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Who's Raising the Kids?: Big Tech, Big Business, and the Lives of Children - Hardcover | Diverse Reads

Who's Raising the Kids?: Big Tech, Big Business, and the Lives of Children

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From a world-renowned expert on creative play and the impact of commercial marketing on children, a timely investigation into how big tech is hijacking childhood—and what we can do about it

“Engrossing and insightful . . . rich with details that paint a full portrait of contemporary child-corporate relations.” —Zephyr Teachout, The New York Times Book Review

Even before COVID-19, digital technologies had become deeply embedded in children’s lives, despite a growing body of research detailing the harms of excessive immersion in the unregulated, powerfully seductive world of the “kid-tech” industry.

In the “must read” (Library Journal, starred review) Who’s Raising the Kids?, Susan Linn—one of the world’s leading experts on the impact of Big Tech and big business on children—weaves an “eye-opening and disturbing exploration of how marketing tech to children is creating a passive, dysfunctional generation” (Kirkus Reviews, starred review). From birth, kids have become lucrative fodder for tech, media, and toy companies, from producers of exploitative games and social media platforms to “educational” technology and branded school curricula of dubious efficacy.

Written with humor and compassion, Who’s Raising the Kids? is a unique and highly readable social critique and guide to protecting kids from exploitation by the tech, toy, and entertainment industries. Two hopeful chapters—“Resistance Parenting” and “Making a Difference for Everybody’s Kids”—chart a path to allowing kids to be the children they need to be.

ISBN-13: 9781620972274

Media Type: Hardcover

Publisher: New Press - The

Publication Date: 09-20-2022

Pages: 320

Product Dimensions: 6.00(w) x 9.10(h) x 1.40(d)

Susan Linn is a psychologist, award-winning ventriloquist, and a world-renowned expert on creative play and the impact of media and commercial marketing on children. She was the Founding Director of Campaign for a Commercial-Free Childhood (now called Fairplay) and is currently research associate at Boston Children’s Hospital and lecturer on psychiatry at Harvard Medical School. The author of Consuming Kids, The Case for Make Believe, and Who’s Raising the Kids? (all published by The New Press), she lives in Brookline, Massachusetts.

Table of Contents

A Note to the Reader xiii

Introduction 1

1 What Children Need and Why Corporations Can't Provide It 11

2 Who Wins the Games Tech Plays? 33

3 And the Brand Plays On 57

4 Browse! Click! Buy! Repeat! 77

5 How Rewarding Are Rewards? 93

6 The Nagging Problem of Pester Power 109

7 Divisive Devices 125

8 Bias for Sale 145

9 Branded Learning 163

10 Big Tech Goes to School 181

11 Is That Hope? 197

12 Resistance Parenting: Suggestions for Keeping Big Tech and Big Business at Bay 207

13 Making a Difference for Everybody's Kids 229

Afterword 241

Acknowledgments 243

Appendix: Model Edtech Policy for School Districts 245

Suggested Reading, Viewing, and Listening 249

Resources 253

Notes 261

Index 317