Providing extensive examples of the conditions of children's everyday consumption as well as how children themselves understand issues of work, money, scarcity, and consumer products, this book challenges the prevailing theories of consumption and opens up new ways of thinking about children. Arguing that consumption simultaneously reflects on the changing social role of children, family relations, market interaction, and state regulations, this account marries consumer studies with perspectives that emanate from the disciplines of childhood sociology and the history of childhood. With contributions from novice and established researchers, it generates consumer values no longer based on the idea of the naïve or competent child.

• Cover
• Title
• Copyright
• Contents
• Acknowledgements
• Situated child consumption
  • An introduction
• 1. Ontological child consumption
• 2. Pricing the Priceless Child – a wonderful problematic
• 3. More children of better quality
  • Pricing the child in the welfare state
• 4. A grown-up priceless child
• 5. Not all about the money
  • Children, work, and consumption
• 6. ‘Consider the fact that I am considerate’
  • Parent–teen bargaining
• 7. Enacting money at an amusement park
• 8. Fatherhood through direct marketing
• 9. ‘I do like them but I don’t watch them’
  • Preschoolers’ use of age as an accounting device in product evaluations
• 10. Tweens as a commercial target group
  • Children and Disney filling the category
• 11. Fashioning girls
• 12. Children, ‘sexualization’, and consumer culture
• 13. ‘The Littlest Arms Race’?
  • War toys and the boy consumer in Eighties’ Canada
• 14. Nobody panicked!
  • The Fifties’ debate on children’s comics consumption
• About the authors