by John de Graaf; David Wann; Thomas H Naylor; David Horsey; Vicki Robin
FOR RICHER. . .
Take, for example, the case of Keaton and Cindy Adams, the couple we introduced you to in chapter 2. They almost let affluenza tear their marriage apart. “Our wedding was so good we almost have it paid off,” said Keaton six years after they were married. “And that’s where the whole ball started rolling.”3 And so it rolls for many young Americans—thousands shelled out for one big extravaganza, that public pledge of eternal fidelity, “for richer or for poorer.”
First, of course, it’s for richer. Presents from friends and family—microwaves, blenders, towels, toasters (never out of fashion), dinnerware, Tupperware, tea kettles, and a whole lot more (leaf blowers?). Plus a roomful of wrapping paper, used once and cast aside. Then the wedding bills come due.
After their wedding, Keaton and Cindy began buying lots of other things for their home, all on credit. They bought expensive furniture and the obligatory “home entertainment center.” “What’s another twenty-five dollars a month?” says Keaton, explaining their thought process at the time, one all too common in American families. “And then we found ourselves making minimum payments all over the place to the point where we couldn’t. And we started to get two months behind, three months behind.”
In a short time, they were $20,000 in debt, with no hope of paying it off. “The arguments ensued. We started fighting,” Keaton recalls. “We were screaming divorce. Finally we ended up reaching a breaking point.”
For millions of American families, their story would, no doubt, sound familiar. But it has (so far, at least) a happy ending. The Adamses sought help from Consumer Credit Counseling Service in Colorado Springs, where they lived at the time, and brought their spending and financial crisis under control. Cindy Adams says they’ve learned a hard lesson. “It’s OK not to have the newest thing, the latest style,” she now believes. “Our home doesn’t have to be in tip-top condition. It lets us focus on things that are more important than stuff.”
SOCIALLY SANCTIONED ADDICTION
Mike and Terri Pauly, family counselors in Colorado Springs, say they see many couples who get themselves into situations like that faced by Keaton and Cindy Adams. It starts, Mike says, “with trying to acquire as many things as possible. It’s a major stressor right now in couples. There is a real addictive cycle that families get into where they go out and spend money in order to feel good about themselves. I have a number of couples I’ve worked with recently who are having lots of problems, but who come in on Monday and say, ‘We had a great weekend. And it’s because we went out and spent a lot of money. We went to the mall and spent five hundred dollars on different things and we had a great time.’”4 Shopping as therapy. But as a psychotropic drug, it ultimately doesn’t work.
The time comes, Mike Pauly points out, “when there’s no more money left on the credit card and they get into that position of feeling backed against the wall. They start feeling stress and tension in their relationship.” It’s a problem, Mike says, “that’s a lot like racism. It’s all-pervasive, it’s everywhere, and people don’t realize it.”
But unlike racism, the addiction to stuff isn’t challenged in our society. In fact, says Terri Pauly, “It’s a very socially acceptable way to be addictive, to get a temporary high, to feel good. I’m feeling depressed today—let’s go shopping. As far as society goes, it’s sanctioned. They get a lot of social reinforcement for it.”5“And yet,” adds Mike, “just like with a drug or with alcohol, when it wears off it’s still the same old world and people have to deal with that emptiness inside, which is really what causes people to go out and spend.”
FINDING SOMEBODY BETTER
In addition to family conflicts brought on by overspending, Terri and Mike say they see another way in which rampant consumerism or affluenza weakens marriages. “The choices available to people in terms of products are so overwhelming,” Terri contends. “Whether you’re going to buy a car or a bagel, there’s so many choices. There’s a feeling when you’ve bought something that maybe you didn’t make the right choice, maybe you missed something. And it can’t help but carry over into relationships with people, that there’s got to be somebody better out there.”
“I see that a lot in my practice,” Mike says. “People come in and say they met someone at work or their relationship started at work and they divorced their spouses and got together. But once the wrapping was off it wasn’t as new and different and wonderful as it was in the beginning when everyone was dressed up and powdered and looked perfect. So they go back to the company to find some other toy to play with, someone new, someone different.” Shopping for partners.
Ted Haggard, pastor of the 11,000-member New Life Church in Colorado Springs, and president of the National Association of Evangelicals, shares the Paulys’ concerns. “Everything we watch,” he says, “is always promoting dissatisfaction. We need a new stereo, a new upgrade of our computer system, a better car, a bigger house. I think the societal discontent we’re seeing is fed by the materialistic society we’re living in.”6
“The whole idea of using a thing and then throwing it away and getting another one is affecting us all as people,” Haggard believes. “We start looking at other people and saying that if they don’t give us pleasure, they are disposable. I think the trend is dangerous, and I think we need to have old values where we live in the same house as long as we can, where we keep material items as long as we can, and where we be faithful to each other.”
In the use-it-once-and-throw-it-away, planned-obsolescence world of American consumer culture, it should not be surprising that attitudes formed in relation to products eventually get transferred to people as well.
Out of sight, out of mind. Moreover, family life strains under the stress of excess. As both parents work full time and more to meet their swelling expectations of the good life, then rush to maintain the frenetic lifestyles those expectations demand, nerves are frayed and tempers boil. In an ironic twist, the degeneration of family life leaves some partners spending more time at the office to avoid the friction and turmoil back home, a phenomenon well documented in The Time Bind, Arlie Russell Hochschild’s study of workers’ lives in a large corporation.
As Barbara Ehrenreich puts it in an endorsement of Hochschild’s book, it’s a “vicious cycle. . . the longer hours we work, the more stressful our home lives become; and the greater the tensions at home, the more we try to escape into work.”7 But the cycle frequently starts not with work, but with affluenza: often we work more because we want more. As a culture, at least, we have chosen money over time.
FAMILY VALUES OR MARKET VALUES?
There is yet another means by which affluenza pulls families apart. Glenn Stanton, the clean-cut director of a conservative family-support organization in South Carolina, calls it “the new homelessness.” “We have people living in houses with one another but not connecting with one another,” Stanton says.8 They’re not interacting because, quite simply, they all have their own toys to play with. “Dad is on the Internet,” Stanton points out. “Mom’s upstairs watching a movie on the VCR. The kids are downstairs playing video games. Everybody is connected to something outside the home even though they are physically within the home.
“The pressure that materialism is bringing to bear on the American family today is woefully underestimated, but it is critically important,” he argues. It wasn’t something we expected to hear from Stanton. We spoke with him several years ago, when he was a policy analyst for Focus on the Family, the largest Christian conservative organization in the United States.
Founded by Dr. James Dobson, a child psychologist whose radio program is heard by millions of people, FOF is a mini-empire of conservative family advisers based in Colorado Springs. Its operations are housed in palatial hillside headquarters that might embarrass the Parthenon. Inside, the feel is expensive and dynamic. Tour groups learn about Dobson’s vision for FOF, while the photographs lining the walls establish his connection to past and present Republican stalwarts, inclu
ding Ronald Reagan and Newt Gingrich.
Dozens of neatly dressed men and women respond to hundreds of phone callers every day, counseling them and sending out audiotapes, videotapes, and publications geared to teens, single parents, and other readers. “We get thousands of letters every week,” said Stanton when we first met him at FOF. “People write to us looking for help to hold their marriage together, their family together.”
The ideology at FOF is decidedly free-market capitalist but not without reservations like those expressed by Stanton. “The market in a very real sense is hostile to the family,” he contends. “It needs to expand itself. It needs to bring in new consumers. And quite tragically, it brings in new consumers at almost any price. Do we go after a sale even pitting child against parent? We would contend that that is too far.”
It may be too far. It is also deliberate. At conferences of children’s marketers, it is described as “the nag factor.” Increase the nag factor and you increase the chance of a sale —family harmony be damned.
THE CONSERVATIVE CONTRADICTION
Stanton and some other conservatives have begun to look carefully at what they see as an inherent tension between market values and family values. Edward Luttwak, a former Reagan administration official with the Center for International and Strategic Studies, expresses his concerns about the issue rather bluntly. “The contradiction between wanting rapid economic growth and dynamic economic change and at the same time wanting family values, community values, and stability is a contradiction so huge that it can only last because of an aggressive refusal to think about it,” says Luttwak,9 the author of the powerful and critically acclaimed book Turbo-Capitalism.
Luttwak calls himself “a real conservative, not a phony conservative.” “I want to conserve family, community, nature. Conservatism should not be about the market, about money,” he argues. “It should be about conserving things, not burning them up in the name of greed.”
Too often, he says, so-called conservatives make speeches lauding the unrestricted market (as the best mechanism for rapidly increasing America’s wealth), while at the same time saying we have to go back to old family values; we have to maintain communities. “It’s a complete non sequitur, a complete contradiction,” Luttwak says. “The two of course are completely in collision. It’s the funniest after-dinner speech in America. And the fact that this is listened to without peals of laughter is a real problem.”
“America,” Luttwak contends, “is relatively rich. Even Americans that are not doing that well are relatively rich, but America is very short of social tranquility. It’s very short of stability. It’s like somebody who has seventeen ties and no shoes buying himself another tie. The U.S. has no shoes as far as tranquility and the security of people’s lives is concerned. But it has a lot of money. We have gone over to being a complete consumer society, a 100 percent consumer society. And the consequences are just as one would predict them. Mainly lots of consumption, lots of goodies and cheap things, cheap flights, and a lot of dissatisfaction.”
Indeed, no system seems as effective as the unrestricted free market in delivering the most goods at the lowest prices to consumers. In the Age of Affluenza, such success has become the supreme measure of value. But human beings are more than consumers, more than stomachs craving to be filled. We are producers as well, looking to express ourselves through stable, meaningful work. We are members of families and communities, moral beings with interest in fairness and justice, living organisms dependent on a healthy and beautiful environment. We are parents and children.
Our affluenza-driven quest for maximum consumer access undermines these other values. To produce goods at the lowest prices, we lay off thousands of workers and transfer their workplaces from country to country in search of cheap labor. We shatter the dreams of those workers who are discarded, and often shatter their families as well. The security of whole communities is considered expendable. Lives are disrupted without a second thought. And as we shall see, children are pitted against parents, undermining family life even further.
CHAPTER 7
Dilated
pupils
We are living in a material world,
and I’m a material girl.
—MADONNA
In 1969, when John was twenty-three, he taught briefly at a Navajo Indian boarding school in Shiprock, New Mexico. His third-grade students were among the poorest children in America, possessing little more than the clothes on their backs. The school had few toys or other sources of entertainment. Yet John never heard the children say they were bored. They were continually making up their own games. And though racism and alcoholism would likely scar their lives a few years later, they were, at the age of ten, happy and well-adjusted children.
That Christmas, John went home to visit his family. He remembers the scene, a floor full of packages under the tree. His own ten-year-old brother opened a dozen or so of them, quickly moving from one to the next. A few days later, John found his brother and a friend watching TV, the Christmas toys tossed aside in his brother’s bedroom. The boys complained to John that they had nothing to do. “We’re bored,” they proclaimed. For John, it was a clear indication that children’s happiness doesn’t come from stuff. But powerful forces keep trying to convince America’s parents that it does.
John tells the story in the first chapter of a new book published by the American Academy of Pediatrics.1 The book, About Children, deals with almost every aspect of childhood in America today—from asthma to violence. The first chapter is about “Childhood Affluenza,” making it clear that the medical profession takes affluenza seriously, especially where children are concerned. It does so with good reason.
THE CHILDREN’S MARKETING EXPLOSION
Three ten-year-old girls participate eagerly, punctuating the sound of rolling dice and moving plastic figures with shouts of “Yes!” and “My favorite store!” They’re playing the game Electronic Mall Madness, from Milton Bradley. They jam their “credit cards” into the plastic ATM and withdraw play money to spend in the mall. The object of the game, which retails for $40, is to buy the most stuff and get back to the parking lot first. It’s a good introduction to the happy-go-spending, affluenza-infected, life of today’s children.
Spending by—and influenced by—American children recently began growing by a torrid 20 percent a year, stands at about $670 billion today (more than the U.S. military budget of $418 billion), and is expected to reach $1 trillion annually within the next decade. In 1984, kids four to twelve spent about $4 billion of their own money. This year, they’ll spend $35 billion. Marketing to children has become the hottest trend in the advertising world.
“Corporations are recognizing that the consumer lifestyle starts younger and younger,” explains Joan Chiaramonte, who does market research for the Roper Starch polling firm. “If you wait to reach children with your product until they’re eighteen years of age, you probably won’t capture them.”2
From 1980 to 2004 the amount spent on children’s advertising in America rose from $100 million to $15 billion a year, a staggering 15,000 percent! In her book Born to Buy, Juliet Schor points out that children are now also used effectively by marketers to influence their parents’ purchases of big-ticket items, from luxury automobiles to resort vacations and even homes. One hotel chain sends promotional brochures to children who’ve stayed at its hotels, so the kids will pester their parents into returning. Schor points out that many American kids recognize logos by the age of eighteen months and ask for brand-name products at the age of two. The average child gets about seventy toys a year.
For the first time in human history, children are getting most of their information from entities whose goal is to sell them something, rather than from family, school, or houses of worship. The average twelve-year-old in the United States spends forty-eight hours a week exposed to commercial messages. Yet American children spend only about forty minutes per week in meaningful conversation with their parents.3 Susan Linn, the a
uthor of Consuming Kids, writes that “comparing the advertising of two or three decades ago to the commercialism that permeates our children’s world is like comparing a BB gun to a smart bomb.”4
Children under seven are especially vulnerable to marketing messages. Research shows that they are unable to distinguish commercial motives from benign or benevolent motives. One ’70s study found that when asked who they would believe if their parents told them something was true and a TV character (even an animated one like Tony the Tiger) told them the opposite was true, most young children said they’d believe what the TV character told them. Both the American Psychological Association and the American Academy of Pediatrics say advertising that targets children is inherently deceptive.
What psychological, social, and cultural impacts are these trends having on children? A recent poll found that 95 percent of American adults worry that our children are becoming “too focused on buying and consuming things.”5
VALUES IN CONFLICT
In Minneapolis, psychologist David Walsh, the author of Selling Out America’s Children, teaches parents ways to protect their offspring from falling captive to commercialism. After years spent treating so-called problem children, Walsh worries that childhood affluenza is reaching epidemic levels. He sees a fundamental collision of values between children’s needs and advertising. “Market-created values of selfishness, instant gratification, perpetual discontentment, and constant consumption have become diametrically opposed to the values most Americans want to teach their children,” says the grandfatherly Walsh, presenting his concerns with gentle passion.6
Advertising aimed at children is hardly a new phenomenon. By 1912, boxes of Cracker Jack came with a toy inside to encourage children to ask for more. Long before television, children were saving cereal box tops to send in for prizes. Interestingly, the whole idea of children’s TV programming came because advertisers were looking for ways to use the new electronic medium to sell their products. The first TV cartoon shows were created explicitly to sell sugared cereals.
