The disempowering empowerment of children's consumer “choice”: Cultural discourses of the child consumer in North America

The purpose of the paper is to explore how discourses of children's empowerment through goods have emerged and function as a key narrative among many in children's commercial industries, particularly in the USA and Canada.

The central philosophical and theoretical approach guiding this inquiry rests on the notion that the “child consumer” exists as a rhetorical figure which has an existence that is as consequential as “real,” biographical children. The child consumer arises from, and in many ways resides in, discourses produced by marketers, retailers, researchers and advertisers on the pages of marketing publications, often framing the imaginations and guiding the actions of advertisers, retailers, merchandisers and marketers. Articles from trade publications such as AdWeek, BrandWeek, Brandmarketing; KidScreen and Progressive Grocer, in addition to books written by marketers about the children's market since the 1990s, were examined.

Three key themes – choice, recognition and involvement – were found to be the most prominent in framing children's consumption as “empowering.”

For scholars and practitioners, the paper offers an approach to understand corporate practice as moral practice by highlighting the ideological justifications presented in defense of promoting children's consumption in the last decade. It offers a cautionary tale about the power of capital to produce and deploy social meaning.