Empire of Things

by Frank Trentmann

  The spread of age-specific clothing in the United States shows the speed of change. Before the First World War, clothing was stocked by article and size, not by age group. Stockings for children were displayed next to those for their parents. By the Second World War, children’s clothing had moved to a separate floor, and often to a separate shop altogether. Saks Fifth Avenue and other department stores opened floors for young people with colour coding for different age groups. By 1929, there were over a thousand stores for infants and children. Two decades later, the number of such shops had shot up to six thousand. Their stock came from a growing number of factories dedicated to making children’s clothing. Stores began to organize baby contests and baby weeks which marketed pre-assembled clothes for the newborn – the ‘layette’ – to expecting parents. In the 1930s and ’40s, age gradation became more finely grained. Fashion for six- to fourteen-year-old girls was separated from that for their three-to six-year-old sisters. The ‘toddler’ acquired a separate persona and its own space on the sales floor, away from the infant. Saleswomen were instructed to play up to their emerging personality and cater to their individual style. Universal ‘bulgy bloomers of yesteryear’ were replaced by stylish dress for each sex – ‘dainty pastels’ for girls, ‘tailored’ garments for boys. No one did more to embody and popularize the new style than Shirley Temple, the Hollywood child actress, with her pinafore look – no belt and no trimming other than a bow of baby ribbon. Her fame on and off the screen made Temple the ambassador of the new look, with trademark dresses in her name for the toddler range. 4

  Shops, cinemas and advertisers were pushing these age-specific fashions, but they would hardly have managed to get their hands so easily into parents’ purses had it not been for the fortuitous convergence of several larger currents. These involved, on the one hand, a shift in the relation between work and consumption, and new attitudes towards child-rearing on the other. The first change meant clothes were less often made at home and increasingly purchased ready-made. Unless they were a trained dressmaker with plenty of time on their hands, few mothers would have relished making age-specific clothes for their little ones. Influence over clothing design thus moved from the mother’s needle to the market. This was only a favourable precondition, however. What made parents captive customers was that shop assistants were echoing what experts and authorities were preaching about the personality of the child. In the early twentieth century, child-rearing literature began to stress that children had rights. Parents were advised to pay more attention to the perspective of the child and their changing impulses and desires.

  In 1929, President Hoover called a conference on child health at the White House. It led to the passage of a Children’s Charter which defended the ‘understanding and the guarding’ of a child’s personality as ‘his most precious right’.5 Women’s magazines went one step further and announced ‘Your Child’s Right to Beauty’. And that personality was evolving, requiring adults to keep step with its growth. Advertisers applied the discovery of developmental stages to age-specific product categories: four- to six-year-olds were said to be developing their imagination, which made them ideal customers for fantasy toys; seven- to nine-year-olds mixed enthusiasm with purpose, which made them collectors.6 Freudian psychology encouraged parents to be more accepting of their children’s material desires. Educational experts at the White House conference warned that too often the child was an ‘alien in his home’.7 Chairs, tables and plates were too big and there was not enough consideration for his toys and needs. Squeezing the child into an adult environment led to moral and physical retardation. Excessive thrift bottled up unmet needs, with potentially dangerous consequences later. Possessions were vital for personal development and mental health.

  What linked these twin transformations in work and mentality was the child’s role reversal in the market place. Children ceased to be workers who contributed to the family income and instead were embraced as consumers. In the words of the sociologist Viviana Zelizer, the more children were becoming economically useless, the more they appeared to be emotionally ‘priceless’.8

  As children put down their tools and picked up their schoolbooks, earnings were replaced by allowances. Already in the nineteenth century, bourgeois families had used pocket money to teach their children thrift and financial discipline. By the 1930s, half of American professional families were giving their children an allowance; in the semi-skilled working class, it was a quarter. Rather than only teaching the art of saving, moreover, the focus now widened to the art of spending. As one textbook for child study groups explained in 1932, ‘emphasis is always placed on the saving of money, but with the increased opportunity and necessity for handling money in the purchase of commodities it is increasingly necessary that children have training in spending money.’ ‘Modern American life . . . glorifies the idea of spending.’ It now also needed to train young people how to do it.9

  Pocket money announced a new truce: kids were given the opportunity to fulfil their own desires while parents kept a check on their wallets. That children had rights as consumers had particular importance for communities battling discrimination: it demonstrated they had some independence and choice. The African-American paper the Chicago Defender sponsored parties with toy prizes and candy for its young readers. The growing acceptance of the child consumer’s position in the family mirrored the appreciation of consumption as a positive force in society at large, so precocious in inter-war America. By the time the White House Conference on Child Health and Protection met in 1936, allowances were accepted as the natural entitlement of future citizen consumers. As autonomous beings, experts said, children naturally deserved a democratic voice in the family budget. Children themselves were absorbing the new wisdom fast, a survey taken at the time suggests. When asked to imagine themselves as parents in the future, many said they planned to hold weekly family councils for a spending review.10

  Work never completely disappeared from children’s lives, not even in the affluent world. Still, it was the emphasis on play and fun that progressively shaped the idea of childhood, and with it notions of what children should do with their time and money. Toys illustrate the shifting balance. In Europe, children already played with wooden toy sets in the early modern period. Customized paper dolls appeared in Britain and Germany at the end of the eighteenth century when the first toy shops opened their doors. Most toys, however, had an educational purpose – to learn by playing, as urged by John Locke – or to prepare the young directly for the craft and business skills of the world of work. From the late nineteenth century, such older customs started being overshadowed by a new commerce in fantasy and desire. Christmas – once a communal holiday, celebrated with neighbours and servants – shrunk into a family affair. The middle-class ideal of intimate domesticity carved out a special place for children’s longing and wonder. Wish lists got longer and longer.11 The success of Walt Disney’s Snow White (1937) reflected the new acceptance of play for play’s sake. In the United States, the sales value of toys and games skyrocketed from $8 million in 1899 to $103 million thirty years later. In the two decades after the Second World War, American spending on toys doubled again.

  These developments were not unique to the United States. Japan was as precocious. The comic The Adventures of Sei-chan produced spin-off cards and toy hats as early as 1924. The market for fantastic characters and heroes with superhuman powers has been getting bigger ever since. Parents were crucial collaborators in this process. By the middle of the twentieth century, parents had not only made their peace with the new culture of play but began to participate in it, getting in touch with their own ‘inner child’.12

  The commercialization of childhood, then, has been deeply paradoxical. Age differences were simultaneously sharpened and diluted. What began as a movement to champion the distinctive needs and rights of the young evolved into a commercial phenomenon which made childhood a place of the imagination, open to all, where biological age ceased to matter.
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  Children’s exposure to advertising took a big jump with television. By the 1980s, the average American child under twelve watched over four hours of television a day. In the course of a year, they would have been exposed to 20,000 adverts. By 2004, the American Academy of Pediatrics had raised this figure to 40,0000.13 There is no denying that children are more than ever bombarded by commercial images and that advertising is employing increasingly sophisticated techniques, such as advergames. What is harder is interpreting these figures. For some experts, advertising is directly responsible for rising rates of obesity and violence. For others, its effects are indirect and modest, doing little more than influencing the choice between brands.14 For yet others, adverts are an indispensable educational tool for growing up in a media-saturated world of goods, a kind of commercial grammar. Only Sweden has banned advertising during and immediately after programmes that are intended for children; the use of characters from children’s programmes in commercials is also prohibited.

  A good deal hinges on how vulnerable or savvy kids are presumed to be. What research on advertising has made clear is that it is unhelpful to generalize about ‘children’. The ability to distinguish between commercials and programmes varies greatly with age. Some children as young as three are aware of the difference. Still, a 1985 study found that, before the age of five, only 10 per cent could tell the difference. For five- to six-year-olds it rose to 62 per cent. Even once children reached the age of eight or nine, there were still 15 per cent who were unable to spot the intent to push goods. The older children became, the more easily they lost interest and adopted a sceptical attitude.15 From exposure and reception, however, it is still some way to the point of purchase. When Quebec introduced a law that banned commercials directed at children in 1980, researchers found that English-speaking children in Montreal with access to neighbouring US stations were buying more cereal than their French-speaking neighbours.16 As critics pointed out, however, this might have had to do with different breakfast cultures in the two groups. Advertising has some effect on what children buy, but it is only one of several factors. Age, education, peer culture, income and family life are at least as significant. What TV adverts do accomplish is to reinforce children’s existing demands for products.

  Anxieties about the loss of childhood often rest on an ideal of inner purity and innocence at risk of pollution by external forces of corporate greed. This narrative is unhelpful. After all, it was partly in the marketplace that children were first recognized as separate persons. Children are vulnerable, but they are not passive. In reality, children never completely left the world of work and exchange. Today, growing up continues to happen within the economy, not outside it.17 Chores, paid work, gifts and exchange remain normal features of children’s lives. Friendships are cemented through trade in cards and food. In the late 1980s, 21 per cent of American children’s income came from household chores, 10 per cent from paid work outside the home; 45 per cent was from allowances, the remaining 24 per cent from gifts. In 1997, American nine- to twelve-year-olds spent over six hours per week on household work.18 In England, a large survey of thirteen- to fourteen-year-olds in England found that one quarter held a paid job for four hours a week; eight out of ten helped with chores around the house.19

  Poor children in the United States carried particularly large responsibilities for the purchase of food and clothing. In return, they enjoyed disproportionately high allowances. For all the surround-sound of corporate branding and pressures for emulative spending, most of these kids showed remarkable discipline in balancing material desires with financial reality. Poorer children saved as much as their more affluent peers; they simply did not put their money in a bank. A German study found that children overwhelmingly displayed ‘rational consumer behaviour’. In a representative sample of one thousand ten- to seventeen-year-olds, the vast majority lived within their means. A mere 6 per cent were in debt to their peers – mainly to pay for fast food, going out and clothing. Interestingly, such ‘excess’ was scattered across the rich as well as the poor.20 Most of these debts were small – €72 on average, less than what these children received each month. More than three quarters of those questioned in the sample were confident that they could meet all their debts within a month’s time. There is a certain irony, then, in adults’ moral alarm about children being seduced by the shiny world of goods. When it comes to debt and credit, the vast majority of children have been more responsible and restrained than their parents.

  In the early 1990s, the anthropologist Elizabeth Chin observed how black children in New Haven, Connecticut, handled money and goods. She gave the participants in her study $20 to spend as they wished. What did they do with it? One ten-year-old girl spent her unexpected windfall on a pair of cheap denim sandals for herself and a pair of golden slip-ons as a birthday gift for her mother, some pink hair rollers for her grandmother and a bag of bubblegum to share with her sister. It was hardly a display of selfish materialism or conspicuous consumption. In many ways, children have taken the place in popular discourse once assigned to the poor and women: their excess and inability to restrain desires are seen to threaten the moral and social order. As in the past, this may say more about middle-class angst than about children or the poor. In reality, there are few lessons that teach financial discipline so well as having to make ends meet. Most of the children Chin interviewed knew the worth of their Christmas gifts down to the penny and understood that some hoped-for presents simply lay beyond their family’s means. The arrival of a Barbie doll did not mark a complete surrender to mainstream consumer culture. Girls were aware that Barbie was a ‘dope’ or stereotype. Some, in playing with them, mocked white middle-class norms. Others made the doll their own by braiding its blond waves into black hairstyles.21

  From the vantage point of the early twenty-first century, we can see the rise of the child consumer as part of a historic bargain between children and the adult world. Children gained commercial power and choice but in exchange forfeited a certain degree of autonomy to adult control and regulation. Instead of roaming city streets and dance halls in the early twentieth century and mingling with adults, they were confined to ‘safe’ spaces of education, the home and fenced-in playgrounds. In the last generation, digital media and internet gaming have progressively undercut this arrangement. Growing parental fears over the loss of childhood reflects this loosening of control.

  Yu-Gi-Oh! is a Japanese mixed-media series about a high-school boy with the supernatural powers of an Egyptian pharaoh. Its magical world reveals some of the emerging forms of childhood consumption.22 One is the symbiotic relationship between old and new media. Yu-GiOh! began life as a manga series in the Shonen Jump magazine in 1996 before taking off as an animated TV series and Playstation game. Its digital success rested on the popularity of card trading. In 2000, according to one survey, every single student in a Kyoto elementary school owned Yu-Gi-Oh! cards. In this fantasy world, the balance of power between children and adults is overturned, as child players take on supernatural powers with the help of monsters and magic.

  A second implication concerns the creativity and intellectual skills that come with consuming in the digital age. Yu-Gi-Oh!, in many ways, exemplifies the stereotype of consumerism as a treadmill: the more children play it, the more they hunger to buy new cards to strengthen their hand, the greater the options and number of cards for sale. Yet, notwithstanding the commercial interests involved, Yu-Gi-Oh! also shows how this kind of game has outpaced the old critique of ‘mass consumption’.23 As they create their own characters, children become sophisticated traders and diplomats, negotiating their way through a thicket of passionately debated rules. Internet sites and digital gaming provide serious players with additional points of entry into the fantasy world. Finally, this is a world for virtual as well as real children. There were adults who fantasized about being cowboys or Indians a century ago, but digital media and social networks have given the escape back into childhood a whole new scale and
respectability. In Japan, a third of all fantasy-character goods are bought by adults. This adult invasion of youth has come with its own dangers, not least the sexualization of childhood. Yet it has also had a liberating effect, freeing adults from the ideal of disciplined, purposeful ‘rational leisure’ that became dominant with industrial society and restoring a little bit of the pleasure of play familiar to our ancestors in earlier times.

  The generic ‘child consumer’ has attracted so much contemporary concern that it is important to remember that children, like any other age group, are hugely diverse. True, certain trends have minimized differences across the globe. Pocket money, the birthday party, fast-food snacks and toy tie-ins are no longer the preserve of Los Angeles but are found in Beijing and Taiwan. Still, even after discounting the hundreds of millions of children in the world too poor to go to school and just concentrating on rich and middle-income countries, children’s lives continue to be shaped by culturally specific attitudes to childhood and money. In Taiwan in 1990, for example, most children were spending independently at the age of five; not so different from Americans. However, this included buying their own school supplies. Spending was balanced by moral dictates of saving and education. Tellingly, Taiwanese children saved more of their pocket money.24 Nor were they paid for doing chores. They just did them.