Consumer Empowerment in the Media-Saturated Family

Abstract

All societies face the challenge of socializing children and childrearing practices are the primary means by which familial norms and values are transmitted across generations. As psychoanalyst Eric Fromm (1947) argued, ‘In order that any society may function well, its members must acquire the kind of character which makes them want to act in the way they have to act as members of the society or of a special class within it’ (1947: 66). Fromm applied Freudian psychoanalysis to the ‘market orientation’ of post-war America arguing that human personality formed in two ways: ‘by acquiring and assimilating things’ and ‘by relating to people (and himself) in a process of socialisation’ (Fromm, 1947: 66). Not only were the individual’s relationship to things becoming more important to family life but a child’s character was increasingly formed through material rewards, through the negotiation of tastes and preferences, through shopping and through the management of money. Recognizing that American children were growing up in an environment where materialism was valorized, he identified consumer empowerment as the paradoxical problem underlying changes in post-war socialization practices through which parents strive to make children freely want the things that parents want them to want.