In a book club and starting to plan your reads for next year? Check out our 2025 picks.

Excerpt from Consuming Kids by Susan Linn, plus links to reviews, author biography & more

Summary |  Excerpt |  Reading Guide |  Reviews |  Beyond the Book |  Readalikes |  Genres & Themes |  Author Bio

Consuming Kids by Susan Linn

Consuming Kids

The Hostile Takeover of Childhood

by Susan Linn
  • BookBrowse Review:
  • Critics' Consensus:
  • Readers' Rating:
  • First Published:
  • May 1, 2004, 256 pages
  • Paperback:
  • Aug 2005, 304 pages
  • Rate this book

  • Buy This Book

About this Book

Print Excerpt


As my daughter progressed through elementary school, the press of commercialism was escalating at breakneck speed. Like all parents, I was coping with the effects of marketing at home. In 1996, as part of my work, I began to track its escalation in a broader sense as well. As the associate director of the Media Center of the Judge Baker Children's Center in Boston, Massachusetts, my mission was and is to work with media to promote the health and well-being of children and to mitigate the media's negative effects. I began to assess the growing body of research and reports documenting the impact of marketing on children. I immersed myself in the myriad books, journals, and newspapers written for and by people responsible for creating commercials and advertising campaigns that target children. I began talking to parent groups—and to children—about the effect of marketing on their lives. In recent years, a significant portion of my time has also been devoted to writing, speaking, and advocating on behalf of children in the marketplace.

Most parents struggle in one way or another to keep corporate culture at bay. In doing so they often feel beleaguered and quite alone. But I see their stories in the context of a large, cohesive, and frightening picture. The most common complaints about marketing to children center on specific products such as violent media, alcohol, tobacco, and, most recently, junk food. Yet to focus only on products is to underestimate the magnitude of the problem. Of equal concern are the sheer volume of advertising to which children are exposed, the values embedded in the marketing messages, and the behaviors those messages inspire.

Children have been targets for some kinds of advertising for a long, long time—from carnival barkers hawking freak shows to ads in comic books and, since their early days, radio and television. But it's not the same today. Comparing the advertising of two or three decades ago to the commercialism that permeates our children's world is like comparing a BB gun to a smart bomb. The explosion of marketing aimed at kids today is precisely targeted, refined by scientific method, and honed by child psychologists—in short, it is more pervasive and intrusive than ever before.

Today's children are assaulted by advertising everywhere—at home, in school, on sports fields, in playgrounds, and on the street. They spend almost forty hours a week engaged with the media—radio, television, movies, magazines, the Internet—most of which are commercially driven. The average child sees about about 40,000 commercials a year on television alone. Many, if not most, children's television programs, including those produced by the Public Broadcasting System (PBS), are funded through licensing, a practice that allows companies to market toys, clothing, and accessories based on characters or logos associated with a program.

Children, including very young children, often watch television by themselves, meaning that no adult is present to help them process marketing messages. Poor children, a population in which children of color are disproportionately represented, watch even more television than their middle- and upper-class counterparts. However, regardless of class, African American and Latino children watch more TV than Caucasian children.

While television remains the major medium through which advertisers target children, it's no longer the only medium. In the 1970s, people concerned about marketing to children worried mainly about the effects of TV commercials on Saturday mornings. Now the average American child lives in a home with three television sets, two CD players, three radios, a video game console, and a computer. Two-thirds of children between the ages of eight and eighteen have televisions in their bedrooms, as do 32 percent of two- to seven-year-olds, and 26 percent of children under two. Electronic media continues to proliferate while, as a nation, our willingness to embrace technology constantly outpaces our understanding of its cultural, social, and ethical implications.

From Consuming Kids by Susan Linn, pages 1-10. Copyright Susan Linn 2004. All rights reserved. No part of this book maybe reproduced without written permission from the publisher, The New Press.

Membership Advantages
  • Reviews
  • "Beyond the Book" articles
  • Free books to read and review (US only)
  • Find books by time period, setting & theme
  • Read-alike suggestions by book and author
  • Book club discussions
  • and much more!
  • Just $45 for 12 months or $15 for 3 months.
  • More about membership!

Top Picks

  • Book Jacket
    The House of Doors
    by Tan Twan Eng
    Every July, I take on the overly ambitious goal of reading all of the novels chosen as longlist ...
  • Book Jacket: The Puzzle Box
    The Puzzle Box
    by Danielle Trussoni
    During the tumultuous last days of the Tokugawa shogunate, a 17-year-old emperor known as Meiji ...
  • Book Jacket
    Something, Not Nothing
    by Sarah Leavitt
    In 2020, after a lifetime of struggling with increasingly ill health, Sarah Leavitt's partner, ...
  • Book Jacket
    A Haunting in Hialeah Gardens
    by Raul Palma
    Raul Palma's debut novel A Haunting in Hialeah Gardens introduces Hugo Contreras, who came to the ...

Members Recommend

  • Book Jacket

    Pony Confidential
    by Christina Lynch

    In this whimsical mystery, a grumpy pony must clear his beloved human's name from a murder accusation.

Who Said...

The single biggest problem in communication is the illusion that it has taken place

Click Here to find out who said this, as well as discovering other famous literary quotes!

Wordplay

Solve this clue:

H I O the G

and be entered to win..

Your guide toexceptional          books

BookBrowse seeks out and recommends the best in contemporary fiction and nonfiction—books that not only engage and entertain but also deepen our understanding of ourselves and the world around us.