Buy Buy Baby

I said that I would post about Buy Buy Baby by Susan Gregory Thomas when I finished reading it, and then I got busy and forgot.

This text made me realize the discrepency between my life as an academic and my life as a parent. I think the only way I can reconcile it is through age-- my work as an academic focuses on how media are affecting older children, not younger-- but I fully realize that the reason media have the influence that it does over older children is because they have been saturated with media since birth.

Thomas talks about how unnecessary television is for toddlers and how actually dangerous it is for babies. She also discusses how unnecessary video games are for children that young-- and I have to believe her. The thing that I think shocked me the most was how well pegged the marketing firms have my generation of parents-- they really know what we want for our kids and they try to market that to us-- it's a little bit scary.

I know this is really just a reference-- my true excitement over the text has worn off, but I think it's important to think about who we are letting tell us what we need.