Facing media-fuelled consumer-driven ridicule by their kids, many parents can't face their responsibilities

In our angst over children we're ignoring the perils of adulthood

While parents are safely at work or in the kitchen cooking tea, thousands of schoolchildren are sitting down to a dose of My Parents Are Aliens. If they are anything like my children, they can't get enough of the antics of these ludicrous parents and the desperate frustrations of their offspring who attempt to extricate them from scrapes, pre-empt the worst of their escapades, or deal with the fallout.

To the distracted parent, it seems a mild, benign form of amusement, and I've chuckled along with the kids. But then I started to see the link between my children's eye-rolling impatience with that of the children in the programme. I even began to collude, subverting my own authority with some pre-emptive eye-rolling of my own. "Bor-ring!" I moan as I announce bedtime. (The very idea of a bedtime, the kids tell me, is a peculiar notion to some of their classmates.) I catch myself complicit in a culture of contempt towards adults.

Professor Juliet Schor, an American economist who has made a habit of writing bestsellers on American anxieties - The Overworked American, The Overspent American and, most recently, Born to Buy - spoke recently in London as part of the National Consumer Council's ongoing research into the effects of consumerism on children.

She argued that marketing to children has boomed over the past decade, and its content has been characterised by anti-adultism. Cool is of the ultimate symbolic importance, and what is cool is usually anti-adult, oppositional, rebellious. Adults are never cool - they are boring, often absurd, sometimes stupid - and when they try to be cool they are pathetic. Even popular cartoons such as Rugrats are aping the format. The universe conjured up is one of "kids rule", in which children are "empowered into an adult-free space".

Schor has a point. On children's TV adults are few and far between. Continuity presenters are adultescents who squeal and giggle like 10-year-olds. Even staples such as Blue Peter offer a version of adulthood that is more older sibling than parent. As Schor acknowledges, this is not an entirely new phenomenon. Children's entertainment has often made adults marginal, but that didn't make them powerless - look at the adults in Harry Potter, for example - and it certainly didn't always make them incompetent figures of ridicule.

To Schor, the purpose of this adult-free space is the commercial exploitation of children. The marketers, she claims, are creating the perfect consumer: easily led and divorced from other moderating social influences. Not surprising, then, that they spend $20bn in the US on this advertising market. It's reckoned that children, on top of their own expenditure, now influence $700bn of parental purchasing power. Parents consult their children on everything from sofas to cars. Children are now the weakest link - the exploitable gateway to household bank accounts.

Consumerism is infiltrating the intimate relationship of child and parent and subtly undermining parental authority, while at the same time ramping up the pester power. In the face of this kind of pressure, many parents are set up to fail, and their efforts to regulate their children's behaviour, whether eating habits or schoolwork, are subverted. Why listen to your parents when they are so uncool? Meanwhile, for the child the evidence of failing, frustrated parents gives the cruel edge of experience to those lighthearted comedy sketches of incompetent adults.

Even more worrying, the experience instils in children a powerful uncertainty about whether adulthood is a desirable state to achieve at all. Who would want to be an adult if it turns you into the despairing, hollow-eyed parents seen on Brat Camp?

So is this all the fault of evil advertisers manipulating the disruption of parent-child relationships? No, it's not quite that simple. Why do I collude? (And I see plenty of other parents in the same boat.) Almost every month we embark on another round of hand-wringing anxiety about the state of childhood, but the much more important question is the state of adulthood. Why are parents of this generation so uncomfortable about projecting the kind of authoritative certainty of adulthood with which many of us grew up, and against which we framed our own sense of identity?

Children can only be children when adults are adults, warned the Archbishop of Canterbury, Rowan Williams, long before panics about childhood had become such a regular feature of British public life. It was a comment that merited more attention. While most people could happily expand on what childhood should be about, I've yet to hear comparable definitions of adulthood.

The process of becoming an adult now starts younger and its end is elusive and indeterminate: we don't want to marry and "settle down". The adult long-term commitment and responsibility of raising a family is already countercultural enough, but it has been piled high with hyperinflationary expectations. It's no longer enough to keep a child fed and safe. Your children should be happy - a new burden of parenting that many adults cannot provide for themselves, let alone another person.

No wonder so many greying kidults or rejuveniles duck the sense of responsibility of full-blown adulthood, and try to co-opt their own children into a measure of self-parenting. This last is typified by the "Don't you think it's time for bed?" type prodding - does any child ever say yes? - in contrast to the "Bedtime!" command-and-control mechanism. Perhaps this adult uncertainty contributes - or even causes - childhood feelings of not being loved or cared for identified by Mori, and cited in Freedom's Orphans, the report by the Institute of Public Policy Research report that has attracted so much attention in the past fortnight.

We need to be able to answer the question of what is successful adulthood. Freedom's Orphans was an interesting illustration of how bankrupt this public debate is. Implicitly, the report equated successful adulthood with labour-market status. It is casually cruel in its instrumentalism - you only have value in so far as you contribute to the economy - thus reflecting an implicit tenet of New Labour.

On such a premise, the models of working-class adulthood are all flawed and inadequate. While middle-class children have simply to faithfully imitate their mums and dads to become successful adults, the only option for working-class kids is to reject the role models of their parents and hope to find a better alternative (where?). If the route to successful adulthood for working-class kids is an obstacle course in which most will fail (and their parents already have), can we be surprised that many opt out and find consolation in the lure of a consumerist "adult-free world" that convincingly expresses their frustration and contempt at what it is to be an adult?

The anti-adultism of advertising to children is less a conspiracy of evil ad men than a reflection of our own inadequacies. Which is why it is so powerful in peddling products - and why we need to worry.

Madeleine Bunting
13 November 2006

http://www.guardian.co.uk/commentisfree/story/0,,1946359,00.html

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