The Commodification of Childhood

In this revealing social history, Daniel Thomas Cook explores the roots of childrens consumer cultureand the commodification of childhood itselfby looking at the rise, growth, and segmentation of the childrens clothing industry. Cook describes how in the early twentieth century merchants, manufacturers, and advertisers of childrens clothing began to aim commercial messages at the child rather than the mother. Cook situates this fundamental shift in perspective within the broader transformation of the child into a legitimate, individualized, self-contained consumer.The Commodification of Childhood begins with the publication of the childrens wear industrys first trade journal, The Infants Department, in 1917 and extends into the early 1960s, by which time the changes Cook chronicles were largely complete. Analyzing trade journals and other documentary sources, Cook shows how the industry created a market by developing and promulgating new understandings of the nature, needs, and motivations of the child consumer. He discusses various ways that discursive constructions of the consuming child were made material: in the creation of separate childrens clothing departments, in their segmentation and layout by age and gender gradations (such as infant, toddler, boys, girls, tweens, and teens), in merchants treatment of children as individuals on the retail floor, and in displays designed to appeal directly to children. Ultimately, The Commodification of Childhood provides a compelling argument that any consideration of the child must necessarily take into account how childhood came to be understood through, and structured by, a market idiom.