A few weeks ago my son, now 13, asked me to take him to the
mall. “We never go to the mall,” he
said with the wail of the truly deprived. Now, he knows what I think of malls.
He knows, further, that I do not even look at them when we drive by on the
highway except to sneer.
“Kids, when you shop at a mall only 14 percent of your money
stays in the region. The rest lines corporate coffers and stockholders’
pockets.”
And, “Things don’t make people happy.”
He knows all this but, alas, he knows much more. He knew, on
that sunny Sunday when we should have been out hiking, for example, exactly
what to say to make me stop my mall boycott.
“But Mom, the mall is the modern agora.”
The kid plays me like a violin. In retrospect, I can almost
hear his internal monologue: Say
something she won’t be able to resist. Appeal to her exultation of the Ancients
and to her sense of vanity about what a great job she’s done raising clever
little me. I ran a comb through my hair, got in the car, and took him to
the mall.
When I was his age, I
was turning tricks in Harvard Square. Well, okay. Not really. Every parent
compares her childhood to her kids’ early years in her own way. This is how I
romanticize mine, a complete fabrication that illuminates nothing more than my
tendency to indulge in self-pity and my disdain for the relative Easy Street
I’ve created for my kids.
At 13 I was a mini-mogul, raking in enough money (from daily
babysitting gigs and three morning newspaper routes) to buy a ticket to visit
my friend in the Netherlands.
Whether I worked constantly out of necessity or out of a sick desire to work
constantly is lost to history.
But the fact remains that during the time I was saving for
my trip, my mother decided she was done shopping for me. I would be paying for
my clothes, shoes, and anything else I wanted — outside of food and shelter
— from then on.
(In my mother’s defense, shopping for me was no picnic. I
was fat before the rest of you, before plus-sized children’s clothing, before
loose-fit waistbands. Blinking back tears of frustration, we pawed through the
stiff jeans and striped shirts in the boys’ department at Sears, searching for
clothes marked “chunky.”)
When my free ride ended, adolescence kicked in. I slimmed
down and shot up. Suddenly finding clothes was a breeze. The paying? Not so
much. Luckily, not only did cool clothes finally fit, my new height made it a
lot easier to conceal Pink Floyd albums, India-print shirts, and crinkled gauze
skirts under my coat. She didn’t really expect me to actually spend my money on
that stuff, did she?
My children will feel neither the barb of being cut off nor
the indescribable freedom of being allowed to fly with a friend (no parents!)
to visit a family in Europe. Like all kids, they’re
proud of their neighborhood cat-sitting jobs and like to save up for things.
But I continue to buy their clothes (and Tevas and hiking boots and running
shoes and soccer cleats and dressy shoes and flip-flops and Chuck Taylors and
board shoes. And. And.).
How on earth will they ever break away? And where will they
go when it’s time to test themselves in the world? I hope not the mall. And
forget about Holland.
For now, sadly, it
seems the siren song of the modern agora — the thrilling video-game
commercials and the witty movie product placements — is luring my children to
the mall’s rocky shores, where lives are cheapened and fortunes lost. The great
irony of this is that it was in stores that I found myself. So much of who I am
today was formed by how, as a teen, I engaged the world of commerce. Being able
to pay for – and sometimes even stealing – the things I wanted allowed me to
feel accepted in a way that I hadn’t before.
I worry about my children, because it’s the very desires I
had then that advertisers prey on. They exploit tweens’ wish to be grown up and
to be recognized as the independent-thinking, self-styling geniuses they feel
they really are.
It may seem condescending to think my kids can’t screen out
all the consumerist noise. But things are different now. Two-thirds of our
economy is based on consumer spending, and advertisers are much more
sophisticated today in their tactics.
When I was a kid, Wonder Bread’s laughable claim was that it
“helps build strong bodies 12 ways.” Today kids don’t have a chance to roll
their eyes. Child psychologists working for marketers analyze children’s
artwork and dreams (a practice that some mental-health professionals are urging
the American Psychological Association to denounce). They know that infants as
young as 6 months old can visualize logos, and brand loyalty can be established
by 2 years of age, according to the Media Awareness Network.
In the mall that day,
I was good. I didn’t say, “hideous temple of greed,” or “those rolling
herds of swine are trying to fill the voids in their souls with transfats and
plastic.”
Suddenly, suspiciously, my son led me to the Lindt chocolate
store where a clerk handed us free truffles.
“The mall’s not so bad,” I said, dopily licking the foil
wrapper.
“I knew you’d like it,” he said.
This article appears in Oct 4-10, 2006.
