were treated as glum receptacles into which “education” was poured. The present generation of parents responds much more favorably to the term “learning,” which suggests that the child brings her own active agency to the experience rather than having it foisted upon her. To this generation of mothers, “learning” connotes an enjoyable, nurturing, or natural experience unobtrusively infused with some underlying lesson.
Steering clear of the stigma of the ’80s and early ’90s parenting style — that of the Baby Boomers — is very important to LeapFrog. Today’s mothers are put off by anything that overtly smacks of academic fast-tracking. So the S&S has yet another function: mapping the mind of the Generation-X mom. In that capacity the S&S may be one of the company’s most valuable assets.
AS DAVE SIEGEL, the president of WonderGroup, a marketing firm, steps onto the stage, the lights dim inside Ballroom A at the Disney Yacht Club Resort’s conference center in Orlando. With the click of his laptop keypad, Siegel activates a PowerPoint presentation. On the giant screen to his left, a photograph appears: a grimacing, gun-slinging woman, a cowboy hat cocked back on her head. Underneath her picture is the legend THERE’S A NEW MOM IN TOWN. The room echoes with the whistling theme song of The Good, the Bad and the Ugly. The audience shudders with nervous laughter.
It is May 2004, and Siegel is giving the keynote talk at Kid Power Xchange, the country’s foremost kids’ marketing conference, which is held annually in Disney World’s capital city. Every year hundreds of marketing executives from companies ranging from Benjamin Moore Paints to PepsiCo to Disney itself — as well as Strottman International, Logistix Kids, KidShop, the Geppetto Group, S.T.A.R.S. for Kidz, the Kaleidoscope Group, and Eventive Marketing — gather here to network with peers and potential clients and learn about new strategies for marketing to children. One of their perennial challenges is working with the mothers of those children — or “getting around the gatekeeper.” Until recently, many marketers say they enjoyed an all but industry-wide field day with Baby Boomer moms. These mothers felt so guilty about being career-focused that they often did not have the emotional wherewithal to say no to their kids; as a result, marketing practices went largely unchecked. But the Boomers are now becoming grandparents, and as Siegel’s presentation confirms, there is a new mom in town who categorically rejects the Boomer mom’s MO. To illustrate this contrast, Siegel projects In and Out lists on the screen, to scattered groans from the floor. As he clicks through his slides, the following phrases materialize: “Super Mom” is Out and “Good Mom” is In; “Indulgence relieves guilt” is Out and “Happy and involved with family” is In; “Achievement” is Out and “Enrichment” is In. Meet the Generation-X mother, he says.
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
