When you write a book badmouthing marketing and proceed to market it, you expose yourself to charges of hypocrisy. In Branded: The Buying and Selling of Teenagers, Alissa Quart capitalizes on publishing's recent penchant for anti-corporate polemics like Naomi Klein's No Logo and Michael Moore's Stupid White Men in a trendy reportorial tone of suburban verité. Quart frets over the obsession with "Logo U"—an Ivy League education as a name-brand product to be marketed and consumed—but the first thing her bookjacket mentions by way of biography is her degrees from Brown and Columbia.

But Branded's contradictions are problematic at a deeper level. As the teens and preteens (or "tweens") she studies scurry around consuming this brand and that, so Quart is content to breezily browse various aspects of youth consumption, darting in and out of malls and marketing conventions, transcribing the disturbing aha! statements she overhears, and presenting the results as if they constituted a systematic critique. How does endemic consumerism warp teens' and tweens' souls? Does it flow from the decline of geographic community, as historian Daniel Boorstin contends? What should kids be doing instead? The pace of Quart's hip tour of the branding of youth—from clothes to video games to movies to marketing in schools—leaves little time for thinking about such questions.

Again and again, one feels the contradiction between Quart's assumed role as social critic and the superficiality of her approach. Like Klein, Moore, and company, she pits passive, powerless citizens against oppressive corporations with unpardonable profit motives. Her title suggests that kids are but cattle quivering before a rancher's searing iron. When Quart writes that today's youth are "victims of the luxury economy" and "governed by MTV," the reader wonders: when did MTV win a war?

But Quart's failure is frustrating precisely because her subject is genuinely important. In a society that equates freedom with market economics, we need thoughtful critiques of what Juliet Schor (The Overspent American) calls "consumer sovereignty"—the idea that the consumer is rational and deliberate in his purchasing choices, and thus commercial success is a triumph of merit, not manipulation. Without denying anyone her free will, we can nonetheless observe that we often purchase products out of habits and insecurities. Teens and tweens have plenty of the latter and are still developing the former, so they are, if not coerced, certainly salivated over as a demographic by marketers.

"Once considered off-limits to advertisers, they are now … considered one of the most powerful consumer groups in the nation," wrote The Chicago Tribune of tweens, the roughly 30 million Americans between the ages of 9 and 13, who spend $10 billion a year and are estimated to influence as much as ten times that in family spending.
1. The weekly spending money, via allowance and babysitting, of the average American 10-year-old, rose 75 percent to nearly $14 a week during the 1990s, and nearly one tenth of all CD sales go to 10- to 14-year olds, according to Newsweek. In response, marketers spent 20 times more on advertising to kids in 1999 than in 1989, Quart reports in Branded. "There are very sophisticated psychologists working on this stuff," Barrie Thorne, professor of sociology at Berkeley and co-editor of Childhood: A Global Journal of Child Research, told Books & Culture. "Billions are spent on shaping desires; it's not as though desires come from a vacuum."

The emergence, in particular, of tweens as a distinct population is at once one of the most urgent and most underexamined social phenomena of the era. At a fraction of the length of Quart's book, Newsweek's October 18, 1999 cover story, "The Truth About Tweens," was more comprehensive and helpful in introducing and exploring this rapidly growing subgroup.
2. (The Tribune reported that there are nearly twice as many tweens now as there were in the early 1990s.) Physically, youth are maturing earlier; advances in public health and nutrition (and perhaps other factors still under debate) helped bring the first signs of puberty down into the tween-age years over the course of the 20th century—for girls, from age 15 to about 10—skewing our conventional boundaries between childhood and full-blown adolescence.

Indeed, the very term "tweens" reflects the tension of feeling stranded between childhood and adolescence. Tweens bear traits of both childhood and maturity, innocence and sophistication. "They are a generation stuck on fast forward, in a fearsome hurry to grow up," wrote Newsweek. They feel "the pressure to act like 8 going on 25," or, as Quart puts it, tweens are "getting older younger." In response to this pressure—from marketers, from their bodies, from their peers—to hurry along toward adulthood, tweens uphold a time-honored American method of personal expression: conspicuous consumption. But this is a "superficial sophistication," as one marketing professor put it in Newsweek. Quart all too briefly hints at this consequence of the cultural patterns she is witnessing: tweens aren't learning "how to be as much as how to be entertained."

What is most detrimentally neglected in Quart's book is how these tensions of premature maturity also perplex parents, who—confronted by ever-earlier expressions of autonomy—may feel torn between rigidity and affirmation. Torn, that is, when they're around to have pangs of conscience at all; both fathers and mothers, ever more beholden to the office (and tied to it by cell phones and laptops), may employ what Newsweek called the "bribery theory" of child-rearing, and risk raising one of the most spoiled generations ever.

But parents' facilitation of tween consumption may have less to do with guilt than with the desire to "provide a better life" for their children, or merely an unthinking perpetuation of their own affliction of affluenza. "We're in a culture where that is very prevalent among the adults in general," Jacquelynne Eccles, president of the Society for Research of Adolescence told Books & Culture. "To hold the media [solely] responsible is to ignore the fact that these kids are living in families where in a substantial number of cases parents are doing the exact same thing." For Christian parents committed to stewardship, then, one of the most important duties of a parent may be modeling reluctant and discerning participation in consumer culture. Eccles says studies show that even with the rise of marketing to youth, the majority of adolescents (however idealistically) identify their parents as their most important influences.

Although seeing tweens as a distinct group can illuminate important social and economic realities, and certainly reflects the reality of marketing strategies, it may also be reductive, says Nancy Darling, a psychology professor at Bard College who researches adolescents' social relationships. "If you look at the social context of the term 'tweens' in the media, I think you'll find that it is almost always used to describe kids who are dressing precociously and spending a lot of money on consumer goods," Darling says. "You don't see it used for kids who are being precociously responsible, hardworking, or doing a lot of volunteer work." Besides, Eccles says, the biggest problem with the effect of the media on teens and tweens isn't branding but behavior. "We sell them lots of things—points of view and habits of mind: eating junk food, solving conflicts by beating up people."

Still, there's little doubt that tweens are more rushed and disoriented about questions of maturity and identity than their counterparts a century ago, when adolescence didn't yet exist as a phase in the life cycle and childhood moved more smoothly into adulthood. (It was, you guessed it, Madison Avenue that first used the term "teenager" back in 1941, Quart reports.) While there's no getting nostalgic for the days before public education, child labor laws, and marital autonomy, earlier times did offer more definite means of social validation for youth, Darling says. Now, tweens may lean on consumption as a crutch in the absence of mutual obligations to family and community.

"Historically, [teens and tweens] developed an identity in part through early work experiences and formal and informal apprenticeships," Darling says. "With larger families or with families that spent more time together in the home, youth played important roles in taking care of younger brothers and sisters and the kids of neighbors, doing chores, shopping, and so on. These were meaningful ways that kids could contribute ways to maintaining the family. Part of the problem that kids of this age have is that we have provided very few roles that they can productively fill, and so they find an identity through buying things and projecting an image of themselves."

In the end, Branded settles for anti-corporate rhetoric and symbolic subversion as a meaningful alternative to the consumerization of youth. Quart ends her book by admiringly following teen protesters at MTV studios in Times Square, having begun it by chuckling at youths' vulgar desecration of Starbucks by changing the "b" to an "f" as a "humorous deconconstruc[tion]" of corporate conformity.

Amid such posturing, Quart and other commentators in this vein mostly neglect commonsense alternatives to the branding of teen and tween life. Mentorships, with wise adults and college students, would go a long way—especially for the 12-year-old who told Newsweek she considers the cast of Friends worthy of discipleship. "You take the actors on as a role model," she says. "I think a show like Friends is pretty realistic." School and church programs on media literacy would also help, though schools would have to kick the habit of soft drink contracts and Channel One broadcasts that siphon advertising to a captive classroom audience. Book groups, starting with Harry Potter, perhaps, and moving on to Mark Twain, would add some much-needed meat and critical thinking to the media diets of teens and tweens currently loaded with the empty calories of TV and Instant Messaging. And while we're dreaming, shorter work weeks and greater flexibility for paternal and maternal leave would help get parents back in the picture.

Nathan Bierma is an editorial assistant at Books & Culture. He writes the weekly weblog "Content & Context" at www.booksandculture.com.

1. Jim Kirk, "The Power of Tweens," The Chicago Tribune, September 4, 2002.

2. Barbara Kantrowitz and Pat Wingert, "The Truth About Tweens," Newsweek, October 18, 1999, p. 62.

Copyright © 2003 by the author or Christianity Today/Books & Culture magazine.
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