A nation of children sold as slaves to the market

It’s been difficult to take Westminster’s recent discovery of the ‘commercialisation of childhood’ seriously. Since politicians’ unswerving devotion to economic growth over the last 20 years has encouraged the commercialisation of everything — childhood included — the sudden indignation about the evils of junk food and Bratz dolls has a rather hollow ring.

The price of one’s wry smile, however, is a nation of increasingly unstable children. It’s not easy growing up in a world where the only values on offer are those of the marketing men, where parental love is measured in presents rather than presence, and where you learn at the tender age of four that the wrong brand of crisps in your lunchbox is social suicide.

Our children are growing up in what American campaigner Susan Linn has called a ‘marketing maelstrom’, and it’s having a profound effect on their development.

Parents and politicians have been slow to recognise how extensively marketeers have muscled in on childhood. Multi-million pound budgets and the services of top child psychologists are now devoted to the cause of ‘winning children for the brand’ — like St Ignatius Loyola, big business has realised that if you can catch them young they’ll be yours for life.

And since the vast majority of children in the UK now have a TV in their bedroom, hidden from parental eyes, marketeers are perfectly placed to groom their young consumers.

The next generation is thus being trained to value themselves in terms not of any human worth, but of their possessions. So possession of this week’s consumer must-have is now the driving force of playground politics and the marketeers’ definition of ‘edgy cool’ is the new infant religion. This culture of cool also affects role models and youthful aspiration.

There are no old-fashioned heroes for children to worship any more, just celebrities. The tales of honour, heroism and achievement with which adults used to nourish their young have given way to photo-journalism about narcissism, conspicuous consumption and instant stardom. The constant daily message received by children is that success is measured in ownership; money is the new currency of love.

All this, of course, is directly counter to what psychology tells us about real human needs. There are rafts of research showing that happiness doesn’t come from having more stuff. It comes from having friends, family and social interaction, from the feeling that there’s more to life than mere self-gratification, and from spending time doing something you personally think worthwhile. So, not unnaturally, children fed this marketing line become steadily unhappier. The nation’s rising tide of behavioural problems and childhood depression is testament to that.

In his book, Happiness: lessons from a new science, economist Richard Layard blames competitive consumerism for the splintering of communities: ‘Our fundamental problem today is a lack of common feeling between people — the notion that life is essentially a competitive struggle. With such a philosophy, the losers become alienated and a threat to the rest of us, and even the winners can’t relax in peace.’

This lack of common feeling is apparent in the recent UNICEF survey about children’s well-being — one reason British children were ranked the unhappiest in the developed world was that only 48 per cent considered their peers ‘kind and helpful’. When fewer than half our children actually trust each other, we should be afraid.

Today’s playground bullies and victims are tomorrow’s crime and mental health statistics, and Layard’s interest in ‘happiness’ has a sound economic basis.

But it’s not just the economy, is it, stupid? It’s the social, emotional and moral health of the nation too. A teacher I interviewed for my book, Toxic Childhood, said ‘Sometimes it seems that what we’re trying to teach the children at school is at odds with everything they’re learning outside.’

She voiced the frustration of countless primary school teachers, who daily try to instil old-fashioned values like honesty, conscientiousness, hard work and concern for others into their infant charges.

But what children see on their TV screens is in direct contradiction to these values. Dishonesty and dishonour regularly triumph: on the sports field, in celebrity marriages, and even — can such things be? — in political circles.

Why bother being conscientious or working hard when you can become famous overnight on Big Brother or The X Factor? And kindness is no longer a virtue in popular TV programmes — bullies and smart-arses are today’s stars; kind characters are inevitably weak, and usually victims.

In a secular, consumer-driven society, it seems that the only ethical value recognised by most adults is a vague sense of moral relativism. To many children, alone in their bedrooms or out there in the jungle of the streets and the playground, this translates as ‘anything goes’. We have left them for too long at the mercy of the market and, unless we act soon, the consequences could be grim.

It’s no good relying on Ofcom, the watchdog without a single decent tooth in its head. Any lingering hope of effectiveness is dispelled by its recent half-hearted ban on junk food advertising (which still allows junk food to be advertised in all the programmes most popular with children) and the non-response to Big Brother’s racial bullying scandal (on the day 25,000 people complained, the chief ‘regulator’ amused the Oxford Media Convention by saying he might write a mild letter to Channel Four in a week or so).

We need, at the very least, a watchdog with lots of teeth and the will to use them. We need more than vague murmurs from politicians about the ill-effects of commercialisation of childhood. Any decent society should strive with all its heart to further the social, emotional and moral well-being of its children — and not just for the sake of crime reduction or economic stability.

We should look after them because they’re worth it.

Sue Palmer (www.suepalmer.co.uk) is a writer and speaker on language and literacy. She developed a number of training packages on the teaching of writing for the National Literacy Strategy, including the DfES grammar website. She is the author of ‘Toxic childhood: how modern life is damaging our children…and what we can do about it’ (Orion Books, 2006)