Changing Childhood, Changed Children, Changed Schools:

How Commercialism Impacts Children in School[1]

Nancy Carlsson-Paige, Ed.D. & Diane E. Levin, Ph.D.

The commercial culture influences most aspects of who children are in classrooms and school. To understand the nature of these influences requires first looking at how the commercial culture is affecting children. 

Key examples of how commercial culture is changing children:

• Consuming can act like a drug, diverting children from working on their own internal interests and needs. It teaches them to associate happiness and a sense of wellbeing with getting what they want rather than with interacting meaningfully with objects and people and mastering and learning how to have an influence on their world. Consuming creates an agenda for children provided by someone else rather than encouraging them to work on their own internal interests and needs. This is why the process of acquiring objects can see like a child’s first drug. When they get the sought after object it brings a quick fix. This high usually quickly wears off without children working on the things they need to work on to develop and grow from within. And over time, they come to depend on their quick fixes rather than on their own devices to find fleeting happiness and meaning.

• Consuming can undermine children’s interest in finding and working on problems of their own making as well as the sense of personal empowerment that comes from solving their own problems. As children focus more on wanting rather than doing, their ability to believe that they can make a difference is undermined.  The difficulty many children have getting engaged in solving personally meaningful problems can be thought of as “problem solving deficit disorder” or “PSDD”.[2]

• Commercial culture affects children’s relationships with each other and with adults. Marketers work to create a strong peer culture where children have a lot of power in influencing what is cool and what children want. What children have affects their popularity and status. And PSDD can contribute to difficulties solving problems that arise in conflicts with others.  At the same time, marketers work to undermine the status of adults; in ads directed at children, adults are either being invisible, stupid, or stand in the way of getting what children want.  Such representations reduce the influence adults have on children and even contribute to premature adolescent rebellions.

• Commercial culture contributes to gender stereotypes and the sexualization of childhood. Vastly different products tend to be marketed to girls and to boys.  For instance, products for girls generally focus on appearance, even sexiness, whereas products for boys focus on being powerful and strong, even violent. In addition, the use of sexualized images and behavior to market products to children confuses them and contributes to attitudes and behavior that undermine the kind of community schools try to create.[3]

Key examples of how commercial culture is changing children in schools: 

• Commercial culture gives children the wrong messages about the nature of the learning process. The marketing of television, videos, and electronic toys to babies and young children begins to shape their learning from an early age.  By the time they get to school, kids have already learned a lot about how to learn.  Media and high tech toys entertain kids and inhibit their problem-solving ability, undermining their natural ability to find inherent satisfaction and take initiative in learning.  Many teachers report that children today are more passive learners, often needing to be directed and “entertained.”  These misleading messages about learning are perpetuated when schools join with commercial businesses to reward children with prizes and food coupons for inherently satisfying learning activities such as reading.4

• Commercial culture has negative effects on the classroom curriculum.  The school curriculum is profoundly affected by commercial culture that enters the classroom in many ways such as journal writing, drawing, class discussions, and small group work.  Children’s interest in the values and messages of popular culture shape many of their interactions in school, but most teachers have not been prepared to handle sensitive topics such as violence, sex, and advertising.  Teachers struggle to focus children back to the curriculum that has greatly narrowed in recent years because of the emphasis on standardized tests.  This leaves children with little or no support in school for dealing with consumer culture and the many confusing messages it conveys.

• Commercial culture contributes to the diminished social skills of children in school.  The social relationships of children in school are affected by the media and consumer culture they live in.  Boys are exposed to models of violence and aggression in media, toys and products; they bring these models and their effects on them to school.  Our research since the deregulation of television has shown that as boys try out the violent models they have seen, their social relationships spiral downward.  And girls’ social relations are affected too as their interactions are dominated by issues of appearance and consuming instead of more substantive topics.  Because of No Child Left Behind, children now have less time for social activities in school.  When they do interact, the handicaps created by consumer culture too often shape their interactions.  And when conflicts among children arise, they have a lessened capacity to resolve them because of their diminished skills for problem solving. 

• Commercial culture leads to gender stereotyping in school and greater separation between girls and boys. Teachers describe a diminishing of overlapping interests between girls and boys.  Girls come to school often preoccupied, as one teacher says, with “clothes, fashion, hair, and makeup,” while boys’ heads are filled with male images of power and aggression.  Because of this, girls and boys find less and less common ground for playing and interacting together.  Exposure to sexualized content in the media has led to school incidents in which young boys, in trying to sort through their confusion over what they have seen in the media, are misunderstood and even accused of sexual harassment.