Do Responsible Parents Expose Their Children to Brands?
First, a quote from page 11 of Born to Buy (with my own emphasis): Children have become conduits from the consumer marketplace into the household, the link between advertisers and the family purse. Young people are repositories of consumer knowledge and awareness. They are the first adopters and avid users of many of the new technologies. They are the household members with the most passionate consumer desires, and are most closely tethered to products, brands, and the latest trends. Children’s social worlds are increasingly constructed around consuming, as brands and products have com to determine who is “in” or “out,” who is hot or not, who deserves to have friends, or social status. It’s pretty easy for me to remember such things from childhood and also to see it in children and teenagers today. When I was a teenager, the most fervent topics of conversation among the people I hung out with were video games (an incessantly costly consumer product) and basketball shoes (an overly expe
