Certainly, childhood is a simpler time for the middle-class consumer. You are for sure an easy target, but you usually seem to have a better time of it; your innocence leaves you without a greater context to the realities of consumerism, the manipulation involved, the greater effect consumerism has on the planet, and other things of this nature. When you’re a kid, you simply want to have fun. It’s a time of learning, sure, but you haven’t learned enough to be cynical; you stare at the pretty colors coming off of products wild-eyed, they coax you to get your parents to buy you various things.

I do not know what it is like for a child growing up in the information age, but in my childhood, parents took their kids to stores. We would tag along like the brats we were, our parents doing their best to keep us from voraciously desiring everything we saw. Stores provided a labyrinth of toys (good), clothes (boring), and food (good, if it was sugary or had cartoon characters on it). We’d be seated in shopping carts, pushed around by our parents who were more concerned with the necessities of life than we were.

We would see something and call our parents’ attention to it. It was different for every child, and the income one’s parents had and their own, more or less mature attitude toward consumerism influenced how easy it was to coax them into buying things, but for me it was not quite as easy as some other kids to get what I wanted. But I did get some things I wanted, and I had a room full of toys.

We watched shows designed for kids on television. Between the segments of brightly colored cartoon characters and such, we were assaulted by commercials designed by adults to get us to ask our parents to buy us products. These commercials dressed up the products as something mind-blowing, something you were completely enraptured by and ran to your parents telling them about what you just saw. With my parents, the response was usually “well, maybe Santa Claus will bring you what you want”.

That’s an interesting thought too, isn’t it? Some Saint named Nicholas or something or another has become what amounts to a god that children believe in who magically brings them products for free, which are somehow made in his workshop at the North Pole. You’re eventually informed that this “god of giving kids consumer products” isn’t real, but once the game is up your parents continue to give you gifts. This “toy god” has supplanted Jesus Christ as what most people think of when they think of Christmas, I suppose. I’m not really against the idea, but it shows the power of our consumerism.

Ultimately, the child does not know the suffering and low wages of the workers who make their products, or the manner in which children are being manipulated to want things. Imagining working in marketing or advertising for children’s products gives me a hollow feeling in my chest. The idea of manipulating children into wanting things that they had no previous desire for and to bug their parents to get said things for them is a little creepy and grotesque, is it not?

I found that the best marketed things were often the most disappointing. There were many toys that were foisted on kids. There was Magic Copier, Color Blaster, Lite-Brite, and countless others. Ultimately, the marketing succeeded, but these products weren’t really very mind-blowing once the brief novelty of them wore off. We were promised endless fun and all we got was a mild return on our parents’ investment.

I will fondly remember many things from childhood that were consumer products for sure, mostly video games. That was and remains my personal weak point when it comes to consumerism. It was an escape from fear and bullying to be able to play video games, and they sparked my imagination. I suppose most have their nostalgia for products when it comes to things from their childhood.

However, I do feel like I was foisted into a world that was fake, a maze of TV commercials and Toys ‘R Us, and that while it was definitely fun to be a kid, there is some promise that wasn’t fulfilled, some dream that was promised us that never was achievable and which we have been chasing all of our adult lives.