The four-year-old's eyes were as brown as the two squares of chocolate which I was offering her. "No, thank you," she said politely. "My Mammy doesn't let me, because she thinks I am getting too fat," writes Breda O'Brien
I looked at the rounded, chubby limbs of a little girl who would register as normal on any weight and height chart and wondered about the kind of society which we live in. With the help of her mother, a child scarcely out of toddlerhood had already internalised the idea that her body is unacceptable and needs changing.
By coincidence, shortly afterwards I received a home-shopping catalogue and was reduced to uncharacteristic silence by the clothes aimed at three- to nine-year-olds. Shoestring straps and plunging necklines to be worn by childish chests, sequins and satin on clothes which our mothers would have said were more suitable for use as belts than skirts.
Except that our mothers would have been talking to teenagers: these were aimed squarely at kids. What an odd set of double standards we operate. We rightly abhor sexual abuse of children and yet accept dressing our children in highly sexualised clothing as normal.
These are tough times to be a kid. Childhood as a concept is increasingly under attack. In some academic quarters, childhood is dismissed as a relatively recent development which was invented in the last few centuries.
According to this school of thought, the change from a rural to an industrial economy in the 19th century resulted in far-reaching changes in the way people viewed the family and childhood. Before that time, it is alleged, there was no sentimental idea of childhood as a special time, or any idea that there was an innocence which had to be preserved. Children were seen as small versions of adults, and rather second-class versions at that.
Not surprisingly, this view of childhood as a sentimental recent invention is often invoked by those who have most interest in children as a potential market. It is a useful rhetorical device which justifies treating children just like any other consumer, and marketing to them as aggressively as you would to an adult.
Oddly enough, such people never seem interested in evaluating whether it was a positive or negative move in the history of humanity to see children as something other than incomplete adults, to pay attention to their developmental needs and to treat them with special consideration.
To look at such ideas would be inconvenient, because it would halt the progress towards separating children from their families and from their families' cash. A consumerist society thrives on dissatisfaction, and on the notion that there is always something to be bought which can ease that dissatisfaction. Women, in particular, are trained from an early age that only certain narrow parameters of appearance are acceptable, but not to worry, there is some product out there to fill the lack.
It suits those who want to exploit children as a market to teach children to identify with a peer group instead of their family, and to want to fit into that peer group by having all the badges of acceptability, which strangely enough have all to be bought.
I am not talking about the normal move towards establishing an adult identity which begins in adolescence, because this separation is beginning at younger and younger ages. Parents are often passively compliant in this process. Advertisers have known for years about "pester power", the ability of children to nag their parents into supplying what they want. Nowadays, when parents often also suffer from guilt about short-changing their children with regard to time, they are even more vulnerable to buying them things to compensate.
Some years ago, when reading up on children and advertising, I came across a fascinating article on China and children in the Journal of Consumer Marketing. At the time, China was just beginning to open up to capitalism, and marketers were gagging at the size of the potential market. So naturally, they were anxious to establish what effect the media were having on Chinese children. This was easy to study, because the advent of television was also relatively recent there. The results were very pleasing, at least to them.
Children have to learn consumerist behaviour, a process known as consumer socialisation. The researchers concluded: "Obviously, television is having an emancipating effect on China's children. It is reducing their reliance on traditional interpersonal sources of product information while catering to their need for entertainment."
Now, we lucky old things in the West have been subjected to consumer socialisation for decades. When parents wonder why it is so difficult to rear kids, or to enforce family standards, they might wonder about the effect of a market which consciously tries to liberate children from "traditional interpersonal sources of product information." In the words of a one-time American presidential candidate, Bill Bradley, the free market which economic conservatives champion undermines the moral character that social conservatives desire.
At the announcement of new guidelines on Internet use this week by Noel Dempsey, it was announced that more than 20 per cent of Irish schoolchildren aged between 11 and 14 have engaged in sex talk with a stranger in an Internet chat room. About 25 per cent had accidentally come across pornography on the Internet. But perhaps the most interesting statistic was that nearly half those interviewed had never been supervised while online at home.
And we all know why. Kids are quiet when they are on the computer. They are not beating each other up or demanding to be entertained. Not only might we interrupt this blessed peace by querying what they are up to, we might be humiliated when it emerges that in another reversal of adult-child relations typical of this period in history, they know far more about the Internet than we do.
It is easy for us as parents to feel swamped and overwhelmed, but that is exactly how those who wish to shape our children want us to feel. Resistance to the dominant culture always takes energy. But unless you are willing to shrug and consign childhood to the scrapheap of other short-lived inventions of the last centuries, resistance is the only option.