A book by Park Slope writer, Susan Gregory Thomas, is coming out next week from Houghton Mifflin. It’s called "Buy, Buy Baby: How Consumer Culture Manipulates Parents and Harms Children."and it’s a smart, well-written, well-reasearched, page-turner that really OPENED MY EYES to the way that we’ve been manipulated by consumer culture and the media about motherhood.
Smartmom knows all about that. She thought she had to buy, buy, buy products that would increase her children’s IQ. All those educationally stimulating toys she bought for OSFO at Little Things when she was just 6 weeks.
Heck, she bought Teen Spirit a black and white mobile when he was 5 days old.
And she thought it was just her.
Much of the book was written at the Park Slope Writer’s Space. Thomas also teaches a class at PS 321 called Adbusters, which was written about in the New Yorker.
Susan Gregory Thomas will be reading at the Edgy Mother’s Day Event on May 24th at Brooklyn Reading Works with Amy Sohn, Smartmom, Tom Rayfiel, Alison Lowestein, Mary Warren, Sophia Romero and Judy Lichtblau. Should be quite the edgy event. At the Old Stone House on Fifth Avenue and 3rd Street.
Read the blurb or buy the book: . You can also get the book at the Community Bookstore in Park Slope.
"It’s no secret that toy and media corporations manipulate the
insecurities of parents to move their products, but Buy, Buy Baby
unveils the chilling fact that these corporations are using— and often
funding—the latest research in child development in order to sell
things directly to babies and toddlers. Thomas offers other, perhaps
even more unnerving epiphanies: the lack of evidence that “educational”
shows and toys provide any educational benefit at all for young
children; and the growing evidence that some of these products actually
impair early development, and could harm our kids socially and
cognitively for life. Underlying these revelations is a dangerous
economic and cultural shift: our kids are becoming consumers at
alarmingly young ages and suffering all the ills that rampant
materialism used to visit only on adults—from anxiety to
hyper-competitiveness to depression. Thomas blends prodigious reportage
with an empathetic voice. Her two daughters were toddlers while she
wrote this book, and she never loses sight of the temporal and
emotional challenges that parents face.