The Effects Of Consumerism On Children

Young people…are richer and better informed than they have ever been, in some countries, particularly in the developing world; over half the population is under 21 years of age. With the globalization of mass media, the style of consumerism associated with modern industrialized societies of the western world has spread all around the plant. Young people can thus be recognized as a unique all-important market in their own right (1998: 1).
These markets aimed at how child consumption has transformed to further target children instead of attempting to get them to influence the purchasing power of their parents. These companies now put products that appeal to children in plain site. There are now objects on lower level shelves and advertisements

Specifically in elementary school kids, what they consume influences their social ties to the other children in their school. Ruckenstein (2010) states: “Preschoolers make use of toys as important markers of belonging, including age and maturity; they tend to be very aware of what kinds of toys they should play with” (396). This emphasizes that children distinguishing themselves from others actively through commercial culture, whether toys, games or television programmes (2010:396). Consumer items become central vehicles for social belonging and are needed in order for peer groups to operate. There is a cycle of consumption that children need to keep up with in order to keep the social relations they have, and if they do not act of this they can be seen as outsiders. “Children are influenced by the toy fashion cycles, but they do not simply internalize the short-term cycle of the market. Instead, they use the cycle for cultural projects of their own, complicating relations between children and markets” (Ruckenstein 2010:395). Marten et Al. (2004) further explain that the ‘peer group pressure’ pushes children into the need to belong and be accepted so they use consumption to gain recognition in their social groups and to distinguish themselves from other groups of children (164). The non-desirable commodities might be seems as ‘old’, ‘boring’, ‘childish’ or ‘babyish’ or associated with social groups such as ‘geeks’ ”(Rukenstein 2010: 394). If children are looking to be in the ‘in crowd’ they need to keep up with consumption patterns that group is participating in. When looking at this issue through habitus and everyday life, “the logic of Bourdieusian accounts would suggest that children’s distinctions are class based. Alternatively, distinctions might relate more to interpretations of age, with ‘maturity’ or ‘childishness’ counting as bases for