Posted 80 days ago

Children and Consumer Faith

by Cindy Spencer, Children & Youth Ministries,
Saint Mark’s Episcopal Cathedral, Seattle
Published originally in The Rubic, Saint Mark’s Episcopal Cathedral, Seattle. Reprinted with author’s permission

I love September. It happens to be a big birthday month in our house, and it’s time for back-to-school. As much as I always look forward to the end of each school year, with the opportunity for more time outdoors, and a more unstructured approach to our particular family schedule, I also look forward to fall. Time for a fresh start – football games, falling leaves, and a chance for everything new – new classes, new books, new schedules, new clothes…

But all this talk of “new” things raises another issue. Fall in our house, is a prime time for me to be aware of the siren song of our consumer culture – to make everything fresh and new, just go on a shopping trip! After all, everything we need is waiting for us at Target or the mall – and we really do need stuff, right? A fresh start for the new school year requires the right stuff, and I’m not really talking about pencils and notebooks here.

But a nagging voice somewhere deep inside me counters, “At what cost? What is the cost to myself and my children? Yes, I probably do have to make some purchases, but how much is truly necessary?” And, both as a parent of three children, and as a person who works with faith formation for children, youth and families, I begin to consider what impact our consumer culture has on our soul and spirituality.

Joyce Ann Mercer, professor of practical theology at Virginia Theological Seminary, raises this issue in an article in the Christmas 2004 edition of the Sewanee Theological Journal. Mercer defines “consumerism” as referring to a way of life structured by and around various practices of consumption. In a consumerist society consumption dominates social practices.¹ Relationships, activities, space, work and leisure come to be structured around these consumptive practices. Consumption becomes a way to achieve social solidarity with others, and it marks identity and status.

Children are affected in three ways by this kind of consumerism, as 1) purchasers, 2) social scapegoats (those who cannot purchase), and 3) as agents of production, through child labor (often in other parts of the world).

Children are targeted in an increasingly intentional way by advertisers, due to the understanding that children constitute three markets in one: 1) a primary market, 2) a market of influence, and 3) a future market.2 Children purchase with their own spending money (in 2001, children spent $29 billion, teens spent $172 billion)³ , use “pester power” to influence the purchases of their parents ($300 billion in 2001)⁴ , and develop brand loyalty for life. (Learning this caused me to re-think my life-long loyalty to a particular cola. Do I really prefer it, or have I been a victim of a really good advertising strategy?!)

Multiple sources cite the goal of the advertising community to target children as young as 2 and 3 years old in an attempt to develop brand loyalty, in a common practice known as “cradle-to-grave marketing.” Juliet Schor, an economist writing on issues of consumption and overwork, writes: “We have become a nation that places a lower priority on teaching its children how to thrive socially, intellectually, even spiritually, than it does on training them to consume. The long-term consequences of this development are ominous.”⁵

What are the consequences of consumer culture, particularly on our children? One that comes to mind immediately is the conflict between what we believe as Christians about the worth of every individual, rooted in our understanding of Genesis 1:26, of humankind created in the image of God, and the implicit message rooted in consumer culture that our worth is found in our ability to consume. What is really communicated to our children when we say, “you are a valuable child of God, created in the image of God, and full of inestimable worth,” but unconsciously live our lives according to the principle that we are what we buy, that the clothing our children wear and the electronic accompaniments of their lives reflect on us, their parents, as reflecting our own social status? Mercer states that this mixed message even impacts the church:

In terms of children’s spirituality, consumerism means the structuring of relationships with children around consumption. Relationships and responsibilities toward children are increasingly figured in relation to the “use-value” of children, foregrounding market values of self-interest, and utilitarianism. Hence, children come to be valued not in and of themselves as human beings – or as it would be put within the Christian tradition, as creatures of God possessing inherent and incomparable worth as bearers of the imago Dei – but for their “use-value” to parents ( as symbolic capital), to business (as consumers), and even to the church (as spiritual capital). It would be reasonable to expect that children nurtured in such a habitus of market-drive (de)valuing of persons would adopt similar practices of treating others in relation to their utilitarian potential for return value to one’s self.⁶

The question raised is about the impact of this mixed message on children’s faith and spirituality. Mercer notes that “children schooled in a pedagogy of consumption hold their commitments lightly.”⁷ This mixed message even impacts the curricula and pedagogical practices of the church, as marketers of curricula and methodology for supporting children’s spiritual growth use standard marketing practice to sell their “product,” further intensifying the message of children being viewed primarily as consumer, rather than as a whole, unique individual, as espoused in our baptismal practice.

What do we communicate to children in such a schizophrenic environment? How can we even begin to hope to counter the messages that consumer culture offers to our children and to us concerning our worth and value as human beings?

We know that children and adults both wrestle with existential issues, issues which are essentially spiritual, including the questions of vocation – “Why am I here?” “What am I to do?” “What is life really all about, anyway?” as well as questions of death, freedom and aloneness.⁸ Consumer culture offers a simple answer to all of these issues, an answer which is simultaneously cheap and costly, and which really serves as an anesthetic to these questions of ultimate meaning, rather than providing any kind of an answer at all.

I have to admit that I can feel discouraged over this dilemma, because it is easy to be overwhelmed by the invisibility of our consumer culture – it is, indeed, the sea in which we swim, and therefore, not always easy to identify. It is tempting to feel that there is little families can do to challenge this culture, to truly equip our children to face the existential issues that haunt all humans.

We can find some clues to solving this dilemma from the children and youth themselves. In 2002 the consumer advocacy group, Center for a New American Dream, sponsored an art and essay contest asking youth to respond to the question “What do you really want that money can’t buy?” The answers: “love; respect; more free time; more contact with extended family; more contact with the natural world; and a healthier, more peaceful planet.”⁹

Betsy Taylor, former president for the Center for a New American Dream, turned the 2000+ responses into the framework for her book, What Kids Really Want that Money Can’t Buy. In her book, she offers these positive family actions and attentions, which might be an antidote to consumerism:

• Family Ritual
• Mealtimes
• Sabbath
• Commemoration of special events and life transitions
• Family service to those in need
• Silence and Stillness
• Singing and Music
• Compassion
• Nature

• Spiritual education and study [10]

From my own experience, primarily influenced by years of working with children through the framework of Godly Play, the Montessori-based method of faith formation currently in use with children through fifth grade at Saint Mark’s Cathedral, I would add to this list:

• Story
• Family stories
• Faith stories
• Stories which engage wonder and imagination.
• Play

• Blessing one another and creation through intentional care of each other and our environment.

All of these actions and attentions take place in the safe space of family and are supported through our engagement as a Christian community in our regular gathering for worship, formation, play, story, service and song. They are supported through our engagement in and around nature, and through our concern for our environment. Paying attention to our family life in these ways challenges an ethic of consumption, and replaces it with an ethic of blessing, remembering how God blesses all of creation in the Genesis accounts, and how Jesus blessed the children and scolded those who attempted to keep the children from approaching him.

So, I need to take another look at the list of school “needs.” Yes, my children will have the supplies necessary to function in their classes. After all, much of it is already lying around the house, perhaps even left in backpacks from the last day of school in June. I should probably check. And I should probably check in with my kids, too. Maybe time spent playing croquet or cards or sharing a story is more important than a night racing around the store. Perhaps my young teenager would actually prefer shopping resale to find her unique “look” for fall, encouraging her creativity. And I might just discover the answer to “What do I really want that money can’t buy?” in the process.

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Notes:
1. Joyce Ann Mercer, “The Child as Consumer: a North American Problem of Amibivalence Concerning the Spirituality of Childhood in Late Capitalist Consumer Culture,” Sewanee Theological Journal 48:1 (Christmas 2004) p. 66.
2. James McNeal, Kids as Consumers: a Handbook of Marketing to Children, Lexington Books, Lexington Mass., and Toronto, 1992, p. 58-65.
3. Betsy Taylor, What Kids Really Want That Money Can’t Buy, Warner Books, New York, 2003, p. 174-175.
4. Ibid.
5. Juliet Schor, Born to Buy, Scribner, New York, 2004, p. 21.
6. Mercer, p. 82-83.
7. Mercer, p. 83.
8. See Jerome W. Berryman, Godly Play, Harper Collins, Augsburg Fortress, Minneapolis, 1991.
9. Mary Pipher, Foreward to What Kids Really Want that Money Can’t Buy, Warner Books, New York, 2003, p. x
10. Taylor, p. 89-105.

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