The Commodification of Childhood

The Commodification of Childhood
Author: Daniel Thomas Cook
Publisher: Duke University Press
Total Pages: 230
Release: 2004-04-20
Genre: Business & Economics
ISBN: 9780822332688

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

The Moral Project of Childhood

The Moral Project of Childhood
Author: Daniel Thomas Cook
Publisher: NYU Press
Total Pages: 228
Release: 2020-02-18
Genre: Social Science
ISBN: 1479810266

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.

Longing and Belonging

Longing and Belonging
Author: Allison J. Pugh
Publisher: Univ of California Press
Total Pages: 321
Release: 2009-02-02
Genre: Business & Economics
ISBN: 0520258436

"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.

The Nineteenth-Century Child and Consumer Culture

The Nineteenth-Century Child and Consumer Culture
Author: Dennis Denisoff
Publisher: Routledge
Total Pages: 379
Release: 2016-12-05
Genre: Literary Criticism
ISBN: 1351884956

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.

Kinderculture

Kinderculture
Author: Shirley R. Steinberg
Publisher: Routledge
Total Pages: 321
Release: 2018-05-04
Genre: Education
ISBN: 0429963645

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.

Disadvantaged Childhoods and Humanitarian Intervention

Disadvantaged Childhoods and Humanitarian Intervention
Author: Kristen Cheney
Publisher: Springer
Total Pages: 242
Release: 2019-02-07
Genre: Social Science
ISBN: 3030016234

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.

Childhood and Children's Books in Early Modern Europe, 1550-1800

Childhood and Children's Books in Early Modern Europe, 1550-1800
Author: Andrea Immel
Publisher: Routledge
Total Pages: 350
Release: 2013-11-05
Genre: Literary Criticism
ISBN: 1135473323

This volume of 14 original essays by historians and literary scholars explores childhood and children's books in Early Modern Europe, 1550-1800. The collection aims to reposition childhood as a compelling presence in early modern imagination--a ready emblem of innocence, mischief, and playfulness. The essays offer a wide-ranging basis for reconceptualizing the development of a separate literature for children as central to evolving early modern concepts of human development and socialization. Among the topics covered are constructs of literacy as revealed by the figure of Goody Two Shoes, notions of pedagogy and academic standards, a reception study of children's reading based on book purchases made by Rugby school boys in the late eighteenth-century, an analysis of the first international best-seller for children, the abbe Pluche's Spectacle de la nature, and the commodification of child performers in Jacobean comedies.

The Commodification of Childhood

The Commodification of Childhood
Author: Daniel Thomas Cook
Publisher: Duke University Press
Total Pages: 223
Release: 2004-04-20
Genre: Business & Economics
ISBN: 082233268X

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

New Forms of Consumption

New Forms of Consumption
Author: Mark Gottdiener
Publisher: Rowman & Littlefield
Total Pages: 322
Release: 2000
Genre: Business & Economics
ISBN: 9780847695706

Consumption as a field of cultural studies overlaps with theories of postmodernism, the social construction of self, commodification in late capitalism, and the role of mass media in daily life. New forms of consumption such as those facilitated by cyberspace, themed environments, the commodification of sex, and the increasing role of leisure in society all play new and interesting roles in daily life that combine consumerism with the most contemporary social forms. This collection of essays examines the recent ways in which consumerism has been approached by cultural studies with special emphasis given to these and other newly emerging topics. The book is divided into three parts. The first part provides a theoretical overview of consumption studies dealing with classical and more contemporary approaches in light of the debate between advocates and critics of postmodernism. In this section there are papers on McDonaldization, tourism and cultural studies, and the Theory of Shopping. The second part emphasizes empirical studies of the commodification process. Papers address the transformation of women's bodies and the mass commodification of milk, the creation of the toddler as a subject and the commodification of childhood, the commodification of sports, and the commodification of rock music. The third section of the book explores new forms of consumption on a more detailed and concentrated level. Papers in this section include the rise of sex tourism as a global industry, the commodification of the sacred, and the emergence of new consumer spaces in the city. An introduction by the editor delineates the advantages of his approach to new forms of consumption based squarely in the emerging issues of cultural studies, debates transcending postmodernism, and the society of the spectacle.

Childhood by Design

Childhood by Design
Author: Megan Brandow-Faller
Publisher: Bloomsbury Publishing USA
Total Pages: 355
Release: 2018-04-19
Genre: Art
ISBN: 1501332031

Informed by the analytical practices of the interdisciplinary 'material turn' and social historical studies of childhood, Childhood By Design: Toys and the Material Culture of Childhood offers new approaches to the material world of childhood and design culture for children. This volume situates toys and design culture for children within broader narratives on history, art, design and the decorative arts, where toy design has traditionally been viewed as an aberration from more serious pursuits. The essays included treat toys not merely as unproblematic reflections of socio-cultural constructions of childhood but consider how design culture actively shaped, commodified and materialized shifting discursive constellations surrounding childhood and children. Focusing on the new array of material objects designed in response to the modern 'invention' of childhood-what we might refer to as objects for a childhood by design-Childhood by Design explores dynamic tensions between theory and practice, discursive constructions and lived experience as embodied in the material culture of childhood. Contributions from and between a variety of disciplinary perspectives (including history, art history, material cultural studies, decorative arts, design history, and childhood studies) are represented – critically linking historical discourses of childhood with close study of material objects and design culture. Chronologically, the volume spans the 18th century, which witnessed the invention of the toy as an educational plaything and a proliferation of new material artifacts designed expressly for children's use; through the 19th-century expansion of factory-based methods of toy production facilitating accuracy in miniaturization and a new vocabulary of design objects coinciding with the recognition of childhood innocence and physical separation within the household; towards the intersection of early 20th-century child-centered pedagogy and modernist approaches to nursery and furniture design; through the changing consumption and sales practices of the postwar period marketing directly to children through television, film and other digital media; and into the present, where the line between the material culture of childhood and adulthood is increasingly blurred.