Don't blame children for apeing the adult world

The hatred of child marketing is as much adult self-loathing as a wish to protect the innocent

More disastrous news for poor pestered parents, as Mary Kate and Ashley Olsen, fresh and fresh-faced from California, hit these shores with the intention of inculcating in our children their sinister take on self-conscious tweenagerdom.

The 16-year-old twins are television veterans, who began their acting careers in a sitcom called Full House at nine months old. Now the two girls have three programmes of their own, two live-action and one animated, which seek to project such values as getting your homework done really thoroughly, respecting yourself and your parents, riding horses in the fresh air, and starting to think about going to college nice and early in your school career.

And it doesn't stop there. Mary Kate and Ashley have a merchandising empire. They even dictate the very shirts that appear on the backs of young girls, touting their own line of clothes in Asda. These clothes are reasonably priced, of acceptable quality, and fashionable but demure. They are designed by the girls themselves not to crop too high in the top, nor ride too low on the hips.

Like the Disney Corporation, the Olsens (or Dualstar as they're corporately known) value "community, decency and optimism", and they're very, very good at getting their message out there. As our spiritual leader, Archbishop Rowan Williams, might say: What can be done to stop this menace?

The selling of entertainment tie-in products to children is one of these modern phenomena that is widely despised, widely distrusted and very, very widely colluded with. And the Olsens are such perfect products, and their battery of svengalis such masterly exponents of the form, that their $1bn corporation illustrates with perfect clarity why this should be.

Even the most trenchant critics of child consumerism have problems pinpointing just exactly what it is about the practice that is so intrinsically damaging to children, and so effortlessly annihilating of parental discipline. When faced with such products as the Olsens, disseminating their blandly professional homilies of wholesomeness, alongside such age-old playthings as dolls, or such necessary items as cut-price T-shirts, the task becomes more difficult than ever.

Because, in this case, there are living, breathing children at the centre of the sales-fest, much emphasis is placed on the danger to the girls themselves. They have been performing constantly since they were babies, and met their business manager – Robert Thorne, who used to manage Prince – when they were four. Their personal fortunes are estimated at £70m each.

Part of the marketing mechanism that surrounds them is the line which stresses that they go to a normal school, do their chores for their pocket money, and are never asked to do anything that they are not themselves enthusiastic about. Their parents, divorced and both remarried, share equal and amicable custody of the girls, and have ostensibly stepped back in recent years from intimate involvement in the business lives of their offspring.

Such assurances are always met with a degree of cynicism, partly because the image in the collective head of the sanctity of childhood involves fields, sunshine, no money, and no reality at all. The Olsens certainly haven't experienced the childhood of England's dreams, but nevertheless they may grown up just fine.

While the pitfalls of child stardom are well documented, there are plenty of Todd Cartys or Jodie Fosters among the Lena Zavaronis and the Michael Jacksons. Child stardom, and wealthy minordom are not in themselves assurances of screw-up and failure in adult life. They just seem to help.

But the hard fact is that there is nothing whatever to suggest that the Olsen twins are doing anything at all that may ever damage either themselves or a single other child. Why then, is there such a widespread gut reaction among adults to these rich but bright and well-meaning young women, who presently stand second only to Disney itself in their ability to shift product aimed at kids in America?

I think that the hatred of marketing to children is as much about adult self-loathing as it is about a wish to protect the innocent. After all, if the wish to protect the innocent was so great, then parents would be able actually to do it, instead of just moaning on about how hard it is. In reality, though, the children are not escaping into some corrupt, hermetic child-world at all. The problem is that they are apeing the adult world all too closely.

The children who succumb to entertainment tie-in marketing watch undemanding television in a vacant sort of way, perk up a bit when the adverts come on, then slump down again. While adults may tell them till they're blue in the face that there are plenty of other things to do, the children know perfectly well that, once they're up in bed, the grownups often elect to do exactly the same in their own leisure time.

Likewise with children's wish to acquire the things they've been told on television to buy. Is it really television that is telling children to behave in this way, or is it us adults, for whom every aspect of everyday life – from childbirth to gardening – is a consumer event?

When adults shell out for items their children want, and resent the fact that their money is being wasted, they are perhaps responding merely to the sight of a normal consumer transaction that for a change they're able to see from a distance, with the strings and manipulations visible in a way that they're not when the item being purchased is for them. Is it really more adult to buy a new bag because the perfectly useable one is outmoded, than it is to buy Scooby-Do biscuits because they're the in thing?

The sight of children being exploited in the marketplace is not very edifying, but the real reason why corporations find it easy to do is because adults are compliant, not because children are. We complain that our children are being encouraged to grow up too quickly, when the actual problem is that we have been infantilised too much.

When adults complain about "pester power", they often mutter about how laws should be changed and how it shouldn't be allowed. What they're actually saying is that they are powerless in their own homes, over their own children, largely because they want the same stuff that the kids do.

We complain endlessly about how there's never anything good on the telly, for adults or for children. But the decisive act of banishing evil, rubbishy telly from the home, is still seen as the bizarre act of a total crank. As for even watching television along with the children, and supervising in the way that a good parent should. well, wasn't the machine invented to give parents a lie-in on Saturday?

While bitter complaints are made about the nanny state, parents actually do seem to want, in this instance at least, to be nannied. They want adverts selling to children banned, free toys removed from packets of cereal and Happy Meals banished from McDonald's.

In short, we want the state to be the parents we can never be ourselves. Instead, we're the children that corporations find so easy to exploit. What we see when our children's enthusiasms are manufactured for them, and we're presented with the bill, is that consumerism is childish. We worry that our kids won't be able to break those bad habits, because we know that we cannot break them ourselves, even for their sake.

d.orr@independent.co.uk