It’s all about the money, innit?
10 is the new 15 as kids grow up faster:
Advertisers have found that, increasingly, children and teens are influencing the buying decisions in their households — from cars to computers and family vacations. According to 360 Youth, an umbrella organization for various youth marketing groups, tweens represent $51 billion worth of annual spending power on their own from gifts and allowance, and also have a great deal of say about the additional $170 billion spent directly on them each year.
It’s really quite scary. I remember agitating for a PAGER when I was 17 years old, and that was a huge deal to me. Kids are getting mobile phones while in PRIMARY SCHOOL — where the hell are they spending their time that their parents would need to reach them via mobile? When I was that age, it was either home, school, or playing in the neighbourhood. It’s really sad that young children have these expectations put on them by their peers. I know we all did, but the stakes appear to have gone up exponentially.
And the advertisers target these children to get them to badger their parents until they relent so the kid will leave them alone. Too many kids are too spoiled.
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Wow, what is wrong with Atlanta? I never really thought of it as a cutting edge area but they are having serious social issues there. I think I mentioned The Lost Children before, a couple of years ago there was a story about how young teens (13 to 16) were having sex parties in a city just outside of Atlanta. The sex parties were only found out when some health care worker tried to track down an outbreak of sexually transmitted diseases in one town.
Your sounding old… “When I was a kid we didn’t have pagers or phones. Mum would tie a string around me soft bits and pull really hard when she wanted me to come in… pagers? You soft buggers have it easy!”
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