THE LEAST NURTURED GENERATION
Generation X comprises 48 million Americans, the oldest born in 1965 and the youngest in 1978 (some research firms put the end year at 1981). This group was famously characterized as “the 20-something generation” in a 1990 Time cover article:
They have trouble making decisions. They would rather hike in the Himalayas than climb a corporate ladder. They have few heroes, no anthems, no style to call their own. They crave entertainment, but their attention span is as short as one zap of a TV dial. They hate yuppies, hippies and druggies. They postpone marriage because they dread divorce. They sneer at Range Rovers, Rolexes and red suspenders.
They also, by all accounts, still hate to be called Generation X. The name originated with the British punk-pop band that launched Billy Idol to 1980s MTV video stardom, but it was adopted as the slacker identifier after the publication of Douglas Coupland’s 1991 novel, Generation X: Tales for an Accelerated Culture, which chronicled the wanderings of a group of “underemployed, overeducated, intensely private and unpredictable” twenty-somethings with “nowhere to direct their anger, no one to assuage their fears and no culture to replace their anomie.”
The slacker generation has finally matured into bona fide adulthood (the oldest turned forty in 2005). In spite of having spent its youth reviling commercial culture, Gen-X has ripened into a desirable demographic for marketers. Today two-thirds of mothers with children under twelve are Gen-Xers (Boomers account for 26 percent), and their ascent into motherhood has paralleled the ascent of the zero-to-three market.
To understand the way a Gen-X mom thinks, marketers assemble a composite picture, based on articles, sociological studies, and survey and focus-group research. They also rely increasingly on ethnographic research, since many people with advanced degrees in anthropology are entering the field of marketing. First, marketers paint a portrait of childhood for that group, the first in which large numbers were raised in daycare. Forty percent were latchkey kids: those who were not in daycare brought house keys to school so they could open the doors to their empty homes while their parents were at work. And by 1980 one American child in six lived with a single parent — the mother in most cases. Some observers estimate that up to half of the families of Gen-X children divorced. The society in which Gen-X came of age didn’t inspire much hope, for as the Time cover story said, it was filled with “racial strife, homelessness, AIDS, fractured families and federal deficits.” As a 2004 study of generational differences concluded, “Generation X went through its all-important, formative years as one of the least parented, least nurtured generations in U.S. history.”
HOME ALONE
The one activity that united Gen-X children was watching TV. According to a report issued by the Carnegie Council on Children titled All Our Children: The American Family Under Pressure, in 1980, by the time the average American teenager graduated from high school, she had spent more time watching TV than attending school or being with her parents. With mothers at work and children alone at home, the latchkey phenomenon did not go unexploited by marketers. Indeed, the 1980s marked the first time in American history that advertisers and marketers had unchaperoned access to children, an unprecedented opportunity to sell to young customers while they were alone. While the sponsors of the television shows that Baby Boomers had grown up watching — The Howdy Doody Show, The Mickey Mouse Club — had targeted children directly, they did so with the knowledge that parents were watching alongside their children, acting as gatekeepers. With no parents watching, however, there were no gatekeepers. Concern that advertisers might mine this vulnerability motivated children’s rights groups to push the Federal Trade Commission (FTC) to investigate TV ads aimed at kids. In 1978 the FTC issued a report contending that commercials targeting children under the age of eight were intrinsically unethical, since children of that age were developmentally unable to discern the subtle differences between fact and fantasy. The report further asserted that babies and children were typically exposed to 20,000 commercials a year. The investigation and the report were quashed by lobbying efforts on behalf of the advertising industry.
By the 1980s toy companies began producing program-length commercials — called PLCs in the industry — by wrapping story lines around product marketing. PLCs became integral to the launch of mass-market toy lines. Programs such as He-Man and Masters of the Universe (Mattel), G.I. Joe: A Real American Hero, Care Bears, and Strawberry Shortcake were all created with the explicit purpose of selling the eponymous toys to children. By 1985 all of the top ten best-selling toys had their own television shows. By 1987 about 60 percent of all toys sold in the United States were based on licensed characters, a dramatic increase from about 10 percent in 1980.
The other major turning point in Gen-X’s childhood was the release in 1977 of Star Wars, a movie that transformed toy boxes forever. Disney had always timed the promotion of licensed merchandise to coincide with its animated feature films; it had originated the practice in 1937 by licensing the cartoon stars of Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs to several toy companies months in advance of the release. But the success of the Star Wars action figures and toys blew away all previous licensing statistics. As movies alone, Star Wars and The Empire Strikes Back earned a phenomenal $870 million in box office sales by 1983 (the year Return of the Jedi was released). But that sum looked puny compared to what the merchandise pulled in: licensed Star Wars products had grossed $2 billion by then. These numbers were so staggering that they changed the toy business: in the post–Star Wars era, entertainment media drove toys’ success.
As a result, Generation X’s very sense of play became different from that of any generation before it.
SECURITY AND AFFECTION
In Kids’ Stuff: Toys and the Changing World of American Childhood, the historian Gary Cross chronicles the story of American toys, material culture, and their impact on families during the twentieth century. He observes that beginning in Teddy Roosevelt’s era, “scientific childhood” and toy advertising, commercials — and toys themselves — were aimed at both parents and children. Exploiting nostalgia was the advertisers’ chief ploy. The toys were not all that different from those the parents had grown up with; the toy industry understood the draw for parents of revisiting their own youth through their children. From the start of the twentieth century, advertisers also played on children’s, especially boys’, longing to forge a relationship with their otherwise remote, authoritarian fathers. A 1918 advertisement for Lionel model trains was directed at boys, to be sure, but the real lure was that the toy would hook fathers into playing with them: “Take Dad into your partnership … Make him your pal.” Even fad toys were historically pegged to a character in popular culture that children and their parents enjoyed as a family. In the 1930s, for example, movie characters such as Buck Rogers and stars like Shirley Temple became so popular that their licensed likenesses sparked massive toy crazes. But these toys were calculated to appeal to children and parents alike. To parents, these items either conformed to their idealized notions of children and childhood (Mickey Mouse and Shirley Temple, for example) or inspired excitement about the future, technological innovation, or American heroism (Buck Rogers and Roy Rogers).
But in the late 1970s and early 1980s, the convergence of the Star Wars licensing phenomenon, the rise of PLCs, and cultural shifts in work and family life — characterized by single working parents and latchkey children — marked the start of a permanent change in kids’ marketing. For the first time, Cross notes, advertisers actively strove to separate parent and child, aiming to divide and conquer. To marketers it was the birth of the “nag factor.” But in the broader social context, the chief point of connection between parents, children, and toys was no longer in playing together: it was in buying something.
The toys of the late 1970s and 1980s were the first to be completely foreign to parents. Rather than exploiting nostalgia as an advertising ploy, toy makers and marketers joined forces to sharpen the line separating the world of working parents and the rapidly evolving youth culture brought about by latchkey children and the rise of TV as babysitter. The toys of this period — and the play they dictated