success of the Star Wars action figures and toys blew away all previous licensing statistics. As movies alone, Star Wars and The Empire Strikes Back earned a phenomenal $870 million in box office sales by 1983 (the year Return of the Jedi was released). But that sum looked puny compared to what the merchandise pulled in: licensed Star Wars products had grossed $2 billion by then. These numbers were so staggering that they changed the toy business: in the post–Star Wars era, entertainment media drove toys’ success.
As a result, Generation X’s very sense of play became different from that of any generation before it.
SECURITY AND AFFECTION
In Kids’ Stuff: Toys and the Changing World of American Childhood, the historian Gary Cross chronicles the story of American toys, material culture, and their impact on families during the twentieth century. He observes that beginning in Teddy Roosevelt’s era, “scientific childhood” and toy advertising, commercials — and toys themselves — were aimed at both parents and children. Exploiting nostalgia was the advertisers’ chief ploy. The toys were not all that different from those the parents had grown up with; the toy industry understood the draw for parents of revisiting their own youth through their children. From the start of the twentieth century, advertisers also played on children’s, especially boys’, longing to forge a relationship with their otherwise remote, authoritarian fathers. A 1918 advertisement for Lionel model trains was directed at boys, to be sure, but the real lure was that the toy would hook fathers into playing with them: “Take Dad into your partnership … Make him your pal.” Even fad toys were historically pegged to a character in popular culture that children and their parents enjoyed as a family. In the 1930s, for example, movie characters such as Buck Rogers and stars like Shirley Temple became so popular that their licensed likenesses sparked massive toy crazes. But these toys were calculated to appeal to children and parents alike. To parents, these items either conformed to their idealized notions of children and childhood (Mickey Mouse and Shirley Temple, for example) or inspired excitement about the future, technological innovation, or American heroism (Buck Rogers and Roy Rogers).
But in the late 1970s and early 1980s, the convergence of the Star Wars licensing phenomenon, the rise of PLCs, and cultural shifts in work and family life — characterized by single working parents and latchkey children — marked the start of a permanent change in kids’ marketing. For the first time, Cross notes, advertisers actively strove to separate parent and child, aiming to divide and conquer. To marketers it was the birth of the “nag factor.” But in the broader social context, the chief point of connection between parents, children, and toys was no longer in playing together: it was in buying something.
The toys of the late 1970s and 1980s were the first to be completely foreign to parents. Rather than exploiting nostalgia as an advertising ploy, toy makers and marketers joined forces to sharpen the line separating the world of working parents and the rapidly evolving youth culture brought about by latchkey children and the rise of TV as babysitter. The toys of this period — and the play they dictated — were tied to a consumer culture that was itself tied to television shows and movies that parents were too busy to watch. Many of these new toys were action figures that adults could not relate to. Many of the characters on which these figures were based were not even human. They were monsters or androids or alien life forms that were far removed from Eisenhower-era values such as courage or a better future through technology. These toys came with prepackaged characteristics, as defined by their role in the television show or movie from which they had emerged. Any American child of that era knew that a Star Wars Land Cruiser could not fly; it hovered. A parent who unwittingly broke these rules while trying to play with his child revealed himself to be a rube — not the partner that Lionel Trains had promised sixty years before as the ultimate reward for playing with its toy.
Toy makers, wanting to capitalize on the action-figure formula for girls, began to create little girls’ characters that were intended as licensing properties from the start. A studio called Those Characters from Cleveland, part of the American Greetings card company, was the first to do this, with a character named Strawberry Shortcake. Her curly-headed, freckle-faced, old-fashioned cute look was in fact a product of sophisticated marketing. Strawberry Shortcake’s diminutive appearance and rather superficial message of “friendship” appealed to overworked Boomer parents who, too overwhelmed to vet toys carefully, would gravitate on impulse to anything that seemed innocuous. But the Strawberry Shortcake character was designed to attract Gen-X girls, whose notoriously unstable upbringing made them feel vulnerable and insecure. Those Characters from Cleveland chose the strawberry theme after market surveys showed that little girls connected emotionally with strawberries and felt “security and affection” in relation to them.
WOULD PREFER TO STAY AT HOME
Given the bleak portrait of their childhoods, one might expect Gen-X women to be numb and emotionally unavailable as mothers. In fact, the opposite is true. Because they did not have stability as children, marketers observe, stability means a great deal more to Gen-X mothers now that they have their own families. Indeed, as a group, they do appear to be more stable than their mothers were: 70 percent are married. But a Gen-X mother is not a true traditionalist. According to market research, getting married is not as important to her as providing a stable household for her children; if she doesn’t meet the right person, she will either defer marriage or will choose to have children on her own. According to 2004 census data, the number of college-educated mothers who have never been married and have children under eighteen has tripled since 1990. Many of these women, sociologists say, have chosen single motherhood. Indeed, the national support group Single Mothers by Choice can point to Gen-X women’s sensibilities as a factor contributing to the doubling of its membership in just three years; though the group is twenty-five years old, it grew from twelve chapters in 2002 to twenty-four nationwide by the end of 2005. The average age of the Single Mothers by Choice is thirty-five, and nearly all have completed college. About 52 percent of the mothers conceived a child by donor insemination, and approximately 25 percent adopted. About 20 percent became pregnant with a “known donor” or sex partner but are raising their children alone.
Marketers have also learned that Gen-X mothers’ top priority is spending as much time as possible with their kids. The 2005 National Study of Employers, conducted by the Families and Work Institute, revealed striking shifts in work patterns that can be attributed to Gen-X parents’ insistence on maintaining an acceptable balance between work and family. Small businesses, the study showed, are increasingly offering employees flexible hours, while large organizations provide benefits that have direct costs, such as retirement funds and on-site daycare programs. Small companies seem to believe that without flexible work hours, Gen-X mothers might simply quit, if they have the financial freedom to do so. “Of the 92% of employers that offered at least eight work-life initiatives, including flexible work schedules, family leave and child care, nearly half, 47%, reported they provide these initiatives to recruit and retain employees,” said the study; 25 percent reported that they provide these choices to enhance productivity and commitment.
Gen-X mothers do not share with Baby Boomer mothers the imperative to drive hard on the career track. According to WonderGroup’s survey research, 87 percent of Gen-X moms with kids of twelve and under said they would rather stay at home to raise their children than work at an office. If they can afford to, many do just that.
STORIES OF THE “OLD DAYS”
Gen-Xers are famous for their hard-won self-sufficiency. Some speculate that their resourcefulness and flexibility in adulthood result from a childhood in which adults were often scarce or frazzled. However, having grown up with shaky role models, Gen-X continues to nurture a guarded view of authority and a deep attachment to individuality (32 percent of Gen-X women have tattoos). Gen-X mothers are less likely to rely on their own mothers’ parenting advice than previous generations have done. Take, for example, a typical Gen-X mother deciding which brand of baby food to buy for her first child, as outlined by marketers Maria T. Bailey and Bonnie W. Ulman in Trillion-Dollar Moms:
