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The Hostile Takeover of Childhood
by Susan Linn
Book Reviewed by: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.
Consuming Kids is a very scary read - which makes it all the more important that it is read...continued
Full Review
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(Reviewed by BookBrowse Review Team).
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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We must believe in luck. For how else can we explain the success of those we don't like?
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T. Berry Brazelton, M.D., Professor Emeritus, Harvard Medical School
A splendid book — a call to arms for parents today. Consuming Kids lays out the ingredients of a fight back, giving back control to parents, and their children. Our children as consumers are being consumed. We can and must take back our parental roles in this media battle.
