Consumerism

Children have long had an active and varied relationship to consumer goods and consumer culture. With the rise of childhood as a distinct modern social category in the West during the 18th century, special goods for children also developed. Early examples include children's literature, children's apparel, and, of course, toys. By the early 20th century, a wider range of children's products were appearing on the market, such as candies, collectibles, child-oriented movies, radio shows, comic books, and the like. Department stores began catering to children not only through product selection but also by constructing special child-themed areas of stores. As the century progressed, children became not only consumers but participants in the ideology and way of life that scholars call consumerism. That is, they were adopting a set of values, attitudes, and practices that privilege the acquisition, possession, and use of marketed goods and services.

In the second half of the 20th century, children's involvement in consumer culture continued to grow. In the 1950s, the introduction of television provided an opportunity for child-directed programming and the advertising to fund it. Although a variety of products were represented in the early days of television, toys and sugared cereals were particularly prominent and continue to be important sources of advertising revenue today. Children of this era became swept up in consumer fads, such as the Davy Crockett fad that swept the United States in the 1950s with the airing of Disney's Crockett series.

In the 1980s, the landscape of children's consumer involvement began to change. One factor was the growing purchasing power available to youth, which was driven by rising parental and grandparental monetary transfer to children. Official estimates of this phenomenon are not available, but industry researcher James McNeal estimates that American children aged 4 to 12 made $6.1 billion in purchases in 1989, $23.4 billion in 1997, and $30 billion in 2002, an increase of 400%. The top spending category, a third of the total, is for sweets, snacks, and beverages, followed by toys. Older children aged 12 to 19 accounted for an estimated $170 billion in personal spending in 2002.

In addition, society was undergoing far-reaching changes in ideological attitudes toward children. Authoritarian and patriarchal family patterns of earlier decades were being replaced by far more democratic and egalitarian family styles, and children became far more empowered in household decision making. McNeal estimates that children aged 4 to 12 directly influenced $310 billion of adult purchasing in 2002 and “evoked” another $340 billion, and that the size of this influence market is growing at 20% per year. Influence purchases include a wide variety of food items, restaurant expenditures, vacation destinations and hotels, tourist sites, technology products, children's apparel and toys, leisure expenditures, and even the choice of family vehicle.

Furthermore, in 1997 the average child aged 6 to 12 spent more than 2–1/2 hours a week shopping, a full hour more than in 1981. Children spent as much time shopping as visiting, twice as much time shopping as reading or going to church, five times as much as playing outdoors, and half as much time shopping as playing organized sports. More children go shopping each week (52%) than read (42%), go to church (26%), participate in youth groups (25%), play outdoors (17%), or spend time in household conversation (32%).

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