The video from my last post got me thinking about personal futures. We are under so much pressure from society to conform to dominant ideas about what an ideal life should look like. A recent book by Maggies Hamilton, called What’s Happening to Our Boys , suggests that boys as young as eight years of age are obsessing about their image, and advertising, consumerism and IT culture lie behind the problem. There are primary school students who are worried about what they were wearing to school, while some teenagers are scared to take their shirts off at the beach because they don't have abs. The problem is thus more acute than ever.
Here’s what the Sydney Morning Herald story noted about the problem.
Some of this is because marketers are recognising boys as the last great untapped market.
"Parents are very worried about not looking cool," she (Maggie Hamilton) says." Advertisers have ... done an effective job in undermining parents' confidence, leaving them constantly worried they're inadequate and/or uncool unless they are buying this or that," she says in her book.
Australian parents spend around $1000 per child per year on toys and related products for kids aged zero to three, Hamilton says.
Her book quotes James McNeal, a Texas-based professor who has published books on children and marketing, as saying that consumer behaviour patterns start at 16 weeks of age.
Meanwhile, the former president of children's clothing retailer Kids-R-Us, Mike Searle, is quoted as saying "if you win this child at an early age, you own this child for years to come".
Kids are basically growing up in rooms full of branded junk watching DVDS over and over," Hamilton says.
"The kids associate (branded toys) with the character they have seen in the DVD ... they don't even have an imaginative repertoire around those characters. What they do is replay the stories they have seen over and over on the DVDS."
Boys' natural attraction to computer games and gadgets means that many are missing out important interaction with not only other people, but the outside world, Hamilton says.
"Our kids are becoming like battery hens, they rush home and it is into the bedroom, onto the computer, iPod in the ears and all that wonderful activity that was going on outside is now happening on the screen," she says.
