In the early stages of developing this project on young children and consumer culture, I visited the warehouse sized out-of-town retailing site of Mothercare , called Mothercare World. Mothercare is a well-known international brand name in retailing 1 in the life course trajectory that includes pregnancy , birth , and the early years of a young childâs life. On arrival, the appeal to this client group was immediately apparent. The façade of the building that housed the store stood out from the other warehouses nearby by visually telling the visitor that this was a place for and about young children. The building had a cream-coloured frontage, and dominating the central entrance was a giant petrol-green coloured porch, featuring a large clock, with smiling sun and moon faces and a huge âMother Earthâ right in its centre. The hourly dial was curvy and yellow, and, in bright orange spiky letters underneath the clock, was an announcement that visitors were entering âthe worldâ of Mothercare . The warehouse itself felt cool and comfortable when I entered from the warmth of a sunny summerâs day, and its aesthetic organisation again announced the centrality of the young child. Organised on two levels, with the first floor starting halfway down, the vista was dominated by a giant green tree, reaching all the way from the floor to the roof. A huge face with rolling eyes, alternately opening and closing, was located in the middle of the tree, and couched on either side were two staircases. These invited children into the upper floor, where the storeâs toy selection was housed, with the ground floor filled with the serious stuff of childcareâfrom Moses baskets for new-borns, to mattresses, bedding and travel systems . In the centre of this ground floor space, and sandwiched between the tills at the front entrance and the giant tree in the middle, was an oval shaped department with clothing for new-borns and babies. This area stood out for its soft pastel colours . A cascade of orange-speckled butterflies circled above, whilst soft toned background music transported me into the tranquillity of an imagined baby nursery .
Those in search of the goods and services that facilitate the practices and emotional experiences of pregnancy and early-years childcare soon discover that a distinct collection of commercial providers form a rather unique market of products, services and resources aimed at them. This market includes specialist retailers, out-of-town shopping warehouses, specialised shopping isles in high street chemists and city centre department stores , and common brand names, such as Mothercare , Boots, and Babies-R-Us, soon start to flow easily off the tongue in conversations that need not necessarily be about shops and shopping. This commercial landscape can be called unique because, as expressed by the prospective parents I spoke with during my research, this is a world about which many claim ignorance before the idea of having a baby started to turn into reality. With products ranging from those with a quick turnover rate, like weaning foods and disposable nappies, to more durable and one-off items, such as potties and car seats , now sold through a range of terrestrial and online retailing settings, the unique quality of this world is further accentuated by the fact that most of the products and services found here are, quite literally, for the care of the young child in the fold of family life.
Caring for a young child is made possible by a broad range of often very mundane and everyday goods and services. As commodities , these goods and services come with a price tag, and are designed, produced and marketed by what, in this book, I call the business of child caring , and bought by new and prospective parents , and other interested adults . I argue that it is the practice of child caring that brings together commercial agents , new and prospective parents, and a range of other people, organisations and entities, including the notion of childhood. In the interactions between these entities, understandings of the young child are realised, and used in the service of pecuniary value creation and in parental reasoning of what it is that they are looking for when shopping for a growing family. My argument is that it is these understandings of the young child that provide the underlying rationale for why and how young children need to be cared for. This book also presents an investigation of how the business of child caring is organised. It explores how the possibilities and opportunities for commercial action and value-creation are enabled and curtailed by cultural understandings of young children . Amongst other things, I will seek answers for why businesses that operate in this terrain are so careful, and why some new parents express concern for the environment when they shop for their young offspring, when others invest in silver charms that have the form of their babyâs tiny hands and feet, and yet others keep referring back to the content of their purse. Researching the business of child caring is also important because consumption scholars, including those specialising in children and childhood, have not shown much interest in young children (Brownlie and Leith 2011; Cook 2008; Martens 2005; Martens et al. 2004; Sjöberg 2013). One of the aims of this book is therefore to locate young children and the business of child caring more clearly into broader debates on children, childhood and consumer culture.
Researching Children and Consumer Culture
Recent years have seen a call for change in the direction of scholarship on children, childhood , consumption and consumer culture (e.g. Buckingham 2009, 2011; Buckingham and Tingstad 2010; Sparrman et al. 2012; Taylor 2013; Woolgar 2012). In the emergence of this call, the highly moralistic character of debate in this area has been highlighted as a problem. Woolgar bears witness to this:
As a newcomer to the field of child studies and child consumption, I am struck first by the intensity of debates and feelings about questions of consumption associated with children, and, second, by the strength of the assumptions about the nature and identity of the key actors at the heart of these debates, and especially, of course, the child. Notions of what is right for children fuel debates in policy, academia, the media and popular culture; debates that seem to gain much of their momentum from entrenched assumptions about what is good for children, what children need, what is in childrenâs best interests â in short what, after all, a child is. (2012: 33)
The arena of children, childhood and consumer culture is clearly a highly generative cultural terrain (Cook 2012), giving rise to urgent new social âproblemsâ such as the emerging debates, in the past 20 years, on childhood obesity and the sexualisation of childhood culture (Buckingham 2009). These debates are illustrative of the ease with which protagonists can position themselves in binary camps, enacting understandings of the child that are incompatible , and that reflect the broader cultural narrative of incompatibility of the market, culturally defined as profane , from the intimacy of family life and sacred familial personae , like children (Zelizer 1985). Arguably, the idea of the child consumer takes on a central location in these debates, becoming symptomatic of the polarisation between the empowered and powerless , and the co...