Childhood Under Siege: How Big Business Ruthlessly Targets Children Paperback – 2 Aug 2012

This is a well researched examination of a very disturbing subject.The book exposes how big business ruthlessly targets children. The incentive for big business is that it is estimated that there is 1 trillion dollars of buying power in the hands of children, directly or through their influence on parents and their carers. In pursuit of this prize, food and drink industries spend billions each year marketing junk food to children whilst pharmaceutical companies have driven the prescription of psychotropic drugs from a base level of virtually zero to tens of millions of children under prescription today.This is a well written and carefully researched book, it includes over 80 pages of notes and references to further information.Whilst the focus of the book is directed at the impact on children, and the impact this has on parents and others with direct responsibility for their care, the book is of relevance to everyone.The book comprises ten chapters which examine:-• The reverse since 1980 of eighty years of child protection advances.• How social media is being shaped to foster consumption• The cynical undermining of parental control orchestrated by marketing to children.• The immoral and illegal activities of pharmaceutical companies in the promotion of drugs.• Environmental damage and its impact on children.• The lack of regulation and the burden of proof requiring harm to be proven before restriction on chemical use is imposed.• Child exploitation in the labour market.• Abuses of the education system driven to meet the needs of corporations.What I found particularly alarming about picture painted by this book was the underlying cynical approach of government and big-business. Purporting to support parents by emphasizing parental responsibility for child care under the guise of rolling back of the 'Nanny State', whilst at the same time implementing policies that make it increasingly impossible for parents to make informed decisions or to implement appropriate actions to ensure children are safeguarded.The picture painted is of the effects of a society where economic growth is valued above all else.This is a well written book that will be of interest to anyone concerned about children and the society they will inherit.

As a children's and youth worker I am fascinated by how culture, media and business shapes our children, and so it was with interest that I read Childhood Under Siege: How Big Business Ruthlessly Targets Children by Joel Bakan.In many ways I felt like Bakan wrote in a similar way to Michael Moore, arguing that big business and governments that look the other way had created a society that instead of encouraging, developing and supporting children and young people actually feasts upon them. Using Nelson Mandela's comment that:'There can be no keener revelation of a society's soul than the way in which it treats its children.'Bakan shows that we fail to protect our children, even though we profess to hold them close through things like in 1989, governments worldwide promising all children the same rights by adopting the UN Convention on the Rights of the Child. The book explores education, pharmaceutical business, ecology, child labour and more in the USA showing that across industries business is targeting children putting profit first.The book at times can be scary and feel overly dramatic, but I think it is a helpful cynical look at how business and children work together.

this book is written from a american perspective.the author charts how big business target kids for profit. how government protection has been viewed as illegitimate intrusions into parents freedoms allowing big business to manipulate kids for there own ends,deregulation has loosened advertising laws creating new children consumers.it graphically shows how business interests manipulate regulations to expand markets,how it funds campaigns to counter any dissent against its wishes.above all exposes that the main driving force is profit regardless of need.

This is an excellent book that covers how big corporations ruthlessly target young children. It's a must read for anyone who has children or grandchildren, nieces, nephews, anyone who's ever been a child, in other words, it's a Must Read for everycitizen!

I am so surprised that I am the first one writing a review. This may be the most important book you have read. The Coporation by Joel Bakan is a by now sort of a classic, but this may be even more important book. If corporations can do to children all the things that the book describes how can anyone expect that they will do any better to the rest of us and to our planet.Bakan makes an argument in the previous book that corporations by their design are acting as psychopats, which means they lack morals. This book should strongly reinforce this message and it, hopefully, will hit home. We may not care about many other things but how can we don't care about our children?Probably the most important argument Bakan makes is that parents today have been convinced that they should fear about children physical safety, thus becoming over protective, possibly at the expense of children development. But, at the same time, and through the same tactics, they are lulled to be agreeable to much more serious, but not imminent and violent threats that damage their childrens psyche and often their both mental and physical health.