Buy, Buy Baby: How Consumer Culture Manipulates Parents and Harms Young Minds

By Susan Gregory Thomas

Book Overview

Our kids are becoming consumers at an alarmingly young age. Many children are already asking for products by brand name at age two. Toy and media corporations have long manipulated the insecurities of parents to move their products, but Buy, Buy Baby unveils the chilling fact that these companies are now using and often funding the latest research in child development to enable them to sell directly to babies and toddlers. Susan Gregory Thomas presents shocking evidence that some of these products actually impair development and could harm our kids socially and cognitively, for life.

The good news is that parents can overcome this dangerous economic and cultural shift. Blending prodigious reportage with an empathic voice, Thomas shows how we can help our children live at their natural pace, not the frenetic clip that serves only the toddler-industrial complex. Buy, Buy Baby helps us fight the power that marketers wield by exposing the false fears they spread.

• Format: Paperback
• Language: English
• ISBN: 0547237952
• ISBN13: 9780547237954
• Release Date: August 2009
• Publisher: Harvest Publications
• Length: 288 Pages
• Weight: 0.65 lbs.
• Dimensions: 0.7" x 5.4" x 8.1"

Customer Reviews

A Great Read

"Buy, Buy Baby" reads like a good detective novel. The author uncovers the facts and presents them in a clear and thoughtful manner. She never judges how parents raise their children. Every parent should read this book. The book really hit home for me when Thomas recalled a marketing exec's reply to a question about whether or not it might be disconcerting for a child to hear its disembodied mother's voice in a toy. "I guess we have to say that we put the mother's voice in because the research said that babies' and toddlers' social interaction with mother enhances learning." Well thank god for the research! I laughed so hard I blew cold coffee out my nose. Idiots! How much did they pay for that bit of information? Have these marketers ever spent time with babies? I was ready to brush the whole thing off as silly marketing speak but as I read the rest of the book I became more and more disturbed. That corporations market their products to babies and toddlers is reprehensible but until laws are past to protect children between the ages of 0 and 3, marketers will continue to exploit them. Research lets them do that job well. Parents, me included, are not prepared to deal with the psycho-emotional manipulation that this 20 billion dollar a year industry produces. With other products, if I succumb to marketing, it's me that looks silly in the too tight pair of jeans. But this is different. When parents succumb to toy marketing it's their babies sitting in front of the TV watching videos. Before reading this book, I thought that babies watching TV was no big deal. Before reading Fast Food Nation, I thought eating a couple Big Macs was no big deal. I've changed my mind.

"Buy Buy Baby" is Two Books in One

Thomas's "Buy Buy Baby" is two books for the price of one. The first book shows how toy manufacturers, educational publishers, and TV studios are making toddlers brand-conscious at very early ages. Almost immediately, brand-consciousness translates into desire for branded products that people a toddler's world at the supermarket, in the public library and the preschool. and at home. What parent is strong enough to deny his or her toddler a Disney product or a PlaySchool educational toy? The second book is a thoughtful look at the impact of this commercial onslaught on very young minds. Thomas describes current research showing that Baby Einstein and other "educate-my-toddler" videos scramble rather than clarify the way toddlers process information. Toddlers respond to love and attention from real people, not from toys with flashing lights or CD's whose visual images may fascinate but at the same time may slow development. Thomas admits to being a busy, stressed parent herself who must stretch to find enough time to play with her two daughters. So she makes play count, letting her little girls develop their imaginations, invent games, and just have fun. Technically-advanced toys and beguiling videos appear to have only a small place in the Thomas home. Buy Buy Baby is an eye-opener. Parents and grandparents should read its ageless message: commercial products that impinge on the toddler world are more of a burden than a benefit during the first three years of life. In no way do they substitute for intimate parent-child relationships.

A Crucial Book If You Have, Or Care About, Kids

This will, in all likelihood, be the most important book published this year. Susan Gregory Thomas uncovers and exposes a threat to every child, and the adult that child is to become, that most of us are only vaguely aware of: the unbelievably extensive corporate attempt--clearly successful--to turn our children into unthinking consumers motivated only by status. Thomas is tenacious in her demonstration of the lengths to which companies go in order to turn our sons and daughters into automatons substituting an addictive desire for the next "must-have" item for the development of imagination and learning. Most of us were aware that advertising aimed at children was unwholesome, but Thomas shows the myriad ways in which such advertising is merely the tip of the iceberg. Here it is possible present only a small sample of the lines of attack used not merely by mega-corporations, but also by "parent-friendly" companies. Their armamentarium includes manipulation by findings of academic psychologists, neurological investigation, licensing ploys that limit choice and raise price, collusion by education organizations and revered operations like Sesame Street and Baby Einstein...the list goes on and on. This one book makes the reader a virtual expert on the subject and an able opponent against those who would brainwash your children. (Thomas shies away from the term, but it is impossible not to see the practices she exposes in such terms.) The importance of this book, and its potential to improve our children's lives, is huge. It is not going too far to say that Susan Gregory Thomas is the Rachel Carlson challenging the practices she describes. Buy, Buy Baby is compulsively readable and spellbindingly interesting, but these are the least of its virtues. If you have kids, or worry about what kids face today, this book is for you Steven Goldberg Chairman (Retired) Department of Sociology City College, City University of New York

Buy, Buy Baby: How Consumer Culture Manipulates Parents and Harms Young Minds by Susan Gregory Thoma

Uh, oh. Are you among those parents, grandparents, godparents and other grown-ups who've bought your favorite toddlers LeapFrog and Baby Einstein products under the illusion they'll help educate young minds? Think again. According to "Buy, Buy Baby," an eye-opening new book by Susan Gregory Thomas, many of these toys don't deliver on the educational promises in their ads and packaging. Not only that, familiar brand-name products in toddlers' toy chests, as well as TV programs purported to encourage early learning actually act as stumbling blocks to achieving the cognitive potential of developing brains. At the same time, subtle marketing strategies aimed at infants a year-old or less are converting tiny children into demanding--and noisy-consumers. "Buy, Buy Baby" was partly inspired when the author didn't like what she saw going on with her own small daughters and the children of family and friends. As she delved further into what would become more than three years of exhaustive first-hand research, the respected investigative journalist knew she was onto something big. I urge everyone with kids aged 0 to 3 in their lives to read "Buy, Buy Baby" by Susan Gregory Thomas. It's readable and filled with common sense advice on the best things you can do to help a young child's development.

finally someone speaks out!

a must read for any parent or educator out there who wishes to raise and guide their child thoughtfully and to think independently about their parenting choices in a culture that does not hold children's best interests at heart. the author clearly and objectively shows us how corporations manipulate anxious parents who want to do the best for their child, into buying a vast array of products touted as educational, while the research actually points to different degrees of harm that can come to children and parents who "buy" into this branding culture. The author becomes a strong advocate for children's right to live and develop in a culture that respects them and cares for them over chasing the profit margin.if enough people read this book, it could change how we think about children and their rights to be children in our society.