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217 When I asked Judy Berger, a quiet, reflective, white middle-class mother, if she regretted buying anything for her eight-year-old son, Max, it would not have been surprising had she named the GameBoy. She had just finished telling me in great detail about the extent of her son’s obsession with the electronic handheld toy and the deep misgivings she had about it. After all that, I almost felt silly asking the question—but her answer startled me. It is not that she rued buying the GameBoy for Max, she insisted. “I guess I felt almost like it wasn’t really [. . .] like I couldn’t have not bought it, because now we are there in our life,” she said, her words tripping over each other uncharacteristically. While she wanted Max to be happy, for two years that desire had not been enough to overcome her intense dislike of the gaming systems, which she regarded as addictive, violent, and sedentary. The turning point was when she came to realize that GameBoys had so saturated the social lives of eight-year-old boys they knew that she did not think she could relegate Max to the kind of social pathos of the outsider. It was not the thought of Max’s happiness that led her to buy the gaming system, but rather the prospect of his social exclusion that made her reevaluate her opposition. But her distaste for the GameBoy remained. “It is kind of sad that it feels like it is a given that you will have one,” she finally conceded. “It is too bad that that is where we are.”1 The commodification of childhood is advancing, with children in the United States spending some $30 billion themselves and influencing another $670 billion spent on their behalf (Schor 2004). The daily lives of children are permeated now with moments of buying, from symbolic rituals to transportation to lunches. Consumption as Care and Belonging economies of dignity in children’s daily lives Allison J. Pugh c h a p t e r 1 7 v As Arlie Hochschild (2003, 36) observed, increasingly “companies . . . expand the number of market niches for goods and services covering activities that, in yesteryear, formed part of unpaid ‘family life.’” As the market seeps into childhood, scholars debate whether or not we should be worried. Are children the victims of an ever more sophisticated onslaught by powerful corporate interests (Schor 2004; this volume)? Or are they “wise consumers ,” savvy social actors who can innovate, using advertising content for their own strategic ends (Buckingham 2000)? Is the commercialization of childhood a new and alarming trend, or is it the outgrowth of longstanding historical practices of intermingling economic exchange and personal lives (Kline 1993; Linn 2004; Zelizer 2004)? Should we shield children from the more sexual, violent, exploitative, or materialistic corners of adult culture, or is it impossible to separate childhood from the features of the wider culture in which it is embedded (Cook 2004; Williams 2005)? The reader might be forgiven for thinking that the answer to all of these questions , however contradictory, is “yes.” I argue that these debates, while important, miss a central point about spending on children: the impact of commercialization on the emotional experience of childhood—specifically, on children’s relationships with parents and with friends. Just like the rise of a “divorce culture” generated by the prevalence of divorced couples changed widespread cultural assumptions about the expectations of trust and obligation in marriage (Hackstaff 1999), the rise of children’s consumer culture has so permeated children ’s daily lives as to establish a new cultural environment in which to grow up. By its sheer domination of childhood today, commodification has reframed expectations about what parents should provide, what children should have, and what having or not having signifies. In this chapter, I consider these developments from the perspective of three years of ethnographic research on children’s consumer culture and families in California. I found that Judy Berger’s dilemma exemplifies that of many parents: she did not regret her decision to buy the GameBoy, but she regretted the cultural imperative that necessitated its buying—an imperative stemming from Max’s relationships with others. Consumption, Care, and Belonging For thousands of years we have understood consumption as a means of distinguishing those like ourselves from others who are not, most often from others below. In a particularly influential argument, Pierre Bourdieu (1984...

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