The dental industry gets a big boost as well. So while parents fret, the experts cheer. A nation obsessed with the GDP starts looking at its children mainly in terms of how much money they spend. Children become resources to mine and sales quotas, not young beings to nurture. Even schools have enlisted in this gold rush.
Children become a captive audience for ads showing expensive sneakers, junk food, and soda pop.
We are tossing children and childhood onto the bonfire that keeps the GDP warm. But the business media looks at the result and gushes at the economy's upward path. It's time for reporters and experts to stop parroting narrow-channeled economic textbooks. They need to develop better indicators of economic performance that don't portray the impairment or destruction of childhood as economic gain. We ought to treat the sale of addictive products like cigarettes to children as costs not gains to the economy.