Abstract
This chapter considers how “elusive childhood” (Honeyman, 2005) and early parenthood are imagined at the site of The Baby Show, a UK consumer show targeted at new parents and other interested adults. The forms of consumer culture that surround the very young child have not received much scholarly interest to date. Yet this phase in the life course, in which new families are formed and in which adults develop a parental identity, is of interest in part because it illustrates how adult imaginings become interspersed with the complex voices and narratives coming from the marketplace. The Baby Show is an excellent site for an examination of how adults, diverse in terms of their objectives for taking part, construct the young child and the new parent. My arguments draw on ethnographic immersion at this site over several years.
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© 2010 Lydia Martens
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Martens, L. (2010). The Cute, the Spectacle and the Practical: Narratives of New Parents and Babies at The Baby Show. In: Buckingham, D., Tingstad, V. (eds) Childhood and Consumer Culture. Studies in Childhood and Youth. Palgrave Macmillan, London. https://doi.org/10.1057/9780230281844_10
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1057/9780230281844_10
Publisher Name: Palgrave Macmillan, London
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