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Who's Raising the Kids?: Big Tech, Big Business, and the Lives of Children Audiobook
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From a world-renowned expert on creative play and the impact of commercial marketing on children comes a timely investigation into how big tech is hijacking childhood—and what we can do about it.
Even before the COVID-19 pandemic, digital technologies had become deeply embedded in children’s lives, despite a growing body of research detailing the harms of excessive immersion in the unregulated, powerfully seductive, profit-driven world of the “kid-tech” industry.
In Who’s Raising the Kids? Linn—one of the world’s leading experts on the impact of Big Tech and big business on children—explores the roots and consequences of this monumental shift toward a digitized, commercialized childhood, focusing on kids’ values, relationships, and learning.
From birth, kids have become lucrative fodder for a range of tech, media, and toy companies, from producers of exploitative games and social media platforms to “educational” technology and branded school curricula of dubious efficacy.
Noting that many Silicon Valley elites wouldn’t dream of exposing their young kids to the very technologies they have unleashed on other people’s children, Who’s Raising the Kids? is unique—a highly readable social critique and guide to protecting kids from exploitation by the tech, toy, and entertainment industries.
Linn provides a deep and eye-opening dive into exactly how new technologies enable huge conglomerates to transform young children into lifelong consumers by infiltrating their lives and influencing their values, relationships, and learning. She persuasively argues that our digitized-commercialized culture is damaging for kids and families as well as society at large, and maps out what we must do to change course.
Written with humor and compassion, the book concludes with two hopeful chapters—“Resistance Parenting” and “Making a Difference for Everybody’s Kids”—that chart a path for protecting kids from targeting by the tech, toy, and entertainment industries that treat them as lucrative bundles of data and as mini-consumers ripe for exploitation, rather than as the children they need to be.
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“Linn issues a clarion call to governments, schools, and parents to push back—against the relentless marketing, the false promises, the saturation of tech into our most intimate and private moments.”
— Sophie Brickman, author of Baby, Unplugged
Quotes
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“Linn’s searing indictment of corporate greed, tech companies targeting children, are rivaled only by the lawmakers who let them get away with it.”
— New York Times Book Review -
“A guide on changing course both individually and as a society, by an experienced activist; a must-read.”
— Library Journal (starred review) -
“Eye-opening and disturbing…Linn recounts numerous horror stories about manipulation, but she is proactive in her advice…A must-read for any parent.
— Kirkus Reviews (starred review) -
“A stunning examination of how marketing, technology, and consumer capitalism impact the well-being of children…A must-read for parents and educators.”
— Publishers Weekly (starred review) -
“An invaluable response for parents at an impossible moment.”
— Bill McKibben, New York Times bestselling author -
“If you love children and care about the future, this book is a much-needed call to arms.”
— Russell Banks, New York Times bestselling author -
“Linn shows that we have been passive as our children were shaped into the selves that tech companies wanted them to be; adults have not met their duty of care.”
— Sherry Turkle, professor, Massachusetts Institute of Technology
Awards
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A New York Times Book Review Editor’s Choice of the Week
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About Susan Linn
Susan Linn is a psychologist and a world-renowned expert on creative play and the impact of media and commercial marketing on children. She is the author of Consuming Kids, The Case for Make Believe, and Who’s Raising the Kids? She was the founding director of campaign for a commercial-free childhood, now called Fairplay, and is research associate at Boston Children’s Hospital and lecturer on psychiatry at Harvard Medical School.