DESIREE COOPER: Kids taught to want more stuff

http://www.freep.com/news/metro/cooper1e_20051101.htm

DESIREE COOPER: Kids taught to want more stuff

BY DESIREE COOPER
FREE PRESS COLUMNIST

November 1, 2005


What do SpongeBob, Dora the Explorer and Ariel the mermaid have in common?


You may think it's their quick wit, their irresistible appeal and their wholesome influence on your preschooler. But Susan Linn says they're really hucksters designed to sell your kids a bill of goods.


"When the religious right attacked SpongeBob for being gay, I thought, 'That's the wrong battle,' " said Linn, a Harvard psychologist who was born and raised in Detroit. "The point is that he's a tool for selling stuff -- clothes, movies and junk food."

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What's worse, marketers are now using science to capture the loyalty of babies, hoping to parlay brand identification into a lifelong loyalty that James McNeal, author of "Kids as Customers: A Handbook of Marketing to Children," says is worth at least $100,000 per consumer.


"You have a $15-billion marketing industry working with the most sophisticated research," Linn said in an interview last week. "They actually use words like 'cradle-to-grave brand loyalty' or 'owning kids' or 'taking share of mind.' For parents, it's like fighting a smart bomb with a BB gun."

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Sophisticated marketing techniques are also turning ordinary friendships into commercial events even for children: get preteen girls to host parties to test market a product and report back on their friends' opinions, for example.

It is ironic that I, a born and bred liberal, hate the TV culture as much as the radical right, but for completely different reasons. I worry that it will undermine the values I am trying to teach my children by promoting materialism and greed. I am less worried about the sex.

I limit my children's TV time, and it is more to avoid the commercialism than anything else. Also, I was lucky and found a preschool that does not use commercial characters in its curriculum.