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This book offers rich critical perspectives on the marketing of a variety of toys, brands, and product categories. Topics include marketing undertaken by specific children’s toy brands such as American Girl, Barbie, Disney, GoldieBlox, Fisher-Price, and LEGO, and marketing trends characterizing broader toy categories such as on-trend grotesque toys; toy firearms; minimalist toys; toyetics; toys meant to offer diverse representation; STEM toys; and unboxing videos. Toy marketing warrants a sustained scholarly critique because of toys’ cultural significance and their roles in children’s lives, as well as the industry’s economic importance. Discourses surrounding toys—including who certain toys are meant for and what various toys and brands can signify about their owners’ identities—have implications for our understandings of adults’ expectations of children and of broader societal norms into which children are being socialized.
This timely and innovative book provides a detailed history of marketing to children, revealing the strategies that shape the design of toys and have a powerful impact on the way children play. Stephen Kline looks at the history and development of children's play culture and toys from the teddy bear and Lego to the Barbie doll, Care Bears and Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles. He profiles the rise of children's mass media - books, comics, film and television - and that of the specially stores such as Toys 'R' Us, revealing how the opportunity to reach large audiences of children through television was a pivotal point in developing new approaches to advertising. Contemporary youngsters, he shows, are catapulted into a fantastic and chaotic time-space continuum of action toys thanks to the merchandisers' interest in animated television. Kline looks at the imagery and appeal of the toy commercials and at how they provide a host of stereotyped figures around which children can organize their imaginative experience. He shows how the deregulation of advertising in the United States in the 1980s has led directly to the development of the new marketing strategies which use television series to saturate the market with promotional "character toys". Finally, in a powerful re-examination of the debates about the cultural effects of television, Out of the Garden asks whether we should allow our children's play culture to be primarily defined and created by marketing strategies, pointing to the unintended consequences of a situation in which images of real children have all but been eliminated from narratives about the young.
In this volume, scholars in developmental psychology, education, and neuroscience examine the ways in which children's toys often reflect and promote gender stereotypes, as well as the long-term consequences of gender-typed play.
This entertaining and informative book--written by Marianne Szymanski, child development and toy expert, and Ellen Neuborne, an award-winning business journalist--is an essential and authoritative guide to toys and play. Based on thirteen years of independent consumer-focused research, Toy Tips offers invaluable advice and practical information about selecting appropriate toys and answers questions such as Why do kids play with toys? What is the true role of toys? Which toys are good and which aren’t? How do toys figure into normal, healthy child development? “Invaluable and specific guidance about how the right toys can help your kids learn, develop, build skills, and have some fun.” --Michele Borba, consultant, educator, and author, Parents Do Make a Difference, Building Moral Intelligence, and No More Misbehavin' “No one is better equipped than Marianne Szymanski to help you make smart choices when purchasing toys for your kids or for the kids in your life.”--Spencer Christian, former host of Szymanski’s guest segments on ABC’s Good Morning America, and author, Is There a Dinosaur in Your Backyard? and many other children’s books “Szymanski’s years of experience and passion for serving children make her a leading voice in the developmental benefits of toys and play.”--From the Foreward by Marvin W. Berkowitz
There are few scholarly books about toys, and even fewer that consider toys within the context of culture and communication. Toys and Communication is an innovative collection that effectively showcases work by specialists who have sought to examine toys throughout history and in many cultures, including 1930’s Europe, Morocco, India, Spanish art of the 16th-19th centuries. Psychologists stress the importance of the role of toys and play in children’s language development and intellectual skills, and this book demonstrates the recurrent theme of the transmission of cultural norms through the portrayal, presentation and use of toys. The text establishes the role of toy and play park design in eliciting particular forms of play, as well as stressing the child’s use of toys to ‘become’ more adult. It will be beneficial for courses in education, developmental psychology, communications, media studies, and toy design.
A guide that helps parents focus on their children's unique strengths and inclinations rather than on gendered stereotypes to more effectively bring out the best in their individual children, for parents of infants to middle schoolers. Reliance on Gendered Stereotypes Negatively Impacts Kids Studies on gender and child development show that, on average, parents talk less to baby boys and are less likely to use numbers when speaking to little girls. Without meaning to, we constantly color-code children, segregating them by gender based on their presumed interests. Our social dependence on these norms has far-reaching effects, such as leading girls to dislike math or increasing aggression in boys. In this practical guide, developmental psychologist (and mother of two) Christia Spears Brown uses science-based research to show how over-dependence on gender can limit kids, making it harder for them to develop into unique individuals. With a humorous, fresh, and accessible perspective, Parenting Beyond Pink & Blueaddresses all the issues that contemporary parents should consider—from gender-segregated birthday parties and schools to sports, sexualization, and emotional intelligence. This guide empowers parents to help kids break out of pink and blue boxes to become their authentic selves.
Informed by the analytical practices of the interdisciplinary 'material turn' and social historical studies of childhood, Childhood By Design: Toys and the Material Culture of Childhood offers new approaches to the material world of childhood and design culture for children. This volume situates toys and design culture for children within broader narratives on history, art, design and the decorative arts, where toy design has traditionally been viewed as an aberration from more serious pursuits. The essays included treat toys not merely as unproblematic reflections of socio-cultural constructions of childhood but consider how design culture actively shaped, commodified and materialized shifting discursive constellations surrounding childhood and children. Focusing on the new array of material objects designed in response to the modern 'invention' of childhood-what we might refer to as objects for a childhood by design-Childhood by Design explores dynamic tensions between theory and practice, discursive constructions and lived experience as embodied in the material culture of childhood. Contributions from and between a variety of disciplinary perspectives (including history, art history, material cultural studies, decorative arts, design history, and childhood studies) are represented – critically linking historical discourses of childhood with close study of material objects and design culture. Chronologically, the volume spans the 18th century, which witnessed the invention of the toy as an educational plaything and a proliferation of new material artifacts designed expressly for children's use; through the 19th-century expansion of factory-based methods of toy production facilitating accuracy in miniaturization and a new vocabulary of design objects coinciding with the recognition of childhood innocence and physical separation within the household; towards the intersection of early 20th-century child-centered pedagogy and modernist approaches to nursery and furniture design; through the changing consumption and sales practices of the postwar period marketing directly to children through television, film and other digital media; and into the present, where the line between the material culture of childhood and adulthood is increasingly blurred.
Few things in life are more delightful than sharing in the laughter of a baby. Until now, however, psychologists and parenting experts have largely focused on moments of stress and confusion. Developmental psychologist Caspar Addyman decided to change that. Since 2012 Caspar has run the Baby Laughter project, collecting data, videos and stories from parents all over the world. This has provided a fascinating window into what babies are learning and how they develop cognitively and emotionally. Deeper than that, he has observed laughter as the purest form of human connection. It creates a bond that parents and infants share as they navigate the challenges of childhood. Moving chronologically through the first two years of life, The Laughing Baby explores the origin story for our incredible abilities. In the playful daily lives of babies, we find the beginnings of art, science, music and happiness. Our infancy is central to what makes us human, and understanding why babies laugh is key to understanding ourselves.
If you're in the business of marketing or developing products and programs for kids, What Kids Buy and Why belongs in your office. How can you create outstanding products and programs that will win in the marketplace and in the hearts of kids and parents? Dan S. Acuff and Robert H. Reiher have invented a development and marketing process called Youth Market Systems that puts the needs, abilities, and interests of kids first. This system makes sure you won't miss the mark whether you're trying to reach young children or teens, boys or girls, or whether you're selling toys, sports equipment, snacks, school supplies, or software. Based on the latest child development research, What Kids Buy and Why is chock-full of provocative information about the cognitive, emotional, and social needs of each age group. This book tells you among other things--why 3-through-7-year-olds love things that transform, why 8-through-12-year-olds love to collect stuff, how the play patterns of boys and girls differ, and why kids of all ages love slapstick.What Kids Buy and Why is the result of Acuff and Reiher's almost twenty years of consulting with high-profile clients including Johnson & Johnson, Nike, Microsoft, Nestle, Tyco, Disney, Pepsi, Warner Brothers, LucasFilm, Amblin/Spielberg, Mattel, Hasbro, Kraft, Coca-Cola, Quaker Oats, General Mills, Broderbund, Bandai, Sega, ABC, CBS, I-HOP, Domino's, Hardee's, and Kellogg's. Special features include: an innovative matrix for speedy, accurate product analysis and program development a clear, step-by-step process for making decisions that increase your product's appeal to kids tools and techniques for creating characters that kids love Here is the complete one-stop tool for understanding what children of all ages want to buy.
"This book is a welcome addition to the literature on children and the media, and a most stimulating application of social theory to questions of the child in contemporary film and consumer culture."--Ellen Seiter, author of The Internet Playground: Children's Access, Entertainment and Mis-Education Since the 1980s, a peculiar paradox has evolved in American film. Hollywood's children have grown up, and the adults are looking and behaving more and more like children. In popular films such as Harry Potter, Toy Story, Pocahantas, Home Alone, and Jumanji, it is the children who are clever, savvy, and self-sufficient while the adults are often portrayed as bumbling and ineffective. Is this transformation of children into "little adults" an invention of Hollywood or a product of changing cultural definitions more broadly? In Coining for Capital, Jyostna Kapur explores the evolution of the concept of childhood from its portrayal in the eighteenth century as a pure, innocent, and idyllic state--the opposite of adulthood--to its expression today as a mere variation of adulthood, complete with characteristics of sophistication, temptation, and corruption. Kapur argues that this change in definition is not a media effect, but rather a structural feature of a deeply consumer-driven society. Providing a new and timely perspective on the current widespread alarm over the loss of childhood, Coining for Capital concludes that our present moment is in fact one of hope and despair. As children are fortunately shedding false definitions of proscribed innocence both in film and in life, they must now also learn to navigate a deeply inequitable, antagonistic, and consumer-driven society of which they are both a part and a target.