Consumed: How Markets Corrupt Children, Infantilize Adults and Swallow Citizens Whole
By Benjamin Barber
W.W. Norton ₤16.99, 320 pages
FT bookshop price: ₤13.59

The Real Toy Story: The Shocking Inside Story on Toys and the Industry That Makes Them
By Eric Clark
Black Swan ₤8.99, 336 pages
FT bookshop price: ₤7.19

The toy business has always been a grown-up game, but in recent years it has developed in an odd way. Children are growing out of toys at an ever earlier age - known in the toy trade as KGOY (kids getting older younger) syndrome. Meanwhile adults are being infantilised, buying into a culture of permanent instant gratification through computer games, electronic gadgets and retro reminders of childhood, such as model trains. Toys really aRe us.

The resulting ”kidult” is the most lucrative type of modern consumer, and the meaty title of Benjamin Barber’s book Consumed: How Markets Corrupt Children, Infantilize Adults and Swallow Citizens Whole sums up his lengthy argument. In this new book, the author of Jihad vs. McWorld offers a depressing thesis on why global corporations seek to make us childlike consumers - and why we collude. It’s just, well, easier.

”Infantilization aims at inducing puerility in adults and preserving what is childish in children trying to grow up, even as children are ’empowered’ to consume.” What we are losing is our maturity. Barber highlights some of the ways this changes us. By preferring easy over hard, fast over slow, and simple over complex, we are turning our backs on the fluency and thoughtfulness of the fully formed adult citizen, who can take informed decisions rather than be dictated to by marketing.

Barber’s consumers falsely believe they have liberty because they have so much choice: ”The preference for the simple over the complex is evident in domains dominated by simpler tastes - fast food and moronic movies, revved-up spectator sports and dumbed-down video games, for example, all of which are linked in a nexus of consumer merchandizing that the infantilist ethos nurtures and promotes.”

Getting hold of the children (and their parents) early is vital if they are to become effective ”kidult” consumers in western countries. While Barber’s polemic tells us why this happens, Eric Clark’s The Real Toy Story: The Shocking Inside Story on Toys and the Industry That Makes Them is a highly readable expose of the practical side of how it’s done. I marked my copy with lots of red Biro as grim facts washed up: ”By the year 2001, American children were seeing about 40,000 commercials a year, double the number in the 1970s.”

Clark shows that ”pester-power” is long-established. When Barbie launched in 1959, initial sales were disappointing. Mothers hated her as ”she had too much of a figure”. Little did they know, Clark writes, that the inspiration for Barbie came partly from an adult doll based on a German cartoon prostitute. It was the girls themselves who pestered to have the doll, and sales soared. This process repeated itself in recent years, when the Bratz dolls appeared. Inventor Isaac Larian put his heavily made-up, skimpily dressed (frankly, tarty) dolls next to Barbies and then asked young girls what Barbie reminded them of. ”Our mothers,” they replied. Larian had a hit, and by 2004, despite widespread parental disapproval, Bratz had captured 4 per cent of the UK toy market.