The Buying and Selling of 'Cool' is Big Business
and the Primary Target is Your Child!

Current popular culture is a sophisticated and coordinated marketing sideshow to capture the attention of our children and to turn them into compulsive consumers for life.

With over $500 billion spent by tweens and teens and their parents in 2014, the multinational media conglomerates ruthlessly compete for a piece of the pie.

We're talking about greed and corporate survival at any cost. Being beautiful, that is skinny and sexy, worshipping celebrity as hero and the continuous example of self-gratification is the message that our children receive from these marketers.

This culturally toxic mix of music, movies, fashion and projected lifestyle is destructive to our children and threatens their natural emotional and psychological development.

Particularly damaging is the sexualizing of our children by the marketing of inappropriate products and images to younger and younger children.

The APA (American Psychological Association) Task Force on the Sexualization of Girls states:

“First, there is evidence that girls exposed to sexualizing and objectifying media are more likely to experience body dissatisfaction, depression, and lower self-esteem…”

Diane Levin and Jean Kilbourne, co-authors of So Sexy So Soon, document the APA’s conclusion. In their book, we read about seven-year-old Hannah. She begins to cry and tells her mother: “I’m fat! I’m fat! I want to be pretty like Isabelle—sexy like her!"

Why is seven-year-old Hannah so concerned about being skinny enough or being sexy enough? These thoughts should be a number of years away for a seven- year-old, but not in Hannah’s world today.

Our purpose at Buying and Selling of Cool is to examine the deliberate targeting of children,
offer resources that inform and provide solutions to compete with the destructive messages
our children are receiving all day every day from these ruthless marketers through today’s
popular culture.