Sold Separately: Children and Parents in Consumer Culture

Abstract

Let’s Team Up and Kill Barney Beverly Lyon Clark Ellen Seiter. Sold Separately: Children and Parents in Consumer Culture. New Brunswick: Rutgers UP, 1993. I hate you, you hate me; Let’s team up and kill Barney— Put a gun to his head, pull the trigger, till he’s dead: First he’s purple, now he’s red. So goes one of the many anti-Barney songs circulating among eight- and nine-year-olds in my neighborhood. And I have to admit that my response is one of secret glee. The glee is not just that, like most post-six-year-olds, I cannot stand Barney. But the parody shows the workings of children’s culture, fashioning resistance out of the icons of mass culture. Ellen Seiter, author of Sold Separately: Children and Parents in Consumer Culture, would approve. Seiter, professor of telecommunications at Indiana University, is one of a new breed of scholars in communication, someone whose work is informed by cultural studies, especially the kind that grants some agency to consumers of mass culture. The result, in this study of children’s television programming and commercials, magazine toy ads, toys, and toy stores, is that Seiter is refreshingly noncondescending toward children. She points out, for instance, how paternalistic anxiety over children’s desires echoes anxieties over the desires of women and of working-class men, how the desires of the powerless are often stigmatized and condemned. Her thinking parallels that of many critics of children’s literature, especially those concerned about the images and status of childhood; it intersects more directly with the thinking of those for whom “Disneyfications” and dumbings down are raising important theoretical issues. Particularly enlightening, for me, are Seiter’s discussions of toy-based television programs and of class biases with respect to toys and her [End Page 277] histories of toy advertising and parenting. In these discussions and elsewhere, she prods us to rethink knee-jerk dismissals of mass culture, children’s culture—and children. I have to admit that despite my efforts to avoid condescending to and sentimentalizing children, I had pretty much bought into the prevailing protectionist attitudes regarding children and television—feeling pure guilt about the amounts of time my nine- and four-year-old spend watching television. Seiter, however, does not indulge in the usual journalistic jeremiads against television, that “thief of time,” that “plug-in drug” (to cite titles by John Condry and Marie Winn). She may not fully endorse television, but Seiter does recognize that children are not merely passive victims, that consumer culture provides images and themes for a shared culture among children, and that children often use these shared images to create new, unanticipated meanings, even to rebel against parental culture. As communication research shows, children are not as gullible as the pundits often try to make out. Groups such as Action for Children’s Television, for instance, have “underestimated children’s understanding of commercials and thus avoided the thornier issue of why children liked them; and . . . overestimated adult immunity to and distance from advertising” (101). Recent research suggests that toddlers have little difficulty differentiating between commercials and other programming. They just tend to prefer the commercials. Separators (“after these messages we’ll be right back”) may now be mandated, but that hardly means that children will coolly dismiss the messages of commercials targeted at them—any more than adults will. In short, children’s engagement with television is complex, not negative for all children in all circumstances. It is even partly utopian through “its subversion of parental values of discipline, seriousness, intellectual achievement, respect for authority, and complexity by celebrating rebellion, disruption, simplicity, freedom, and energy” (11). Yet this utopianism is limited, generally proposing, as it does, “buying and using commodities as the means to a solution, rather than real social change” (134); it solves problems of difference only symbolically, creating seemingly democratic utopias that actually reproduce race and gender hierarchies. Seiter is especially good at exploring such representations of race and gender. She argues that television ads deserve more criticism for the discriminatory attitudes they purvey than for their selling intent. She documents how men of color appear in Saturday-morning commercials...