Buy, Buy Baby: How Big Business Captures the Ultimate Consumer – Your Baby or Toddler

In the tradition of No Logo and Fast Food Nation, Buy Buy Baby investigates how today’s consumer economy markets to infants and toddlers. Buy Buy Baby is a powerful expose of how multi-national toy and media corporations use aggressive marketing techniques to snare the ultimate consumer – your baby or toddler. While it’s no secret that toy and media companies manipulate the insecurities of parents to sell them products, Buy Buy Baby reveals how these corporations sponsor and use the latest research in child development to sell directly to the 0-3 age group. Following scientific research in the late 1990s that showed that babies develop and make more significant connections between the ages of 0-3 than at any other point in their lives, an explosion of products aimed specifically at this group came onto the market. Under the guise of having 'educational benefit', we have witnessed the rise of everything from the Teletubbies to Barney, all feeding into the anxiety of parents keen to raise 'smart' kids. More sinisterly however, has been the rise in awareness of this age-group of brands, the top names including Cheerios, Disney, Pop-tarts, McDonalds, Coke and Barbie. As a parent and as a business journalist, author Susan Gregory Thomas, former senior editor at US News & World Report who has written for Time and Glamour amongst others; is uniquely qualified to write on this subject. She reveals the growing evidence that some of the products aimed at young children have little or no 'educational benefit' and that these toys could even impair early development. Moreover she examines the huge negative impact of selling products to such young children and argues that kids are now experiencing the anxiety, hyper-competitiveness and depression usually found in adults and caused by the effects of rampant consumerism. Buy Buy Baby is an important contribution highlighting a burning contemporary issue.