You Will Respect My Authority
I have been born and raised in a negotiating household. You’d better respect that! I have pester power. And I will use it - at the breakfast table, in shops, and when you decide our holiday destination.
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Brand Child by Martin Lindstrom & Patricia B. Seybold
The importance of this book is best illustrated by the book and by the authors themselves. We generously provide three quotes to make you long for the rest of the book:
“It is not surprising that this generation has been tagged the ‘age of compression’. Almost every aspect of today’s tween-ager is different from what we have seen among past generations. They’ve grown up faster, are more connected, more money, influence and attention than any other generation before them.
No other generation has ever had as much disposable income as this one.”
“Think about it. All the soap families lurch from one crisis to the next. There’s divorce and adultery. Even murder. Problems are solved in a short half-hour. Judge Judy can work her way through five court cases in a mere 25 minutes. And as for the complexities of war – well, that may take a little longer. But 120 minutes in the cinema should solve it.”
“Having an opinion is exactly what it’s all about. The stronger the opinion the better. It was rumoured that SMP – an Australian brand – stood for sex, Money and Power. The tweens loved it. Sales of the clothing brand soared within months. In actual fact it stood for Smith, Mercury & Powell.
A mineral water named Splitrock had four very small letters printed on the side of the smart, trendy label: FYGH. And so the rumours began. It was put about that they appeared there by mistake, and they stood for ‘Fuck You Go Home’. The mineral water tasted like most other mineral waters. But in just four years, this has become the second largest-selling mineral water in Australia.”
Making Happy People by Paul Martin
“The self-esteem industry strikes a chord in our consumerist ‘me’ culture, with its emphasis on individualism, self-improvement and feeling good. Thousands of books, websites and organizations have been created in order to explain, discuss and boost self-esteem.’
‘Swept along by this tide enthusiasm, some parents and teachers have come to believe that raising children’s self-esteem is a sort of panacea – a ‘social vaccine’ that will boost their academic performance and protect them from depression, drug abuse, antisocial behaviour and a host of other undesirable outcomes.’
‘The reality, however, turns out to be much less clear cut than the rhetoric implies. Low self esteem is not the root of all evil, and raising self-esteem is not an easy way to make everything well. The evidence from research suggests that low self-esteem in children is more often a consequence, not a cause, of problems like educational underachievement, drug abuse or depression.”