Children as Consumers: The Market, Families, and Children in Italy, 1900–1990

In Paul Ginsborg’s writings, the family and its relationship with civil society and politics occupy an important place. Increasingly, in his later works, this nexus is explored in association with individualism and consumption. ‘Nowhere is choice more important than in what we consume on a daily level’ he wrote in The Politics of Everyday Life: Making Choices, Changing Lives (2005); ‘[n]o one should underestimate its allure, for modern consumption is for nearly all of us a source of irresistible attraction and self-definition’. This chapter explores the way children—mentioned but never explored in depth by Ginsborg—were socialized as consumers in Italy from the 1930s, as individuals and as members of families in which choices were made by adults. It considers the place of toys, advertising, and star figures in patterns of consumption which passed through families while also forging group identities and facilitating a sense of individual agency that is rarely recognized in children. In keeping with Ginsborg's critical perspective on the distortions of the world of goods, the chapter explores the way the increasing pressure of advertising on children in the age of television repressed the agency that consumer choice ostensibly granted. This discussion focusses mainly on the postwar period and includes both the first and second economic ‘miracles’.