Childhood “Affluenza”

08/22/2007

What we must decide is perhaps how we are valuable, rather than how valuable we are.
F. Scott Fitzgerald

At the 2007 World Forum in Kuala Lumpur, Linda Southward from Mississippi State University presented us with a copy of an amazing resource book she helped produce, About Children: An Authoritative Resource on the State of Children Today (American Academy of Pediatrics; www.aap.org/bookstorepubs.html). The book provides an in-depth look at childhood in the United States, looking at demographics, health, family life, and environments. In the lead chapter, John de Graaf takes a look at what he calls Childhood ‘Affluenza.’ In introducing this chapter he observes...

”... In a Guatemalan refugee camp in México, or a landless peasant’s settlement in Brazil ... I have seen poor children, cheerful and resourceful despite their lack of possessions. Meanwhile, their affluent American counterparts, awash in stuff, often feel deprived. They are the perpetually dissatisfied victims of an emerging, airwave-borne epidemic I now call ‘affluenza.’ Among affluenza’s childhood symptoms one might include:

a fever for shopping and spending
swollen expectations about material needs
decreasing immunity to the assaults of advertisers
self-concepts defined by brands of clothing, and
a rash of debt by the time they leave college.

“Polls consistently find that a wide majority of American parents today believe their children are ‘too materialistic’.... But that’s no accident. Children have become the hottest targets of today’s marketing dollars. A generation ago, the Federal Trade Commission considered restricting advertising aimed at children, but, in 1980, Congress passed a law preventing such action. Since then, the amount of money spent by advertisers to reach children has increased by a factor of 20 — from $100 million to $2 billion per year.”

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