, ôThe children who are more involved in consumer culture are more depressed, more anxious, have lower self-esteem, and suffer from more psychosomatic complaints.ö This cause-and-effect relationship disturbs Schor, who argues that the mixture of materialism, consumerism, and commercialization is producing a generation of children with no values of what remains important in life other than material acquisition.
Schor (2004) also argues that predatory marketers now go around parents to get directly at children. The methods and tactics used by such marketers are often so subtle or covert that few parents are even aware of their existence. For instanbe, a good deal of marketing is conducted on the Internet or even in public schools. A lack of education funding leads to pacts between schools and marketers that are passed off as having intellectual or educational value. For lucrative sums of money, companies...