The Commodification Of Childhood

Download or read book The Commodification of Childhood written by Daniel Thomas Cook and published by Duke University Press. This book was released on 2004-04-20 with total page 230 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: DIVThrough a study of industry publications over much of the century, shows how the U.S. children’s clothing industry produced increasingly refined categories of childhood./div

Download or read book The Commodification of Childhood written by Daniel Thomas Cook and published by Duke University Press. This book was released on 2004-04-20 with total page 223 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: In this revealing social history, Daniel Thomas Cook explores the roots of children’s consumer culture—and the commodification of childhood itself—by looking at the rise, growth, and segmentation of the children’s clothing industry. Cook describes how in the early twentieth century merchants, manufacturers, and advertisers of children’s clothing began to aim commercial messages at the child rather than the mother. Cook situates this fundamental shift in perspective within the broader transformation of the child into a legitimate, individualized, self-contained consumer. The Commodification of Childhood begins with the publication of the children’s wear industry’s first trade journal, The Infants’ Department, in 1917 and extends into the early 1960s, by which time the changes Cook chronicles were largely complete. Analyzing trade journals and other documentary sources, Cook shows how the industry created a market by developing and promulgating new understandings of the “nature,” needs, and motivations of the child consumer. He discusses various ways that discursive constructions of the consuming child were made material: in the creation of separate children’s clothing departments, in their segmentation and layout by age and gender gradations (such as infant, toddler, boys, girls, tweens, and teens), in merchants’ treatment of children as individuals on the retail floor, and in displays designed to appeal directly to children. Ultimately, The Commodification of Childhood provides a compelling argument that any consideration of “the child” must necessarily take into account how childhood came to be understood through, and structured by, a market idiom.

Download or read book The Moral Project of Childhood written by Daniel Thomas Cook and published by NYU Press. This book was released on 2020-02-18 with total page 228 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Examines the Protestant origins of motherhood and the child consumer Throughout history, the responsibility for children’s moral well-being has fallen into the laps of mothers. In The Moral Project of Childhood, the noted childhood studies scholar Daniel Thomas Cook illustrates how mothers in the nineteenth-century United States meticulously managed their children’s needs and wants, pleasures and pains, through the material world so as to produce the “child” as a moral project. Drawing on a century of religiously-oriented child care advice in women’s periodicals, he examines how children ultimately came to be understood by mothers—and later, by commercial actors—as consumers. From concerns about taste, to forms of discipline and punishment, to play and toys, Cook delves into the social politics of motherhood, historical anxieties about childhood, and early children’s consumer culture. An engaging read, The Moral Project of Childhood provides a rich cultural history of childhood.

Download or read book Longing and Belonging written by Allison J. Pugh and published by Univ of California Press. This book was released on 2009-02-02 with total page 321 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: "Even as they see their wages go down and their buying power decrease, many parents are still putting their kids' material desires first. These parents struggle with how to handle children's consumer wants, which continue unabated despite the economic downturn. And, indeed, parents and other adults continue to spend billions of dollars on children every year. Why do children seem to desire so much, so often, so soon, and why do parents capitulate so readily? To determine what forces lie behind the onslaught of Nintendo Wiis and Bratz dolls, Allison J. Pugh spent three years observing and interviewing children and their families. In Longing and Belonging: Parents, Children, and Consumer Culture, Pugh teases out the complex factors that contribute to how we buy, from lunchroom conversations about Game Boys to the stark inequalities facing American children. Pugh finds that children's desires stem less from striving for status or falling victim to advertising than from their yearning to join the conversation at school or in the neighborhood. Most parents respond to children's need to belong by buying the particular goods and experiences that act as passports in children's social worlds, because they sympathize with their children's fear of being different from their peers. Even under financial constraints, families prioritize children "feeling normal". Pugh masterfully illuminates the surprising similarities in the fears and hopes of parents and children from vastly different social contexts, showing that while corporate marketing and materialism play a part in the commodification of childhood, at the heart of the matter is the desire to belong."--pub. desc.

Download or read book The Nineteenth-Century Child and Consumer Culture written by Dennis Denisoff and published by Routledge. This book was released on 2016-12-05 with total page 379 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: During the rise of consumer culture in the nineteenth century, children and childhood were called on to fulfill a range of important roles. In addition to being consumers themselves, the young functioned as both 'goods' to be used and consumed by adults and as proof that middle-class materialist ventures were assisting in the formation of a more ethical society. Children also provided necessary labor and raw material for industry. This diverse collection addresses the roles assigned to children in the context of nineteenth-century consumer culture, at the same time that it remains steadfast in recognizing that the young did not simply exist within adult-articulated cultural contexts but were agents in their formation. Topics include toys and middle-class childhood; boyhood and toy theater; child performers on the Victorian stage; gender, sexuality and consumerism; imperialism in adventure fiction; the idealization of childhood as a form of adult entertainment and self-flattery; the commercialization of orphans; and the economics behind formulations of child poverty. Together, the essays demonstrate the rising investment both children and adults made in commodities as sources of identity and human worth.

Download or read book Kinderculture written by Shirley R. Steinberg and published by Routledge. This book was released on 2018-05-04 with total page 322 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: America is a corporatized society defined by a culture of consumerism, and the youth market is one of the groups that corporations target most. By marketing directly to children, through television, movies, radio, video games, toys, books, and fast food, advertisers have produced a 'kinderculture'. In this eye-opening book, editor Shirley R. Steinberg reveals the profound impact that our purchasing-obsessed culture has on our children and argues that the experience of childhood has been reshaped into something that is prefabricated. Analyzing the pervasive influence of these corporate productions, top experts in the fields of education, sociology, communications, and cultural studies contribute incisive essays that students, parents, educators, and general readers will find insightful and entertaining. Including seven new chapters, this third edition is thoroughly updated with examinations of the icons that shape the values and consciousness of today's children, including Twilight, True Blood, and vampires, hip hop, Hannah Montana, Disney, and others.

Download or read book Disadvantaged Childhoods and Humanitarian Intervention written by Kristen Cheney and published by Springer. This book was released on 2019-02-07 with total page 242 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This book explores how humanitarian interventions for children in difficult circumstances engage in affective commodification of disadvantaged childhoods. The chapters consider how transnational charitable industries are created and mobilized around childhood need—highlighting children in situations of war and poverty, and with indeterminate access to health and education—to redirect global resource flows and sentiments in order to address concerns of child suffering. The authors discuss examples from around the world to show how, as much as these processes can help achieve the goals of aid organizations, such practices can also perpetuate the conditions that organizations seek to alleviate and thereby endanger the very children they intend to help.