Abstract

This book investigates the way that corporations are strategically shaping children to be hyper-consumers as well as the submissive employees and uncritical citizens of the future.

Sharon Beder shows how marketers and advertisers are targeting ever younger children in a relentless campaign, transforming children's play into a commercial opportunity and taking advantage of childish anxieties.

She presents an alarming picture of how a child's social development - through education, health care and nutrition - has become an ordered conveyor belt of consumerist conditioning. Focusing on education in particular, she also shows how 'difficult' children are taught from an early age that pharmaceuticals can be used to discipline them or to make them 'happy'.
'Beder's analysis is comprehensive, steely and clinical'
Harold Pinter
'Outstanding ... This is such an important book that I would put it on every school curriculum'
John Pilger
'A chilling assessment of modern commercial culture and how it distorts childhood, corrupts civic institutions, and endangers the planet'
Alex Molnar is Professor of Education Policy and Director of the Commercialism in Education Research Unit at Arizona State University. He is the author of Giving Kids the Business and School Commercialism: From Democratic Ideal To Market Commodity