When one of our children left for college, the sudden increase in free time surprised us. Like many parents of teenagers, our own schedules had been shaped and sometimes driven by his schedules, and by those of his brother and sister.
His main childhood activity had been sports and by the time he was in high school he was wrestling 10 months of the year. There were high school seasons with daily turnouts, twice weekly matches and weekend tournaments.
There were off-seasons with different styles of wrestling, clubs, camps and tournaments spread across the United States.
He still had the prime-time activities of school, dances, studying, parties, driving and working.
And running through all of that — often right at the center of all the activities — were peers, friends, acquaintances and teammates.
Parents of teenagers get used to that pace. Teenagers’ schedules are sources of pride, enjoyment, fatigue, fun, closeness, expense and over working. When parents talk with each other about the hectic pace of raising teenagers, it is a little like dancing at the Hotel California — sometimes they talk to remember, sometimes they talk to forget.
Teenage years are so intense that busy parents don’t have time to realize that the drive to keep up doesn’t entirely grow out of the needs of their teenagers.
They may not know there are people who artificially manufacture much of the frenetic energy in and around teenagers. They mark young people and market to them. They consider teenagers to be key players in the ever-expanding gross national product.
These adults study teenagers for no purpose other than causing them to buy things.
My column that talked about children as voters angered some people. One thought that writing about the idea of child voters was a subversive part of a communist plot to undermine the rights of parents. Another was angry because the reader and his or her spouse have to "subsidize … breeders" who choose not to use birth control.
Of course, the column wasn’t about either of those things, but the fact of children as consumers is more powerful than idea of children as voters.
As far as I can tell, no political party is making any effort to reach children at all even though a parents’ party might be a good idea. Neither are gangsters or drug dealer’s making the greatest effort to communicate directly to children — to obtain their loyalty, to undermine their parents, to sell to them.
The greatest effort to get around parents and reach children directly is being made by perfectly legal, highly rewarded people who love children, but only as consumers.
"Ask any professional trend spotter," says Lev Grossman in a Time magazine article (Sept. 8), titled "The Quest for Cool": "It takes insight, dedication — and secret armies of superhip teenagers" to predict the future trends.
"Many of us are not cool," Grossman ventures. He is so right that there are a many books about that fact are on the bookstands right now. Most emphasize the importance of parents knowing that their children are probably not in the upper 10 percent of popular kids.
The books include "Mom, They are Picking on Me" and "Best Friends, Worst Enemies" by Michael Thompson and his associates, and "Queen Bees and Wannabes" by Rosalind Wiseman.
"Cool," Grossman writes, "may be our country’s most precious natural resource." Teenagers and those who sell to them certainly believe that. For some, dead is preferable to not cool.
The "cool kids," Grossman says, are "alpha consumers … Watch what they do now —what they wear, eat, listen to, drive — and you will know what the rest of the kids will be doing a year from now."
Irma Zandl invented the phrase "alpha consumer." She scouts out young people, ages 8 through 24, who hang around malls. She then sorts them with the help of questionnaires, surveys and interviews. She selects 3,000 or so of the super-cool kids from around the country, asks them about what’s cool, combines their answers with other information and writes a newsletter.
Big corporations such as General Motors, Coca-Cola and Disney buy her newsletter to guide their product development and marketing. Do parents wonder whether the information is actually helpful? The corporations think so. They pay a yearly subscription fee of $15,000.
Zandl is one of many such trend spotters. Others have names such as Radar Communications, Teenage Research and Youth Intelligence.
Consumers’ short attention span is a cliche among marketers. One claims that, "The minute we spot a trend, we’ve got about four second to tell our clients."
Another trend watcher has a network of 20,000 teenagers with whom they communicate by instant messaging. This marketer can, for example, field test product names overnight and learn which will sell best.
They can also notify the same 20,000 super-cool kids about a new product. When those youngsters drink, wear, drive or listen to a new product, their choice is contagious.
No wonder parents can’t keep up with their youngster’s tastes, even by listening to their music and watching their TV commercials. Trends are being spread by computerized national networks of super cool kids who spread the trends to those who hang around them — or who want to.
The trends spread like a virus from the super-cool to the cool to the not-so-cool, writes Grossman, and professional marketers snap at their heels to move them ever faster.
By the time most parents catch onto a trend, they have missed it and their youngsters are on the next one.
Trends are not about what is good for young people or about what they need. Trends are all about what children and teenagers will buy or talk their parents into buying.
The marketing goal, to leave no child behind, leaves many parents falling farther and farther behind.
Bill France, a father of three, is a child advocate in the criminal justice system and has worked as director of clinical programs at Luther Child Center in Everett. Send e-mail to bsjf@gte.net.
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