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Longing and Belonging: Parents, Children, and Consumer Culturereviewed by Lisa Jacobson - October 22, 2009 Title: Longing and Belonging: Parents, Children, and Consumer Culture Author(s): Allison J. Pugh Publisher: University of California Press, Los Angeles ISBN: 0520258444, Pages: 320, Year: 2009 Search for book at Amazon.com In recent years, probing the perils and pleasures of childrens consumer culture has developed into a cottage industry within the book publishing world. Sociologists have produced gripping exposés of the lengths to which contemporary corporate marketers go to capture childrens brand loyalty, while historians have located the roots of such practices in the early twentieth century. Contrary to conventional wisdom, the widespread anxieties surrounding childrens consumer culture are nothing new. Yet, even as parents have decried manipulative corporate marketing and the commercialization of childhood, childrens relationships with their parents and peers have become ever more deeply enmeshed in consumer culture. Sociologist Allison Pugh, in her brilliant study Longing and Belonging, succinctly frames this conundrum of contemporary child-rearing: If consumer culture is the enemy of good parenting, why do so many parents invite the enemy into their homes? (x). Pughs compelling answers to that question take us deeply into the social... (preview truncated at 150 words.)To view the full-text for this article you must be signed-in with the appropriate membership. Please review your options below:
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- Lisa Jacobson
University of California, Santa Barbara E-mail Author LISA JACOBSON is an Associate Professor in the History Department at University of California, Santa Barbara. She authored Raising Consumers: Children and the American Mass Market in the Twentieth Century (2004) and edited Children and Consumer Culture in American Society: Historical Essays and Documents (2008). She is currently working on a book about alcohol promotion and consumption after the repeal of Prohibition in the United States.
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