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In recent years, children have become an increasingly important consumer market, and there is growing concern about the 'commercialization' of childhood. This book sheds fresh light on these debates, offering new empirical data and challenging critical perspectives on children's engagement with consumer culture from a wide range of international settings. The contributions are written both by well-known scholars and emerging researchers, and include studies of the history of children's consumption in the US and in Europe; discussions of new theoretical and methodological approaches to studying children's consumer culture; critical analyses of the practices and strategies of contemporary marketers; sociological accounts of the contexts of children's consumption in the family and the peer group; and culturally-informed analyses of the role of consumption in children's identity formation. Taken together, these studies outline a productive new agenda for research in this field, and provide ways of moving beyond established theories and approaches.

"In exploring children's own everyday food encounters, alongside the ways in which childhood identities are constructed and mediated through food, this book enables a measured and insightful understanding of the various and subtle dimensions of the relationship between children, food and identity"--Provided by publisher

PurposeThis paper seeks to report from a qualitative study of the global television concept Pop Idol with the aim of evaluating children's and teenagers' involvement as consumers, both in their roles in purchasing goods and services, and being targets for well‐designed promotional activities.Design/methodology/approachBased on content analysis and interviews with children, the paper analyses the dynamics between marketing strategies, program content and child audiences.FindingsThe paper discusses how young consumers distinguish between two "regimes of truth" in the television concept: first the creation of a superstar, and second the broader phenomenon that Pop Idol represents, which is mainly about creating consumers through participation.Originality/valueThe paper contributes to acknowledging children's perspectives and childhood as not only valuable but necessary to inform consumer research, since children are deeply and unavoidably enmeshed in consumption in fundamental ways.