Working Mother

This item was written by Savita Iyer-Ahrestani. She is a freelance financial journalist now living in The Netherlands who guest blogs for Working Parents.

Almost all the American parents I have met while living overseas say that the two things they miss most about the States are online shopping and Target (TGT), which in our times have become pretty much one and the same thing.

In the four years that I have lived outside the US, I, too, have missed the convenience of Target and its panoply of both store and online choices. But like every other American expat parent I’ve met, I also have a real fear of returning to that world of temptation, for I remember all too well setting out on shopping trips to buy, say, a pack of batteries, and returning home with all manner of things I had no intention of getting in the first place.

The greatest fear I and the fellow Americans I’ve met overseas share is the impact of the easy consumer culture that Target et. al. stand for on our children. Living overseas—particularly in The Netherlands, which is a very basic, no-frills-at-all kind of place—our kids have been shielded from the “I wants” and “I needs” that the world (myself included) associates with America. How easily can it ensnare these kids once they get back to the States?

I asked Allison Pugh, assistant professor of sociology at the University of Virginia and author of “Longing and Belonging: Parents, Children and Consumer Culture,” what advice she had for me, taking my two tabula rasa children—aged eight and five and with no recollection of America (they left the US in 2005)—back to New Jersey in a couple of months.

“Good luck,” she said with a laugh.

I told her my favorite European vs. American story: A French grandmother I know went to the States for her grand daughter’s (whose father is American) birthday. As the French and many other European grandparents do, she took one very exquisite and quite expensive dress for the little girl. But it was completely overshadowed by the American grandmother and her armfuls of gifts, tossed into a corner without a second glance. The French grandmother said she had never felt so embarrassed in her life.

“I’m quite frightened about the onslaught of mass consumerism-even though there’s a recession, I still feel that American children want and get so much more than children I have seen in Europe,” I told Pugh. “Should I be afraid of this?”

Yes, she says, there is definitely something to be scared of. The whopping $17 billion that’s spent on advertising geared specifically toward children—the giant monster that American parents I’ve had discussions with overseas are really afraid of—is certainly something to fear (I don’t think I have seen ads for kids stuff on Dutch TV, come to think of it). But although advertising certainly fuels kids’ “needs” and “wants,” Allison argues that it can’t be held wholly responsible for the impact of consumer culture on children.

In her book—based on her doctoral dissertation—Pugh says that children’s desires stem less from striving for status or falling victim to advertising than from their longing to join the “conversation” at school or in the neighborhood. In turn, parents answer this yearning to belong by buying the particular goods and experiences that act as “passports” in children’s social worlds, because they empathize with their children’s fear of being different from their peers. They want their kids to belong, and this continues even under financial duress. Pugh studied children and parents from different socio-economic classes and found this pattern to be the same.

It’s okay to give into the “conversation” every now and then. Pugh says, and as a parent bringing my kids to a new place, I would be inclined to want to help them belong to that place as much as I can. But Pugh also says that she’s “quite pessimistic about individual kids’ abilities to withstand the pressures and fight against materialism and handle their differences.”

Parents are afraid of their children being excluded and left out, but ultimately “the solution will come from us not just talking the talk and walking the walk about difference, but actually celebrating it, in terms of ethnicity, social class, and all kinds of other differences,” Pugh says.

Many middle-class American parents I’ve met like to say they’re not materialistic, that they don’t buy their children anything. Yet when you walk into kids’ bedrooms they’re often filled to the brim—with stuff that’s rarely even touched. I find this—which Pugh says is “the honorable thing to say”—more pronounced among Americans than any other race I’ve met, so despite my discussion with her, I am still nervous about my childrens’ return to the US.

Do I have reason to fear or not?

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