Metropolis 40x30" Oil on canvas by Hall Groat II

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What is most troubling is that children’s culture has become virtually indistinguishable from consumer culture over the course of the last century. The cultural marketplace is now a key arena for the formation of the sense of self and of peer relationships, so much so that parents often are stuck between giving into a kid’s purchase demands or risking their child becoming an outcast on the playground.Children consumers grow up to be more than just adult consumers. They become mothers and fathers, administrative assistants and bus drivers, nurses and realtors, online magazine editors and assistant professors—in short, they become us who, in turn, make more of them.Childhood makes capitalism hum over the long haul.— Dan Cook, Assistant Professor of Advertising and Sociology at the University of Illinois, Lunchbox hegemony; Kids and the Marketplace, Then & Now, LiP Magazine, August 20, 2001