This Little Kiddy Went to Market

This book investigates the way that corporations are strategically shaping children to be under-aged hyperconsumers.Sharon Beder shows how marketers and advertisers are targeting ever younger children in a relentless campaign, transforming children's play into a commercial opportunity and taking advantage of childish anxieties.Beder investigates the corporate relations and ideals that infiltrate every aspect of our lives, especially through our public services. She presents an alarming picture of how a child's social development - through education, health care and nutrition - has become an ordered conveyor belt of consumerist conditioning. Focusing on education in particular, Beder explains how businesses are taking control of more and more aspects of schooling, not only for profit but to erode state schooling and promote business values. Similarly, she writes how children are taught from an early age that the pharmacy offers the solutions to all their ills, and how pharmaceuticals are only to happy to 'educate' them.

Sharon Beder is currently Fowler Hamilton Fellow, Christ Church, Oxford, and has been at the University of Wollongong for 14 years. She is considered a leading authority on corporate and environmental issues, for which she has won a number of awards. She is the author of nine other books, including Free Market Missionaries: The Corporate Manipulation of Community Values (2006), Power Play: The Fight for Control of the World's Electricity (2003), Selling the Work Ethic: From Puritan Pulpit to Corporate PR (2000) and Global Spin: The Corporate Assault on Environmentalism (1997; 2nd ed. 2002). Dr Wendy Varney is an honorary fellow at the University of New South Wales. Dr Richard Gosden is a full time writer and researcher based in Australia. He is the author of Punishing the Patient: How Psychiatrists Misunderstand and Mistreat Schizophrenia (2001)