Young Children and Consumer Media Cultures in Japan: Mothering, Peer Relationships, Social Identities and Consumption Practices

摘要

This thesis, entitled Young Children and Consumer Media Cultures in Japan, exploresthe role of consumption practices in the social interactions and everyday lives of youngchildren and mothers in a suburban context in Japan. With its focus on young children(aged between 1 and 5) and mothers as primary care-givers, it analyses how theyexperience consumer media culture while using, creating, controlling, transforming andadapting commercial goods and knowledge, and the part this plays in their presentationof self and their construction of interpersonal relationships in the home and thepreschool. My PhD research was affiliated with the research project at NorwegianCentre for Child Research (NOSEB), “Consuming Children: Commercialisation and theChanging Construction of Childhood”, financed by the Norwegian Research Councilfrom 2006-2009. The data were obtained through five months of fieldwork thatinvolved ethnographic methods such as participant observation, interviews and homevisits.The thesis is based on the perspectives of childhood studies, consumer culture theoryand commercial enculturation. Following a discussion of theory and methods, itincludes three analysis chapters. Chapter 5 focuses on mothers’ ideological dilemmasand their construction of identity through caring consumption. I explore how motherstake responsibility for products, services and experiences on behalf of their youngchildren, while reflecting on children’s future becoming and present being. Chapter 6focuses on young children’s sense of belonging in peer consumer culture. I explore thesignificance of children’s having and knowing in preschool settings and discuss how themeanings and values of certain possessions and forms of knowledge are consistentlyinterpreted and transformed among peers. Chapter 7 focuses on flexible social identities,and in particular how children maintain different kinds of boundaries and transformcultural resources in play. I explore the ways in which consumption practices serve astools for children’s construction of social identities.Ultimately, I argue that consumption is not a simple matter either of control or of freechoice, and that researchers need to look beyond some of the dichotomies that havetended to characterise discussion of these issues. With this thesis I am hoping to makeempirical, methodological, theoretical and disciplinary contributions to both childhoodstudies and consumption studies.