Born to Buy

This afternoon I finished reading Born to Buy by Juliet Schor (last year I also read her The Overworked American and The Overspent American). It was pretty good--I got a little bogged down by the charts and data analysis (maybe not the best idea for naptime reading!) and I also felt like it wasn't as "exposé" quality as I had been expecting. I had read most of the "shocking" details
already in magazine articles or book reviews. While reading it, I found myself feeling depressed and dismayed about the state of childhood in America--it evoked images of heartless, consumeristic, selfish, totalitarian tots running about disrespecting adults and the very fabric of society disintegrating beneath our feet! Her own research didn't seem to fully support that image though, so maybe there is hope after all.

Something I found particularly interesting was this: "today's average (i.e. normal) young person between the ages of nine and seventeen scores as high on anxiety scales as children who were admitted to clinics for psychiatric disorders in 1957."