The Commercialization of Childhood

Com merci a l i s m has left i ts m ark on all aspects of children's everyday lives today. It constitutes a shared world of experience, permeating relations between chil­ dre n a nd w ith i n the family. The article discusses the possibilities of an in-depth an a lyH iH from an eth nological per�pective. One po:;s i b i l ity is to study commerc ia l ­ i ;,ation from the ch i l d ren's perspective as practice, social acti v ity, or lifestyle . This is exempl i fied pri m arily with chi ldren's computer games. Another possibility is to study in a h istorical perspective how consumerism has been gradually intro­ d uced , est abl ished , i nstitutionalized , and finally made into a seemingly sel f­ ev ident part ofthe children's world. 'l'he authors discuss how the process could be studied through archival sources such as advertisements and price-lists. The article conclude� with a discussion of the new i mages of fam ily relations and ch i ld ren's com petences that emerge from the commercial media. In adverti se­ ments for computer� , children arc presented as competent and superior. In television series, parents are often portrayed as pathetic, as clumsy fathers and nagg i n g mothers , while the children are enterprising and crafty. What does that say about actua l changes in family relations and problems in today's families?

the actual world out there. Helene fo und an example one day on her way home, when she saw a notice stuck to a lamp-post, and fu rther on another one, both with the same message: "Has anyone seen my cat Ludde? He looks just like the cat in the Pussi ad. Please call . _ ." fo llowed by the name and telephone number of the eleven-year-old owner. Just a few decades ago, lost animals would have been described in a completely different way, in terms of colour, markings, and distinctive fe atures, with com parisons taken fr om the world of nature. For today's children, designations such as lime blossom green or straw-coloured scarcely have any relevance, but a comparison to "the cat in the Pussi ad" does. The cat that advertises Pussi cat fo od is not just any cat. It is a black cat with a white nose, the white mark running up and tapering in the shape of the Eiffel Tower. The Pussi cat is a celebrity for many children today. It lives its own life in television commer cials and has its own personality, in a way that gives the tins on the supermarket shelf a special charge. Learning and interpreting the symbolic world of advertising is as essential for a child as understanding the underlying process by which the meat ends up in the tin.
In consumption studies this shared world of experience is often primarily described as a symbolic world associated with an accelerated post-modernization of culture. This symbolism provides models, language, signs to play with, and dreams, wishes, fa ntasies to be charmed by and urged to realize. The example above shows that there is a great deal of truth in this descrip tion. Ye t commercialization cannot be under stood solely as an illusory world floating above the real world, available to those who seek inspiration for an escape fr om reality or an identity construction. It is much more perva sive than that.
To begin with, the symbols of commercialism are a shared world of experience for children today to playwith and associate with. When our ch ildren meet their hol iday friend::; once again and have to li nd ::;o m c th i ng to talk about on the long summer evenings, with no television or video, there are two natural topics of conversa tion: their fav ourite comics in the Disney mag azine, and the cartoons and advertisements on telev ision : best, worst, most exciting, corniest, neatest graphics, best music, and so on . Every one can join in, associating, talking and laugh ing, even if there are a few years' diflerence in age or ifthe gang consists of both girls and boys .
Commercialism also pervades relations be tween children. In the children's world there are often diflerent styles, and children have clear perceptions of what is neatest or corniest, best or worst, cutest or ugliest. The symbolic value of things gives the potential to express something about who one is or wants to be, which world one wants to express solidarity with or fr om which one wishes to dissociate oneself. At the age of just eight, children are fu lly fledged consumers, as Stephen Kline says in Out ol the Garden: To ys, TV and Children's Culture in the Age of Marketing (1993). They know all about the range of goods on offe r in the convenience store, they know how to convert their pocket-money into hard currency in the children's world in the fo rm of ice hockey cards, sweets, and scented erasers. Commercialism also makes its mark on rela tions between parents and children. Parents buy things for their children as a token of their love and affinity, to reward and to delight, perhaps to salve a guilty conscience about not being at home enough or not having enough time fo r the children. The children soon learn negotiation techniques. Appealing to the sym bolic value of objects as pleasure, consolation, protection against guilty consciences, pointing out that "everyone else has ... ", and hence playing on the parents' fe ars that their children will be left outside, ostracized, or bullied. lives today, whether we like it or not. That is why it has been said that the ideology of post modernity is consumerism, which means that consumption is more than an activity; it is a way of life and thus indissolubly connected to identity. The identity of post-modern man is linked to consumption, not to production as it used to be. The time is long gone since we consumed solely for our material needs. Accord ing to Baudrillard (Bocock 1993), it is primarily emotional needs that today's consumer tries to satisfy.
How did it end up this way? How are we to perceive "this brave new world" in which we live, with all its commercialism? And how can we as ethnologists contribute to an understand ing of this world, what it does to us and our children, and what we do to it? These were the questions we considered in our work with the anthology Postmodern barndom ("P ost-modern Childhood", Brembeck and Johansson 1996), for which the students were sent out to docu ment different "post-modern tendencies" in to day's childhood. It was shown time and again that commercialism was at the centre.

Consumption as Lifestyle
One way to take the pulse of today's childhood is to get under the surface, to investigate opin ions and attitudes fr om the perspective of the users, the children and the parents, and to see commercialism not just as a structure or dim en sion but also as a practice. Is it possible to trace consumerism in present-day children's con sumption? Ye s, for we can see how the advertis ers succeed in their purpose: to get the children to want io have a multitude of' products which they do not need in material terms. We who were small in th e 1960s perhaps had a Barbie and a Ken thai we bought clothes !'or. The girls of the 1990s, in contrast, buy and ask for new dolls al l the time. Even if they already have twelve Barbie dolls, they still want that special "P arty Barbie", or "P ocahontas" or "Riding Bar bie" that they have seen in the alluring adver tisements. With her new clothes, her accesso ries, and special attributes such as the length and colour of her hair or the colour of her skin, each doll has an individual personality. The doll is more than the wearer of a set of clothes; it offers a role, an identity. Barbie is the post modern dream of changing i deniity as easily as one changes clothes.
Another way in which consumption satisfies emotional needs is by becoming a social activity, for example, a shared fa mily activity. Instead of a walk in the fo rest, the family can spend a Saturday afternoon at the shopping mall. When children play together, their play requires them to have the same toys or to watch the same television programmes. A special case is the ice hockey cards that children collect, swap, buy, and sell. It is nothing new for children to collect things, nor that there are obvious economic incentives; collections of stamps and coins can acquire a high value. What is new about ice hockey cards is that the trade in the pictures has become as important as the actual collect ing, thus showing a clear similarity to adult speculation in stocks and shares -an example of boundaries between generations being tran scended.
Consumerism thus means that the concept of consumption is broadened. Until now we have mentioned the expanded symbolic mean ing of the consumed products. The goods stand for much more than their practical use, they have an important symbolic fu nction. This is a necessary condition if consumption is to be a lifestyle. In addition, there has been an expan sion of the things encompassed by consump tion. What was fo rmerly connected to the indi vidual's personality and perhaps did not change through a whole lifetime -such as taste, style, interests, political and religious affiliation -is now an object for consumption. Everything be-comes a commodity and hence can be exchanged, even one's own identity.

Using the Media
When one speaks of the commercialization of childhood, about the power of advertising over children and the heavy impact of the media, it is easy to take the view that children are vic tims. This has long been the common attitude in media studies. Scholars have studied what has gone into the children in the fo rm of violence, action, and stereotyped pictures, and then what has come out in the fo rm of aggressive behav iour, anxiety, and prejudice. In recent years, however, many scholars have rejected this view of children as passive receivers and instead studied the effect of advertising and the media as an active process fr om the children's side as well. There is of course no reason to try to deny that children are influenced by what they see, hear, and experience -the whole school system is based on this -but the perspective changes if the child is placed as an active subject in the centre of the process. In particular, this makes it much easier to understand why children are influenced to such different extents. Of fo ur children who see a violent scene on television, one may be inspired to go out and fight, while another may be upset and reject violence, a third may find inspiration for a game, while the fo urth may be wholly unaffected. It all depends on the circumstances of the child.
These circumstances, however, should not be reduced to an individual psychological level. The repertoire and the options are not infinite in the culture of which the child is part, and the things that children, each in their own way, practise and learn to manage as well as possible in the society in which they live.
What is it that the children learn, what do they practise, what is it that they need to bring out in life? Whereas man's task in the early days of industrial society was to do one's work in the fa ctory as quickly and efficiently as possible, with no unnecessary talk, in our later industri al society it is instead a matter of solving prob lems, discussion, communicating, arriving at the solutions together. Since much of what is produced is information, it is obvious that the skill that is valued most highly today is commu nicative competence (Frones 1987). Children practise this competence in their games, which is why games today look very different fr om games in the past (Ronnberg 1987). Children today live in small nuclear fa milies and rarely have any insight into their parents' jobs. The media are therefore an im portant source for understanding the world. It may seem as if there is a contradiction in the claim that children actively construct them selves and acquire communicative competence in interaction with other people, while at the same time they spend so many hours seemingly passive in fr ont of the television set or the computer. Yet Ronnberg (1987) argues that, even if children are physically passive in fr ont ofthe television, they are creative and active on the mental level. According to Ronnberg, televi sion gives rise to two different kinds of play.
There is play on the mental level, a game of thought or a looking game. In addition, the media fu nction as a collectively shared play model, serving as a basis for "media games" when the television is switched off.
The media can thus be said to fa vour commu nicative competence by fu nctioning as a model and as a knowledge bank. As a model, the media inform us about how communication takes place.
The children get ideas and suggestions as to what to do and how to behave in encounters with others. As a knowledge bank, the media supply children with shared fr ames of reference which can ::;erve as a basis fi1r co mmunication between them. They can play Bj orne (a man dressed w; a bear in a fa vourite Swedish chil dren's television programme) or Power Rang ers, and ihey can invent their own commercials based on television advertising.

A Good Childhood
Behind every advertisement thai children and their parents meci, there arc a number of as sumptions about the world which ihe receivers are expected to share. Let us iake a product that is now spreading like wildfire in schools and fa milies, with the support of intensive market ing: the computer. There is a generally accepted view that the computer is a thing of the future.
"What your children need io know for the fu ture, they can now learn in their spare time" is the slogan used by Futurekids in their adver tisement, playing on the Swedish words {r am tid "future" and f;·itid "leisure time". It is not just in advertisements but also in articles about children and computers th at the connection between computers and fu ture is made to ap pear self-evident. A school in which the children use computers is called "the school of the fu ture" and the children are called "the children of the fu ture", although all this obviously takes place in the present. And the latest computer technology is said to be "only the beginning"; after just a few years, computer models are antiquated. In addition, we are constantly re minded that we must hurry. "Full speed ahead. Those who don't keep up only have themselves to blame" (Hadenius 1995). 1t is essential not to miss the train and be left on the platform among the losers in the computer society.
Yet there is also a discourse to the opposite effect, which argues that "children must be allowed to be children". It is fe lt to be fu nda mentally unnatural that children sit in fr ont of a computer screen instead of being outside climbing trees, building little houses, and play ing tag. Instead of emphasizing the importance of children having sharp elbows and getting to the fu ture as fa st as possible, this view urges that they should have opportunities for play, fa ntasy, and peace and quiet, in contrast to the dazzling, high-speed multimedia eiiects of ihe computer world.
It is easy to see this complex of ideas as a reaction to the "future discourse", and it i::; obvious that the two discourses stand out more clearly as a result of the polarization between ihem. In order to better understand what hap pens, however, it is important to see that these opposed ideas have not arisen in our days with the introduction of computers for children. We can trace the historical roots back in time, to sec how new techniques have always created great expectations -in the 1960s (which was sympto matically called the space age), for example, people dreamed of a small space rocket for every fa mily -and have always encountered reac tions in the fo rm of fe ars, critique, and usually anxiety about how this will affe ct the children .
The reaction has often taken the fo rm of moral panic, which has been provoked by videos, tel evision, comics, and even children's books when they started to appear. Back in the eighteenth century Rousseau warned of the danger of let ting children learn to read, since it would mean the end of the innocent and natural childhood.
There is thus a deep-rooted dichotomy between "the natural" and "the artificial", and even between nature and culture, a dichotomy which can also be taken as a starting point for defining a "good childhood".

Reading History fr om Advertisements
A fa scinating point of departure for a continued study of the commercialization of childhood would therefore be to take a step backwards and study the present in the light of history. A tested ethnological method for understanding something complex and contradictory of which we ourselves as modern people are part is to study the phenomenon as a stage in a process in which the "roots" and part of the explanation lie one or perhaps more generations in the past.
One way is to apply the "formation perspective" advocated by Orvar Lofgren ( 1990). This means that the fo cus is on how new phenomena are fo rmed, established, institutionalized, routi nized, and eventually taken for granted, trivial ized, or mystified.
Here too, we have a multitude of possible methods and materials, muny of which have been successfully tested in the Lund proj ect "Welfare Dreams and Everyday Life: Consump tion in Post-war Sweden", under Lofgren's lead ership (e.g. Lofgren 1992Lofgren , 1993. In our continued work we shall confine ourselves ex clusively to archival material such as advertise ments, price-lists, books of advice, and so on in the field of toys, children's fa shions, and chil dren's use of the media. Part of the reason for this is that we start our study in 1900. The decades around the turn of the centu ry have been described as a period of upheaval in the field of children's culture (e.g. Kline 1993). In dustrialization and industrial technology had attained a level that enabled mass production. Th e increased range of goods reached fa milies in all social classes -not just the rich -and th ey could all increasingly afford it. It may be wondered what can be derived fr om advertisements apart fr om the fact that they fu nction like the "tradesmen's entrances" that Lofgren (1990) recommends, like "peep holes" into a culture or "texts" fr om which we can read a society. Do they give us any informa tion that we could not get elsewhere? Can we really arrive at a deeper understanding of the complex reality in which children live today by studying, for example, toy advertisements fr om the 1930s, pram advertisements from the 1910s, or sweet advertisements fr om the 1950s? As Lofgren (1996) has pointed out, reading culture as a text has proved to be "a narrow and one dimensional metaphor for the multifaceted char acter of everyday culture". With the articles in Postmodern barndom in mind, we can only agree with this. At the same time, we believe that an advertisement fo r, say, toys or children's clothes must be understood as something more powerful than just a "text".  life. They were on the contrary released fr om work, and it was the responsibility of society, or at least the adult world, to lead them on to the right track. It could be said that childhood as a cultural category was created now, not just fo r the children of the bourgeoisie but also for broad groups of children, at least in the cities.

Teddy Bears fo r Good Children
Parallel to this, the concept of "child" was re charged in bourgeois circles during the nine teenth century. Whereas children had previ ously been regarded as blank slates to be filled with knowledge, as bearers of original sin, or as small adults who just needed to grow in strength and knowledge to be able to enter adult roles, in the nineteenth century there arose a rival, romantici�ed view of chi ldre n -or at lea::;L bourgeois childrenas pure and unspoiled, good through and through, the bearers of a superior morali ty, God'::; angels on earth . At the same Lime, there arose the idea of the excellence of toys. Bourgeois children were to be educated, stimulated, and trained from their very first years to assimilate all the bourgeois virtues and attain the same economic and social position as their parents . To ys were perceived as excellent aids to th is en d. Th i s applied in particular to the abundance of educational toys that began to fill the bourgeois nurseries to wards the end of the nineteenth century, such as games, mechanical kits, steam engines, and peep-shows (Bjurman 1981:104). Even very young infants, who had been of very little inter est to secular and ecclesiastical authorities and had scarcely been perceived even by their par ents as being educable, were now to be exposed to education and intensive stimulation.
With the breakthrough ofFreudian psychol ogy around 1900, infancy came to be regarded as the most significant phase of childhood, when a child had to be subjected to intensive educa tion. The child was at the mercy of drives which had to be channelled in the right direction.
Incorrect action on the part ofthe parents could have devastating consequences for the child later in life. Although psychology stressed the importance of emotional intimacy and warmth, too much "corporeality" and fo ndling between parent and child was viewed negatively. The baby had to cope on its own even in the cradle, and be able to occupy itself for long periods alone in the nursery. The practice ofhaving the nanny sleep with the children was abandoned, and the nursery became a private, secluded children's land, supervised fr om a distance by the nanny (Kildegaard Hansen 1987).
On top of this came the mass launching of fa ctory-made toys. In this way one can find a multitude of explanations for the specific de sign of the Steiffteddy bear advertisement. Yet this cannot solely be understood as a reflection of the contemporary social and ideological cli mate; it is also in large measure a human construction. The increased use of technology in industry, new conditions for the children of the bourgeoisie, a new view of children -all this m i ght have had little effect ifthere had been no marketers . Without them, the production of teddy bears would scarcely have increased with the incredible speed that it did: fr om the fi rst teddy bear at the toy fair in Leipzig in 1903 until a production volume of97 4,000 bears just three years later.

The Loving Comrade
In the same way as advertisers today, the Steifr fa mily's advertising designers enlisted all the contemporary psychological theories to try to convince parents of the necessity of toys . A central aspect of all toy marketing is to give the object meanings which were not originally there.
The marketers thus tried to give the teddy bear a symbolic charge, listening attentively to "the needs of the market" so that they could strike the right chord. The picture painted by Steiff and other large toy manufacturers was of the teddy bear as a loving comrade and companion, not just in childhood but throughout life. A soft, cuddly fr iend, always by your side, with whom you can share your sorrows and joys, a good listener, always willing to comfort you in childhood when you have been scolded by mother, in your teens when your boyfriend has let you down, or in adult life when you encounter setbacks at work or in fa mily life. The teddy bear was moreover legitimate for boys too. Girls already had dolls to hug. With a teddy bear at one's side any Victorian empire-builder could stand firm and unmoved when the wind blew.
We can thus see how advertisements not just reproduce culture but also produce it, or rather how that class of people that Mike Feather stone (1994) calls "symbol producers" skilfully capture our dreams and give them a certain shape -one of an infinite number of possibili ties, to which we direct our desire. Why teddy bears and not donkeys, pigs, or camels, which were also to be fo und in Margarete Steiff's collection? Ask the marketers and their skill in "listening to the market". Stephen Kline de scribes how "my Little Pony" was created after American surveys of what girls think of before they fa ll asleep, dreams that were realized in tho form of small, pw;tol-colourod plastic ponicl:l with long, combublo muncl:l and tu ill:l. In other words , the girlish longi ng to h ave a horse of one's own to look aft e r was giv en a specific fi>rm , wh ich si mu ltaneously excluded all others, und this form pe rhaps says m ore about the inside of a marketer's head and about our cultural ster eotypes about girls, about male and fem a le, and not very much about the inside of a l ittle girl's head before she fa lls asleep.
Advertisements thus give us models fo r how we should act, how we should th ink, what we should own. Although there are other models, they give us suggestions which arc mixed and matched with all tho [()reo of commercial cul ture. Advertisements and other typos of arch i val material arc thus not just "innocent" reflec tions of their time, but also to a groat extent help to create modern man and to change chil dren's identities in today's post-modern society.

The Mythologization of Children
Further examples may be given of the signifi cance of a historical perspective in the study of the commercialization of childhood. Today we see teddy bears everywhere. In advertisements for baby fo od, toothbrushes, and high chairs, as trendy accessories in fu rniture stores, as deco ration on everything fr om mugs and wallpaper to shirts and underpants. The path of the teddy bear fr om the nursery to the shirt collar can only be explained in historical perspective, for example, through the gradual mythologization described by Roland Barthes (1970).
A myth is created, according to Barthes, when a representation, an "image" -the Swed ish flag in a letterhead, fo r instance -is used to represent something completely different fr om the piece of blue and yellow cloth in itself, such as "Swedishness" or "nationalism". In the same way, the teddy bear as a myth has been con structed by means of several layers of meaning and symbolic recharges. With a rising degree of abstraction, the teddy bear has come to repre sent, fo r example, children, childhood, security.
In the symbolic world, the myth of the teddy bear in addition interacts with other myths to build up an image of innocence, playfulness, goodness, and so on. An advertisement like that 22 Fig. :3 . What i� the teddy bear doing be� ide the packet of infi.tnt filrmula? Perhap� it i� trying to te ll UH t.hat we give our children a real childhood when we buy F'indus wholemeal formula.
used by Findus to sell its infant fo rmula -an advertisement that is geared to parents, not children -can only be understood in connection with the ability of the teddy bear figure to trigger a complete battery of associations and to convince parents that they are giving their children a "real" childhood by buying Findus's wholemeal fo rmula.
Part of the explanation for the design of advertisements can also be fo und in the en counter of the global, or at least transnational, meanings with the national ones. As Hannerz and LOfgren (1992) have rightly pointed out, there has been a special relationship between market, state, and popular movements in Swe den, as a result of which commercialism has been integrated in a special way and charged with special symbols. An example that we have fo und in our work on the anthology is that the hedonistic message of the American toy indus try -"Make your child's day a happy one, buy a toy" -finds it difficult to gain fu ll acceptance among Swedish parents. Instead, it seems to be more important to convince hesitant Swedish parents of all social classes that the toys have an educational value; this indicates the special role played by state experts in Sweden, in com petition with the market's symbol producers.

Pathetic Parents and Crafty Children
We assume thai commercial cu l tu re has changed children 's conditions in s u ch a profound way that it a l so aflccis the most intimate relations and the sense of who one is. In our work with Postmodern ba.mdom we detected many such areas where far-reaching changes had occurred.
One exa m p le is the competence th ai ch i ldren possess, their perception of time and place, and -not least ofall -theirrelation to their parents. We shall round otfihis article by looking more closely at the latter.
In Postmodern ha.rndom , both Linda Mau the and Lotta Edin examine how advertising now bypasses the parents and appeals directly to the children, and how parents are portrayed in advertisements as twits who are easily out witted and humiliated by their children. This development is obvious in Mauthe's analysis of fo rty years of advertisements in Swedish Dis ney comics, in which parents are gradually reduced fr om dependable, caring adults to pow erless tools for the children's consumption. In the 1950s, parents were depicted as sensible adults buying bactericides and helping their children to write the address on the envelope. In the 1980s and 1990s, the children are the active subjects, highly aware consumers, who are ex pected to be able to look after themselves and take advantage of what the market has to offer, for example, to "take Mum and Dad to EuroDis ney in Paris". In a competition organized by a Swedish sweet manufacturer, a child could even win an adult as a prize, the comedian Stellan Sundahl, who would be delivered to the winner along with a supply of sweets. "With his clever jokes, hilarious stories, and crazy pranks, he will make your day a birthday to remember." The roles are reversed: the adult is crazy and irresponsible, the child is the sensible and per haps critical consumer.
Ellen Seiter (1993) describes the stereotyped presentation of adults in American television commercials aimed at children. White men are either conscientious workers or boring parents.
Black men stand fo r the bodily or sensual as pects to do with sport or music. In advertise ments for children, the attraction of the product often lies in the fa ct that it is the opposite of the adult world. The adults are the constant loserH, those who vainly try to deprive the childre n of the pleasures of life, in the fo rm of sweets and snacks. The point ofthe advertisements is often that an adult is exposed as stupid, fa lse, or childish.
One could claim with Seiter that this is a clever way to design advertisements fo r chil dren, to make them laugh and buy more. This in itself need not say very much about relations in the real world. It is no doubt possible to trace this mockery of the adult world fu rther back in time in children's media. In Postmodern barn dam Anne Simu and Lena A kerman present a study of a children's television programme, Fem myror iir fler iin fy ra elefanter, a Swedish vari ant of Sesame Street. They show how Brasse Briinnstrom played the role of a shrewd and crafty child who often outwitted the adults in the fo rm of the motherly Eva Remaeus and the schoolmasterly Magnus Hiirenstam. From our own childhood we remember a scatterbrained inventor fa ther in Edith Unnerstedt's book Ka strullresan (The Saucepan Journey) , and Astrid Lindgren undoubtedly let Pippi Long stocking make fun of the adult world. Ye t the moral panic that Pippi Longstocking provoked shows how unique and daring her mockery of the adult world was. This mockery has been multiplied to such an extent in the 1990s in advertisements and commercial television for children that it does not upset anyone or cause the slightest moral panic. In fa ct, it leaves the adult world unmoved, which might suggest that something rather radical has happened in relations between parents and children. In any case, it was not parents that Pippi made fun of; it was rather the pompous representatives of authority, such as policemen and superintend ents of children's homes. To mmy and Annika's parents, like Pippi's own father and mother, were portrayed as good, worth all respect, and with an unquestioned authority, in a way that is increasingly uncommon in children's televi sion nowadays.

The Family in Front of the Television
Even more thought-provoking are the images of parents that we see in television series which a re not primarily geared to children, being more fam ily �:�cries. These abound in prim mothers and scatterbrained fath ers who ca n hardly take a step without fa lling over. A clear example is the 1996 advent calendar, a �:�erics oftclcvision programmes leading up to Christmas; here the mother was a rational perfectionist and the fa ther a fai led inventor who made all the televi sion sets in Sweden spark. Another example is the popular Swedish sitcom Svensson, Svens son. The series is about a "typical" Swedish fa mily with two children, living in a suburban terrace house, and th eir everyday problems.
The father constantly makes unsuccessful at tempts to maintain his masculinity and family authority, accompanied by the sarcastic com ments of the mother, a bank executive. Exam ples fr om outside Sweden arc Th e Wo nder Years and The Simpsons. Where do all the daft fa thers and all the cheerless, priggish mothers come fr om? A historical perspective would pre sumably show that this phenomenon is nothing new either. It has gradually emerged and has been accentuated. One of the fa mily fa vourites of the 1980s was Cosby, in which the two par ents -he a doctor, she a psychologist -smoothly solved all the problems that arose in the large, rowdy fa mily. Cosby is more than anything else a popular fo rm of advice on child-rearing. From our own childhood we remember Father Kn ows Best and western series like Little House on the Prairie and Bonanza, in which the adults were always wise and understanding and the fa thers were the true heroes.
According to viewing figures for 1996, Svens son, Svensson was the most popular programme in Sweden, with a maximum of 3.4 million viewers on an ordinary Sunday evening (Gote borgs-Posten 24Jan. 1997). What made so many Swedish people, both young and old, sit and watch Allan Svensson and his fa mily? What did they laugh at? Themselves? Their own parents? Or at the typical Swede who usually goes under the name "Svensson"? Is it a distorting mirror in which certain fa miliar fe atures are grotesque ly exaggerated? Or is it a contrasting picture which allows people to say, "At least I'm not like that"? Or could it be a dream image: "Imagine having the nerve to behave like that just once!"? And who laughs at it? Is it the children and the 24 yo ung pa rents who laugh at their ow n parents' fa ilures? ls it. the middle-aged generation'�:� par ody of disintegrati ng parental authority? Or is it the media makers' ironic commentary on their own parenthood? I�:� the success of Svensson, Svensson due to the fact that the series has something more to say over and above t.hc opportu n i tie::; fo r laugh ter and identification that the characters in the series provide? Is it in fact a study ofthe modern problems ofthc parental role, and particularly the father's role? Docs it Lest new ways to be a child in the family? The smart son in the fa mily often outwits the adults, just as in th e adver tisements aimed at children, as a mixture of the traditional naughty boy and the boy genius (Seiter 1993:126). The boy genius is a new character in the commerci al media, the only one for whom intellectual and verbal skill�:� are highly valued, according to Seiter. He is a clever type who is cool in an individualistic way, far fr om the image of the traditional bespectacled nerd. Is this perhaps the revenge of the compu ter boys?
Television researchers, such as David Mor ley (1986), have stressed how the fa mily is "constructed" in television series, but also by the real fa mily in the social situation that watching television constitutes. Different fam ilies have different viewing styles, and a fa mily can arrive at a shared understanding of how to perceive programmes and characters, an un derstanding that differs fr om that of other fam ilies. Morley's studies also show that the fa ther in the viewing situation often adopts a playful role towards the children, while the mother has a more supervisory fun ction. Perhaps it is pri marily the fa mily in the viewing situation that is parodied in Svensson, Svensson. Maybe fam ily television viewing plays yet another role: cuddling up in the sofa in fr ont of the television is perhaps the only chance that fa milies have to sit close together. Morley argues that television viewing is the only activity in which this snug gling is really permitted between adults and children or between men and women -an act of intimacy, solidarity, and fa mily togetherness.
This enhances the significance of what happens both on the television screen and in fr ont of it.

New Competences
Do media discourses about pathetic parents and crafty children have a counterpart in real ity? Most people can no doubt confirm that a great deal has changed in inter-generation re lations in just a few generations. The self evident authority once enjoyed by the school teacher and the fa ther has been dissolved. To day schoolchildren can fo rce through their de mand that they too -and not just the teachers -should be allowed to eat biscuits during the school breaks, in the name of fairness. In the home it is often the children who urge a change to environment-friendly detergent and sorting of waste. Smoking parents may find it difficult to persist in their vice when they are confronted with the well-formulated arguments and se vere sanctions of the children's anti-smoking campaigns. Children not only know more than adults in many fields, they also have the ability to argue for their views, showing their increased communicative competence.
When changes occur so quickly nowadays fr om one generation to the next, and the par ents are no longer those who know best and have the answers to all the questions, it is natural for children to turn to their coevals to learn how to act in life. Nowadays, with rapid staff turnover in kindergartens and schools, with divorces and single parents with fr equent changes of partner, it is perhaps a child's fr iends and not the parents that represent continuity.
Another example of something that never ceases to amaze parents is how easy it is fo r children to learn to use computers. It is not long after the PC is installed at home that the parents need the help of the son or daughter, who have experimented and learned things that the adult cannot find in the thick manuals.
It is characteristic that a three-year-old girl who still cannot read, but who has sat playing with a drawing program and become skilled in clicking her way through the dialogue windows, can tell astonished visitors that "it's mostly Daddy and me that use the computer, Mummy doesn't know so much, but she tries a bit".
It appears as if our information society in  (Johansson 1996).
In the same way as with other language acquisition, it is the children who learn easiest and quickest, while adults will always speak it with a fo reign accent. It is easy to see a parallel with the fa mily that moves abroad and the children are the first to learn the language and culture of the new country, having to act as an intermediary for the parents.
"Post-modern" Te chnology The example of the three-year-old girl is far from unique. The new adult-child relationship stands out with particular clarity when one looks at how adults and children relate to com puter technology, a world in which adults are generally more cautious, showing greater re spect for the computer, sticking to one or just a few programs which they more or less master. The typical attitude of the child, on the other hand, is inquisitive, testing, playful, and irrev erent.
One can see in many ways how the computer fits into modern society, in which large quanti-26 tics of information have to be handled quickly, in which priority is attached to llcxibility in working life , where quick and long-distance communication is essential . In the post-modern era, when the grand narratives have been aban doned and life is characterized by fragmenta tion, a tourist existence (Bauman 1993), tran scended boundaries, and a seemingly infinite number of options, the computer and the Inter net afford the possibility ofleaving the confines of everyday life and surfing in cyberspace. This in turn fu rther reinforces these post-modern tendencies.
In the same way, we can see how the changed relationship between children and ad ults is supported by computer technology. It is not just that parents and teachers have to ask the chil dren for help when they want to usc th e compu ter; the adults' control of the children is re duced. It is impossible to keep track of what the children download fr om the Internet, and they quickly learn how to hide their documents on the hard disk, safe fr om the eyes of curious adults. Ye t it is not just children who appear more adult; the computer also gives adults an outlet fo r their more childish tendencies, as people know who have sat for hours -perhaps to their own amazement -wasting time with some computer game. Unlike children, howev er, adults have a tendency to stick to one game to which they constantly return, often a simple game that does not require any great intellectu al effort. The children notice this and comment on it: "Daddy usually plays with a boat sailing on the sea and there's a lot of shooting" or "Mummy's always sitting playing patience". It is particularly bad, of course, when the adult is ashamed of his addiction to computer games and plays them fu rtively. One girl could tell about her father who would sit down at the computer to work and then, when she had left the room, she could hear the little tune fr om his favourite game. There is scope here for all kinds of attitudes on the part of the children, fr om scorn to gentle indulgence.

The Merger of Childish and Adult Be haviour
In the general discourse, in both popular sci-ence and ::;erious research, we often glimpse pictures or young people who do not enter the adult role in the same way as previous genera tions did . Thomas Ziehe speaks in positive terms about a "normalization", in which the artificial boundaries which, in his view, modernity set up between adults and children, are now disap pearing, and childhood is once again attaining its normal status as a part of adult culture. Others view this normalization as rather more problematic. The Italian sociologist Alberto Melucci (1992), for example, sees the dissolu tion of routinized transitions between different phases oflife as a great danger for the process of becoming an adult. Perhaps we will have a society of eternal children with no responsible adults. Robert Bly, in his latest book The Sib ling Society (1996), argues that adults are not just more immature than they were in the past; they have even been "infantilized" and thus lost the ability to bring up the next generation. He blames commercialism, which has had the ef fe ct that our rational brain, "the new mamma lian brain" cannot curb the more primitive parts of th e brain, "the reptilian brain" and "the old mammalian brain" but is flooded by hedon istic desire, sloth, and lust.
On the basis of the examples cited here, it seems as if the generational change is about something more complex than the normaliza tion of which Ziehe speaks and the infantiliza tion that Melucci and Bly fe ar. Perhaps we may look at it as increased interplay between "child ish" and "adult", which are not so closely at tached to specific age groups but instead have begun to flow fr eely between different genera tions. This can be seen in schoolboys who start computer companies and in grandmothers who dress as youthfully as their grandchildren. We see adults in television shows building towers out ofbeer crates and competing to see who can burst most balloons in a minute, and we see children who start national collections to save the rainforest. The different interpretations may be seen as an attempt to read the signs of the times, signs which find fa irly unambiguous expression in the media. In the same way as the Steiff adver tisement can fu nction as a peephole into bygone ideas about children and childhood, today's media images of children and adults may fu nc tion as lookout points in a study of changed relations between adults and children. Con temporary studies give us ethnologists a chance to combine pure cultural analysis with studies of the meanings that children and parents cre ate in the television-viewing situation, of how their use of the media can fu nction as veritable identity-building work in the consumption soci ety. All this provides a fa scinating basis for new ethnological research.

Translation: Alan Crozier
Notes 1. Parallel to, or perhaps even before the Stciffbcar, the American teddy bear began to be produced and marketed at the turn of the century, using largely the same advertising language.