Summary and Reviews of Consuming Kids by Susan Linn

Consuming Kids by Susan Linn

Consuming Kids

The Hostile Takeover of Childhood

by Susan Linn
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  • First Published:
  • May 1, 2004, 256 pages
  • Paperback:
  • Aug 2005, 304 pages
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About This Book

Book Summary

A shocking exposé of the $15 billion marketing maelstrom aimed at our children and how we can stop it.

With the intensity of the California gold rush, corporations are racing to stake their claim on the consumer group formerly known as children. What was once the purview of a handful of companies has escalated into a gargantuan enterprise estimated at over $15 billion annually. While parents busily try to set limits at home, marketing executives work day and night to undermine their efforts with irresistible messages.

In Consuming Kids, psychologist Susan Linn takes a comprehensive and unsparing look at the demographic advertisers call "the kid market," taking readers on a compelling and disconcerting journey through modern childhood as envisioned by commercial interests. Children are now the focus of a marketing maelstrom, targets for everything from minivans to M&M counting books. All aspects of children's lives — their health, education, creativity, and values — are at risk of being compromised by their status in the marketplace.

Interweaving real-life stories of marketing to children, child development theory, the latest research, and what marketing experts themselves say about their work, Consuming Kids reveals the magnitude of this problem and shows what can be done about it.

Susan Linn is an instructor in psychiatry at Harvard Medical School and Associate Director of the Media Center at Judge Baker Children's Center. She is also co-founder of the coalition Stop Commercial Exploitation of Children. She lives in Brookline, Massachusetts, with her husband and daughter.

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Consuming Kids is a very scary read - which makes it all the more important that it is read...continued

Full Review (316 words)

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(Reviewed by BookBrowse Review Team).

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Is government regulation such a tall order?  I don't think so. Firstly it's only in the past couple of decades that companies in the USA have been given such free reign to market to children in the USA - before this there were far tighter controls.  Secondly, other countries manage it, so why not the USA?  For example, Sweden, Norway and Finland ban marketing to children under 12, Greece prohibits ads for toys between 7am and 10pm, New Zealand bans junk-food marketing to children, ...

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