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Toxic Childhood: How the Modern World is Damaging Our Children and What We Can Do About it Sue Palmer See book keywords and concepts

Twenty-first-century parents pick their way gingerly through the sound bites - junk food, sugar highs, couch-potato kids, pester power, battery children, electronic babysitters, technobrats, and so on - but with a distinct shortage of reference points. When my husband and I were bringing up our daughter twenty years ago, the world we lived in was not vastly different from the one in which we'd grown up ourselves. But since then, the pace of change has been phenomenal.

To the heady mix of pester power, 'the right to choose', peer pressure and a quick-fix culture, is added parental panic that their children might waste away (or acquire one of those much-hyped eating disorders). So children across the world continue to be hooked on a diet that threatens the healthy development of both body and brain. Sugar rush The brain is a greedy organ, needing almost one-third of the blood pumped from the heart to supply it with the oxygen and nutrients it needs to work efficiendy.

Another factor in the change of emphasis has been the discovery that this 'pester power' works not only for children's products but for everything families buy - from cars, holidays and entertainment to food, household items and even cleaning products. As avid TV watchers, children are able to pass on marketing messages to parents, and as avid consumers they're quick to pick up on what's in and what's out. So the marketing industry has recruited children to work on their behalf, and 'nag-factor' now features in all major campaigns for family purchases.

Indeed, pester power has become essential to marketing - a US study showed that sales of a product declined by a third if children didn't ask for it, even more in the case of toys and entertainment. A third reason for targeting the young - and perhaps the most sinister of all - is to initiate them as early as possible into the cult of the brand. In a cut-throat consumer culture, brand awareness and brand loyalty are priceless assets, so the marketeers' aim is to ensnare consumers while 'the imagination is warm and impressions are permanent'.

So when parents are conditioned by marketeers to feel that allowing choice shows love for their children, and children are persuaded by those same marketeers to choose certain products, it can be extraordinarily difficult to resist the pressure. And that pressure now is immense: marketing techniques have become enormously sophisticated in recent years, and parents are often unaware of the ways their children are being targeted.

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