Abstract
As a conceptual construct, historical subject and lived social personage, the ‘child consumer’ 1 remains something of an unwelcome guest to the party thrown by the New Paradigm beginning some 20 or more years ago. On the whole, scholarship identifying itself with the field that many call childhood studies or the sociology/anthropology of childhood has ignored, downplayed or otherwise segregated the study of the consumer-commercial lives, practices and cultures of children and their childhoods.
It is telling that Berry Mayall’s (2013) new history of the sociology of childhood notes no place for the consuming child in the development of the field. Indeed, general histories of childhood also nearly completely overlook consumption and popular culture (see Cunningham, 2002; Mintz, 2004), leaving that task to other, more specific historical treatments (Cross, 2004; Jacobson, 2004; see Cook, 2012, for an overview). A good deal of the work that has been undertaken in the area of children’s consumption in the last two decades has been executed by sociologists, historians and those in education, business schools and communications departments for whom the central driving impetus is focused on something other than conceptualizing and problematizing children and their childhoods. Interestingly, it is in these fields and disciplines where one can discern how key insights enabled by childhood studies – i.e., agency, the child’s perspective and methodological issues – have informed research and discussion about children’s consumer lives (e.g., Buckingham, 2011; Cody et al., 2010; De la Ville et al., 2010; Marsh, 2005; Marshall, 2010; Willett, 2008).
Yet, the field generally seems content to offer a slow, grudging acceptance of the child consumer, as the mention or treatment of children and consumption now has begun to make appearances in places where the subject may not have been considered worthy of much attention until recently. James and James (2011), for instance, decided to add ‘children as consumers’ in the second edition to their Key Concepts in Childhood Studies from which it was absent in the first edition. Some textbooks and edited books that intend to be introductions to the field of childhood studies/sociology of childhood discuss the child consumer in some way (Boocock and Scott, 2005; Kehily, 2008). The massive Chicago Companion to the Child (2009) contains a single, short entry on the subject. The Oxford Bibliographies Online in Childhood Studies (2010) included a section on children as consumers as did the Palgrave Handbook of Childhood Studies (2009). The Young Lives Project does not take commercial-material existence as a key feature of its childhoods, but has, at times, recognized the world of things as important to ‘well being’ (Camfield and Tafere, 2009). Others make brief note of the arena of consumption, popular culture or media, or do not address it at all (see, for instance, Corsaro, 1997; Goncü, 1999; James and James, 2004; Mayall, 2002). In Childhood, the subject of consumption and material culture has gained intermittent attention by authors and editors alike (see Nieuwenhuys, 2011; Pilcher, 2011; Zelizer, 2002).
At issue here involves something beyond a simple ‘recognition’ of children and the commercial world, something beyond a simple additive element or mere inclusion into already existing formulations. Rather, the ‘child consumer’ – and the accompanying complex of relations – provides the opportunity to speak to, challenge and offer new conceptual territory to the now solidifying, and increasingly taken-for-granted, epistemology of childhood studies. The question is not one of the amount of attention paid – not about a separate entry in an encyclopedia or a designated chapter in a handbook – but of what counts as ‘real’ or core aspects of children’s childhoods, conceptually speaking, in one’s studies. For, it is evident that despite the significant, excellent work investigating children’s commercial lives and contexts (briefly noted above), the consuming child remains an identity apart, a category apart, a special designation often given over to the quite capable hands of a now growing cadre of specialists. The child consumer, that is, remains exceptional to the child in childhood studies, just as it does in consumption studies (Cook, 2008).
I see this division manifest regularly in the papers that pass across my desk as editor when authors are examining the ‘contexts’ or the ‘lived experiences’ of childhoods, yet make not so much as a token mention of the children’s material and commercial desires and practices. Conversations with many skilled ethnographers reveal much of the same. After listening to enlightening talks about children in Africa, or the subcontinent, or South America or North America for that matter, I sometimes ask questions like: ‘What were the children wearing?’ ‘What music did they listen to?’ ‘Besides X (the subject of the presenter’s paper), what else did the children talk about?’ ‘What kinds of things did they have?’ ‘How did they handle them vis-a-vis others with material things?’ Sometimes, the speaker has not noticed anything of the sort, even after prompting. At other times, a glint of realization comes to their eyes, and we begin to discuss the brands or objects or media the children in question were wielding, but which somehow never made it into the field notes, never made it into the grid of relevance.
The scenario just painted represents a troubling myopia, not necessarily of the individuals with whom I spoke or whose manuscripts I have read, but a myopia characteristic of a larger and underlying epistemology and ideology that continues to structure childhood studies writ large. There remains a guiding presumption that commercial goods, images, messages, relationships and media somehow remain exceptional to children and to core definitions and aspects of their childhoods (and of childhood generally), as well as to the larger caring and uncaring relationships in which these are embedded. It is a presumption that derives from a one-sided, selective reading of the same constructions of the ‘child’ upon which the field has been built and which continue to animate a good deal of its activity. Namely, that the child is/represents an unqualified moral good that is susceptible to corruption, but who now, in the ‘new’ studies, has agency and volition. Within this neo-Rousseauian view, the valuation of agency varies with the object of action. If children act upon those things in the world we researchers and observers (and parents) deem important, then the ‘right’ child has made an appearance. It is not that the child as consumer doesn’t count in childhood studies; it is that it doesn’t count in the same way as others.
The problem the ‘child consumer’ poses for childhood studies stems from the ways in which it can disrupt carefully formulated notions of children’s power, voice and agency, unsettling perhaps all-too-settled understandings regarding ‘good’ or ‘appropriate’ childhoods. Many who sanctify and laud children’s volition, rationality and inventiveness when they are caring for loved ones, working in fields, carrying water or fighting wars, find such qualities incomparable to hosting Disney Princess birthday parties, texting about entertainment stars or making rhyming games from product jingles. Many in our field would, without hesitation or reflection, consider a Youth Parliament to be a superior form of participation for children to a product evaluation panel, the latter being only about ‘consumerism’. The difference here is not one of simple intensity or importance – i.e., fighting in a terrestrial war has different consequences than fighting in a Nintendo war, of this there is no dispute. Instead, the difference I note here combines cultural-political belief with a largely unstated and particular conception of the ‘new’ child of the ‘new’ childhood studies. It is a selective conception, a heroic agency, where any suggestion that this agency may have deep and authentic resonance with the commercial world is out of place with the ‘real’ child sought by careful and sensitive fieldwork.
The consuming, desiring child, when encountered and recognized, proves to be rude to that scholarship which ignores its unbudging presence and place in everyday living because it complicates agency and refuses to specify any simple, straightforward provenance and trajectory of value, in both the moral and economic senses. Being a consumer and engaging in consumption is not something with which one has much choice – for adults, children or anyone else. Choice enters in how goods are used in social transactions. Whether one is enveloped in global brands and high-end products or struggling with basic necessities, people use material things to, as Barrie Thorne (2005) notes, ‘mark and negotiate difference’. Goods and material things enable and activate the creation and transformation of culture and social relationships – be they intimate and caring, or something else (Douglas and Isherwood, 1979). In Global North contexts and elsewhere many ‘do’ (i.e., enact) family, ethnicity, nationality, parenting and generation in public retail settings like toy stores (Williams, 2005), supermarkets (Philips, 2008) and fast food chains (Brembeck, 2008; Yan, 1997) or in rituals like birthday parties and baby showers (Clarke, 2008).
Consumption, as well, registers social acknowledgment, be it negative or positive; it is an indispensable and unavoidable way of participating in the world. Children (and others) often use goods as vehicles for participation in social life where they can experience a sense of belonging (Pugh, 2009) as well as exclusion, of both difference and sameness (Chin, 2001). I am reminded of a story related by a colleague who worked in an NGO that needed to secure money to continue ‘practical’ programs for children. When it was suggested that they could discontinue the long tradition of giving gifts at birthday parties, the children rejected the idea outright as this was the only opportunity for many of them to celebrate something, to be recognized and noted as special, as individuals. To ignore, downplay or shunt aside the consuming, commercial environs of children’s lives – to make consumption a special, and therefore optional (and usually negative), category of practice – is to disqualify outright much of the materials from which and with which they craft selves, relationships and meaning. There are perhaps few things more ‘adultist’ (as some like to say) than to discount children’s affinities for and pleasures with commercial goods and productions as something necessarily and simplistically imposed on them.
To go further, accepting the consuming child as part and parcel, in some degree, of most any childhood complicates agency because sometimes the child is taken and is duped by the promises and insinuations of marketing and publicity, as we all are at some time or another in our respective quests to participate in social life. Acknowledging corporate power makes this child no less a child, no less agentive, no less human than any other. It is difficult for some to see and to accept as real that sometimes children want frivolous things and there is nothing more to it than our differential definitions of the situation.
The child consumer cannot easily be dismissed as a ‘First World problem’, in the contemporary parlance. Children in and of the Global South and those from economically deprived conditions and contexts are as implicated in consumer culture as are those from middle-class families in Cherry Hill, New Jersey. ‘Street kids’ in Brazil have shown to possess finer grained knowledge about brands and counterfeits than many researchers investigating their lives (Diversi, 2006). As well, the child of a rising transnational middle-class has come to stand for a particular, increasingly globalized, normative version of childhood. This childhood marks a stark contrast to the consuming-laboring child that is struggling not only to survive but to acquire social recognition which is thought to accompany material gain (Nieuwenhuys, 1998). In addition to war and environmental factors, tensions between consumer and producer (i.e., worker) roles and identities also can be seen to be forming part of the ‘push’ and ‘pull’ complex of influences of transnational child migration.
To conclude, if childhood studies intellectually, analytically and practically confers the dignity of agency onto children, as is its apparent core mission, then we must do so for all forms of action, and not sift out those that do not conform to our views of acceptable desire. To bring the consuming child into the purview of the field, into the definitions of childhood itself, does not necessitate or imply any abdication of critical faculty to critique corporate, capitalist power. What I advocate is something much more difficult – that is, to manifest the critical eye and to allow children their pleasures and self-defining practices in and through goods and to integrate these as necessary, unavoidable aspects of childhood without apology, hesitation or equivocation. We need not concur with the values and attitudes surrounding children’s goods and media, but we also must not denigrate outright the very things and actions that forge the childhoods we painstakingly strive to comprehend.