The Other “Child Study”: Figuring Children as Consumers in Market Research, 1910s–1990s

Abstract

This article examines how notions of “the child” were constructed in marketing research literature from the 1910s through the 1990s. Drawing on children's industry trade literature, market reports and books, I argue that children have become increasingly portrayed as individualized, autonomous consumers. Over this time period, the desire for consumer products becomes figured by industry observers and researchers as a mode of children's “self expression.” The analytic isolation of “the child” in the persona of a “consumer” authorizes a new morality for consumption by construing children's desire for goods as preexistent and thus natural.

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