This book investigates the way that corporations are strategically shaping children to be under-aged hyperconsumers as well as the submissive employees and uncritical citizens of the future.

Sharon Beder shows how marketers and advertisers are targeting ever younger children in a relentless campaign, transforming children's play into a commercial opportunity and taking advantage of childish anxieties. 

Beder investigates the corporate relations and ideals that infiltrate every aspect of our lives. She presents an alarming picture of how a child's social development -- through education, health care and nutrition -- has become an ordered conveyor belt of consumerist conditioning. Focusing on education in particular, Beder explains how businesses are taking control of more and more aspects of schooling, not only for profit but to erode state schooling and promote business values. Similarly, she shows how 'difficult' children are taught from an early age that pharmaceuticals can be used to discipline them or to make them 'happy'.

Sharon Beder is a visiting professor in the School of Social Sciences, Media and Communication at the University of Wollongong. She is considered a leading authority on corporate and environmental issues, for which she has won a number of awards. She is the author of nine other books, including Free Market Missionaries: The Corporate Manipulation of Community Values (2006), Power Play: The Fight for Control of the World's Electricity (2003), Selling the Work Ethic: From Puritan Pulpit to Corporate PR (2000) and Global Spin: The Corporate Assault on Environmentalism (1997; 2nd ed. 2002).

Dr Wendy Varney is an honorary fellow at the University of New South Wales.

Dr Richard Gosden is a full time writer and researcher based in Australia. He is the author of Punishing the Patient: How Psychiatrists Misunderstand and Mistreat Schizophrenia (2001)

Introduction
1. Turning Children into Consumers
2. Turning Play into Business
3. Branding Childish Identities
4. Teaching Consumer Values
5. Turning Schools into Businesses
6. Making Schools Accountable
7. Business Campaigns
8. Made to Order
9. Dumbing Down Future Citizens
10. Teaching Corporate Values
11. Privatising Schools
12. Turning Schools into Markets
13. Privatisation Proponents
14. Controlling Wayward Children
Conclusion
Notes