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TechnoratiMaterialism on the Playground: Study Shows Power of Consumption Starts Early
'Material kid' is the new 'cool' kid on the block
The price of back-to-school shopping may be higher than parents think.
![[Grade four students, Winston Kirk,9 (left) and Cleo Maier, 9 with their teacher Deirdre Richardson (right) during math class at Sunalta Elementary school. New research finds that children as young as five are already capable of judging who’s “cool” and who’s not based on their peers’ consumption habits. (Photograph by: Leah Hennel, Calgary Herald)]](http://www.commondreams.org/files/article_images/materialkids.jpg "materialkids.jpg")
New research finds that children as young as five are already capable of judging who's "cool" and who's not based on their peers' consumption habits. The study, which will appear in a forthcoming issue of the Journal of Consumer Research, sheds light on what you might call popularity economics: social value as the sum of products and brands flaunted.
"Very young children — as young as first grade, possibly younger — pick up on non-verbal cues that they use to read into what a person is like," says study co-author Lan Nguyen Chaplin, an assistant professor of marketing at the University of Arizona.
"More expensive products and brands (are) associated with coolness for younger kids and early adolescents. For older adolescents, (it's) products and brands that differentiate them from their peers; they have a stronger sense of who they are, so coolness now means being different from others."
In three studies using more than 250 participants aged five to 16, young people were asked to create collages, or "consumption constellations," using a diverse set of products, brands, foods, personality traits, and demographics/psychographics that described either a "cool kid" or a "quiet kid who doesn't have a lot of friends."
Participants between Grades 1 and 3 formed their constellations based on single experiences. For example, if an idolized older sibling owned a cellphone, cellphones would thus be synonymous with the child's stereotype of cool.
From Grade 3 to Grade 5, kids drew on multiple experiences and interactions to make generalizations about the social roles of others, and demonstrated a high degree of flexibility in those views.
By Grade 7, however, adolescents were showing greater rigidity in their stereotypes.
"It basically becomes an 'either-or' situation, where you either wear brands like Adidas or Abercrombie & Fitch to be cool or you don't sport these brands and will, by default, not be cool," explains Chaplin.
Study co-author Tina Lowrey emphasizes that popularity can't be bought per se. But with few exceptions, she says costlier brands were most widely associated with cool kids, while material things (brands, products) were twice as likely to compose teens' mental images of social roles than any other category (personal characteristics, food choices, demographics/psychographics).
"There has always been the cool pair of jeans or the store you didn't want to be caught dead in," says Lowrey, a professor of marketing at the University of Texas at San Antonio.
"But that's really mushroomed 100-fold in the last few decades."
Ann Douglas, a mother of four, says her per-child back-to-school budget is strictly for non-brand names. Her brood has to pay the difference themselves if they want to upgrade to labels that win favour with their friends, with Douglas opining that the "right" brands and accessories these days can "cost hundreds of dollars per item."
A Coach backpack, for example, can top $400, Abercrombie jeans will set buyers back $110, and a coveted iPhone 3GS comes in at $199 — before monthly fees.
"We need to teach our kids that it's who people are, not what they wear, that matters," says Douglas, a Peterborough, Ont.-based parenting author. "Otherwise, some kids don't stand a chance on the playground, or the playground of life."
The good news is that by Grade 10, Chaplin and Lowrey found young people's consumption constellations used far more diverse cues to make sense of the social hierarchy.
"They . . . have a clearer idea of how 'cool' can mean many things, and one can be cool in many different ways," says Chaplin. "So their stereotypes are less rigid, which transfers over to how they view people."
13 Comments so far
Show AllI think pjd412's first comment says it all. There are always dynamics that we use to separate ourselves from others, to make us feel more important, to create a pride in ourselves. If it were not material goods, it would be looks (yeah, it's the same principle), or strength, or intelligence. Kids get bullied for all these things (including ginger hair). "Cool stuff" is only one element amongst many.
We've conducted some robust research into this in the UK, to discover to what extent commercialisation is affecting young people, because we are a youth research and marketing agency (set up by kids themselves) and we're keen to ensure our campaigns are responsible.
What we found was that kids are materialistic, but that they still count friendships, family, being respected for doing good, caring for others, as way ahead of anything monetary or material (thank goodness). Owning the latest cool gadget or clothing trend was only marginally influential on acquiring or retaining friends. Again, being kind, sharing with others, "being there" for others - all these were rated as much, much higher influences. And where bullying was surveyed, material goods or money were mentioned as randomly as other factors, and responsible for only one tenth of bullying occasions.
Sure, any bullying or negative impact is bad - we wouldn't say otherwise. But the point we would make is that the commercialisation of childhood is only one factor, and materialism is only one cause of harm in young people's lives. Unfortunately, we can't point to these as overriding causes of distress in young people. Rather it is the underlying need to distance ourselves from others, to demonstrate success, and to pride ourselves in being better than our neighbour that is the fault. All the commercial world does is give us ways to feed on this - if it disappeared tomorrow, we'd find something else.
"Materialism on the Playground: Study Shows Power of Consumption Starts Early
'Material kid' is the new 'cool' kid on the block"
IT IS LEARNED behavior. Now, I wonder where they learned this behavior, where they were conditioned by witting or unwitting conditioners, "educators", to be like this. Well, the first place childhood education, learning, and conditioning occur is at home, so look to the families, principally the parents, for the cause.
"Life father, like child", or "Like parents, like (their) child(ren)"; very often, anyway.
It's probably both parents, for if one parent is this way, while the other is opposite, then the latter will or should normally offset much of the influence of the low-quality other. Why such a couple would choose to stay together, however, now this causes me to figure that the higher quality parent is nevertheless weak, not high-quality enough, and if this is true, then it's likely that they are too weak to be able to offset the lousy education from the low-quality parent.
Brats. And they'll grow up to be adult brats.
Uniforms for school children sounds like a fine idea. Isn't that done in a lot of other country's public schools?
I remember the first time I encountered this to the extreme after having moved to Vancouver.
I had grown up on a farm where a lot of the clothes I wore , were the ones my brother before me had grown out of. This in a time when there was no such thing as a shirt with some companies name emblazoned on it.
A Co-worker is wondering what to buy his 8 year old kid for his birthday. He was a divorced dad so had to get him something to show up the kids mother.
He buys the 8 year old kid a 600$$ slr camera.
This opened my eyes to how bad "consumerism" had become and it gets worse.
I walked by a store and could not help but noticing a pair of "brand name" 300 dollar jeans on a mannequin. It came "pre washed" and with holes down each leg. Yeah I know it is not something "new" but the notion of "designing" clothes with tears and rips in the leg so for 300 bucks you can give the appearance that you are some person who can not afford a new pair so wears his "holey jeans" just strikes me as absurd.
Ya know, pjd412, there are some girls who throw a pretty mean baseball -- is it kind of like with the right clothes and stuff it really doesn't matter if you're not white???
I was just pointing out things the boys said when I was in grade school 40-45 years ago about the non-athletic boys. No kid thought about clothes in those days - Catholic Schools had uniforms, and public schools had strict dress codes.
Here are a few thoughts on how to swim against this tide:
Unplug your televisions.
Point out ads to children from day one and explain what they're for.
Learn to distinguish between "need" and "want."
Read to your children and take them to the public library instead of the mall.
Expose your kids to values other than stuff; cultivate those values in yourself.
If you have to buy stuff, go to the Goodwill or garage sales.
Avoid impulse buys at the grocery store.
Encourage your kids' innate creativity; remember when you played with the box more than the toy that came in it.
Work to keep advertising and corporate "infotainment" out of public schools.
Volunteer at a food bank and bring your kids.
Go camping, hiking, walking in nature.
Model the behaviors and attitudes you want for your kids.
Tell stories, have conversations, play games, and make music.
And pray that this counteracts the thousands of ads they'll still be exposed to on a daily basis.
We need a complete ban on child marketing.
"Is God willing to prevent evil, but not able? Then he is not omnipotent. Is he able, but not willing? Then he is malevolent. Is he both able and willing? Then whence cometh evil? Is he neither able nor willing? Then why call him God?" -Epicurus
what a farce our way of life has become...why bother buying backpacks at all? why bother going to school? to learn how to destroy the planet making and buying and using and getting bored with and disposing of crap, all the while being actively prevented from connecting the making and buying and using and getting bored with and disposing of the crap with the planetary destruction?
How do we make a person just smart enough to do what we want, but not smart enough to question? Studiously avoid the first law of thermodynamics, and replace it with religious pablum...
Education is about making money, heaps of it. Might makes right has become wealth makes right. The distortions and lies of capitalism start before birth, if you count the anti-choice crowd that punishes women for sexuality. This is what happens when a culture has either failed, or was never there in the first place. Expecting culture in America is like expecting a septic tank to express empathy. Here, we have to elevate ourselves just to be back in the toilet again. Everything Americans like is violent, makes huge amounts of noise, burns oceans of fossil fuel, or all three. What a total fraud America is.
Why would any kid need a $400 backpack? It makes one more vulnerable to thieving eyes rather than jealous ones.
The article gives no clue as to how or from where this dynamic originates. Do the professors of marketing have any theories about the effect of corporate media belaboring us from womb to tomb?
The final two paragraphs are indeed hopeful, but again are silent on the number of those who escape as opposed to those who become slaves to the almighty logo.
(Moan!)
Pretty shocking.
Oh well, at least "cool" is no longer defined by athletic ability on the playground. With the right clothes and cell phone, you can even be a guy who "throws a baseball like a girl" and still be cool!