Childhood culture

Children's culture includes children's cultural artifacts, children's media and literature, and the myths and discourses spun around the notion of childhood. Children's culture has been studied within academia in cultural studies, media studies, and literature departments. The interdisciplinary focus of childhood studies could also be considered in the paradigm of social theory concerning the study of children’s culture.

In recent years, cultural studies scholars from various fields of study have deconstructed and assessed sociological issues specifically dealing with children’s roles within a society's culture. The phrase "children's culture" was made most popular by a body of works known as The Children’s Culture Reader. The collection, edited by MIT’s Henry Jenkins, features various scholars discussing cultural themes about childhood and what it means to be a child. Jenkins describes the collection as being, “about how our culture defines what it means to be a child, how adult institutions impact children’s lives, and how children construct their cultural and social identities,”. These scholars view children as “active participants,” that possess social and political "agency," American historian Steven Mintz echoes that critics of children's culture focus on commercialization, commodification, and colonization of children

Consumer socialization and consumerism are concerned with the stages by which young people develop consumer related skills, knowledge, and attitudes. In a retrospective study, written by University of Minnesota’s Carlson School of Management Chair of Marketing, Deborah Roedder John looks at 25 years of research and focuses her discussion on, “children’s knowledge of products, brands, advertising, shopping, pricing, decision-making strategies, parental influence strategies, and consumption motives and values,” The model proposed for the development of consumer behavior is framed through the use of age-related patterns. Using characteristics of knowledge and reasoning and developmental mechanisms, cognitive and social stages are defined by way of Piaget's theory of cognitive development which describes developmental stages that are mastered as children obtain the ability to cognitively interpret mediated messages. She expands pulling from Information processing theories explaining the storing and retrieval of information. John references Robert L. Selmen, a Professor of Education, Human Development, and Psychology in Medicine at Harvard University discussing the development of social perspectives in young children.

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