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Product Description
In the tradition of No Logo and Fast Food Nation, Buy Buy Baby investigates how today’s consumer economy markets to infants and toddlers.
Buy Buy Baby is a powerful expose of how multi-national toy and media corporations use aggressive marketing techniques to snare the ultimate consumer – your baby or toddler.
While it’s no secret that toy and media companies manipulate the insecurities of parents to sell them products, Buy Buy Baby reveals how these corporations sponsor and use the latest research in child development to sell directly to the 0-3 age group.
Following scientific research in the late 1990s that showed that babies develop and make more significant connections between the ages of 0-3 than at any other point in their lives, an explosion of products aimed specifically at this group came onto the market. Under the guise of having 'educational benefit', we have witnessed the rise of everything from the Teletubbies to Barney, all feeding into the anxiety of parents keen to raise 'smart' kids. More sinisterly however, has been the rise in awareness of this age-group of brands, the top names including Cheerios, Disney, Pop-tarts, McDonalds, Coke and Barbie.
As a parent and as a business journalist, author Susan Gregory Thomas, former senior editor at US News & World Report who has written for Time and Glamour amongst others; is uniquely qualified to write on this subject. She reveals the growing evidence that some of the products aimed at young children have little or no 'educational benefit' and that these toys could even impair early development.
Moreover she examines the huge negative impact of selling products to such young children and argues that kids are now experiencing the anxiety, hyper-competitiveness and depression usually found in adults and caused by the effects of rampant consumerism.
Buy Buy Baby is an important contribution highlighting a burning contemporary issue.
About the Author
Susan Gregory Thomas is an investigative journalist and broadcaster. A former senior editor at US News & World Report, she has written for Time and Glamour amongst others. She has two young children aged five and three years old.
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Customer Reviews
I have also conducted some simple experiments with my own children and TV and it appears that they don't really learn anything from it apart from "character recognition". That is evident every time we are in the supermarket!
A great book, well written and essential in the great fight against consumerism.
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
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.
The book was informative but not enough to sway me from avoiding major companies and their toys. I think parents just need to be choosy and wise when selecting toys that offer the best for their child - find the right balance.
One thing I'll take away from it is the importance of "imaginary play" for children to develop a since of imagination and not just be glued to a toy that sings and dances for them constantly...a-hem, Elmo! When I was a kid we played in the backyard and used acorns, leaves, and sticks to play "kitchen". And this was back in the 80's. I think it's important for kids to develop that since of creativity and imagination that "learning" toys don't always offer them. Remember, just because a toy says "learning" on it doesn't means it really IS.
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