Born to Buy

Schor spent years studying the marketing industry's systematic targeting of children — the research it conducts on how to exploit developmental vulnerabilities, the channel it uses to route consumer desire through kids and into households, the way it has colonized childhood itself as a market. The findings are specific and damning: children are exposed to more commercial messages per day than any previous generation, the psychological techniques used are drawn directly from clinical research on persuasion and attachment, and the outcomes — anxiety, materialism, lower self-esteem, family conflict — are well documented. The most rigorous academic account of what consumer culture does to children ever written for a general audience. Essential reading for every parent on the stage-0 shelf and every teenager on the stage-4 shelf who wants to understand why they want what they want.