CONCEPT
Commercialized Childhood
Schor's documentation in Born to Buy (2004) that American childhood had been systematically colonized by marketing — a finding whose AI-era extension is the colonization of developmental time by productive engagement.
Born to Buy documented the infiltration of marketing into every domain of American childhood — schools, friendships, family dynamics, self-concept — and the measurable psychological costs that resulted. The framework extends directly to the AI era in a form Schor did not originally anticipate: the same institutional forces that commercialized childhood are now colonizing children's developmental time with AI-mediated productive engagement, converting the unstructured, non-productive hours that developmental science has shown to be essential for cognitive and emotional growth into time filled with tool-use, optimization, and the implicit expectation of continuous measurable progress. The costs fall disproportionately on children, whose developmental needs do not map onto the productivity frameworks that AI adoption optimizes.
In The You On AI Field Guide
The original Born to Buy analysis focused on the commercial targeting of children — the billion-dollar marketing-to-kids industry, product placement in schools, the sophisticated psychological techniques used to bypass parental gatekeeping and establish brand relationships with children from early ages. Schor documented the