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Born to Buy cover
SEE THROUGH IT RAISE THE FUTURE

Born to Buy

by Juliet Schor

The marketing industry studied your childhood. To sell to it.

For you if

you want to understand how your desires were manufactured before you were old enough to know it was happening

⚡ Choose Your Route ⚡

Not sold directly on this site. Support indie bookstores with a new copy, or go sustainable with a used one.

Buy New on Bookshop.org

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Find Used on Better World Books

Secondhand & sustainable

$20 MSRP
Reference price shown. Other editions may be available.

Schor spent years studying the marketing industry's systematic targeting of children — the research it conducts on how to exploit developmental vulnerabilities, the channel it uses to route consumer desire through kids and into households, the way it has colonized childhood itself as a market. The findings are specific and damning: children are exposed to more commercial messages per day than any previous generation, the psychological techniques used are drawn directly from clinical research on persuasion and attachment, and the outcomes — anxiety, materialism, lower self-esteem, family conflict — are well documented. The most rigorous academic account of what consumer culture does to children ever written for a general audience. Essential reading for every parent on the stage-0 shelf and every teenager on the stage-4 shelf who wants to understand why they want what they want.

Where This Book Lives

Themes
childhoodconsumerism

Part of a Reading Journey

consumerism

Consumerism: How to Not Waste Away

From landfills to liberation — how to stop buying into the lie.

8 books • SEE THROUGH IT → MAKE SOMETHING BETTER

Explore →

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