Consuming Kids: Dr. Susan Linn

Dr. Linn takes a comprehensive and unsparing look at the demographic advertisers call "the kid market," taking readers on a compelling and disconcerting journey through modern childhood as envisioned by commercial interests. Children are now the focus of a marketing maelstrom, targets for everything from minivans to M&M counting books. All aspects of children's lives—their health, education, creativity, and values—are at risk of being compromised by their status in the marketplace.

Susan Linn is Associate Director of the Media Center of the Judge Baker Children's Center at Harvard, and an Instructor in Psychiatry at Harvard Medical School. She has written extensively about the effects of media and commercial marketing on children. Most recently, her articles have been published in The Boston Globe, The Christian Science Monitor, The Los Angeles Times, TheWashington Post, The American Prospect, and online at www.familyeducation.com. Her book Consuming Kids: The Hostile Takeover of Childhood was published by The New Press in 2004.

In 2000 Dr. Linn was appointed to the American Psychological Association's Task Force on Advertising to Children. Her work on behalf of children has been featured Sixty Minutes, Now with Bill Moyers, and Weekend News Tonight.

She has written and appeared in a number of video programs designed to help children cope with issues ranging from mental illness to death and loss. With Family Communications, Inc., the producers of Mister Rogers' Neighborhood, Dr. Linn created Different and the Same: Helping Children Identify and Prevent Prejudice, video based classroom materials designed for first to third graders. The series won the 1996 Media Award from the Association of Multicultural Educators and is being used in forty-seven states around the country.

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