Quart, Alissa 1972(?)-

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Quart, Alissa 1972(?)-

PERSONAL:

Born c. 1972. Education: Graduated from Brown University and Columbia School of Journalism.

ADDRESSES:

Home—New York, NY. E-mail—alissa@alissaquart.com.

CAREER:

Writer.

WRITINGS:

Branded: The Buying and Selling of Teenagers, Perseus (Cambridge, MA), 2003.

Hothouse Kids: The Dilemma of the Gifted Child, Penguin Press (New York, NY), 2006.

Also contributor of opinion pieces and book reviews to the New York Times, Lingua Franca, Elle, Nation, Salon.com, New York Times Magazine, and Atlantic Monthly.

SIDELIGHTS:

Alissa Quart's Branded: The Buying and Selling of Teenagers tells the story of how bigname corporate brands have infiltrated the world of young people, securing access to a market worth an estimated 155 billion dollars, according to Women's Review of Books commentator Jean Kilbourne. "As Quart points out, marketing to teens has existed since the word teenager was coined by Madison Avenue in 1941," Kilbourne explained. "But there has been an exponential increase in the amount and intensity of advertising that teenagers are exposed to, even in their schools, as well as on the streets and in their homes. In 1989 corporations spent about six hundred million dollars on marketing to kids. In 1999 they spent twenty times that amount. In addition, marketers spend billions of dollars on psychological research designed to get them into the heads and thus the wallets of young people."

The author views the increased power of advertising as in some ways a side effect of the decline of the traditional family. "The heart of Ms. Quart's argument is that because some teenagers have ‘bleak and atrophied familial relationships,’ companies rush to create emotional relationships with them centered on idealized notions of how their bodies should look and what they should buy," wrote New York Times contributor William J. Holsten. "Brands, in her view, become surrogate parents. But these corporate parents are engaged in the ‘manufacturing of inadequacy,’ urging teenagers to conform to ideals of what's attractive. The logical end point of this pattern of exploitation, in the author's view, is the scramble to achieve high SAT scores and go to a ‘Trophy U’"—a realization of the power of branding on a larger scale.

Targeted marketing is virtually unavoidable for today's teenagers, Quart reports. Many advocates for teenagers and children suggest that marketers have learned to take advantage of their vulnerability and underdeveloped sense of self. The author, stated Nation contributor Rebecca Segall, "eerily demonstrates how the relentless marketing to kids has insidiously permeated what used to be, not even fifteen years ago, youth's sacred spaces: the teen movie and magazine, youth literature, school social events, video games, extreme sports, the dressing room and worst of all, their inner lives." "Quart," Segall concluded, "seamlessly weaves within her cultural criticism and warnings an extremely insightful analysis of the transformation of youth social movements."

In Hothouse Kids: The Dilemma of the Gifted Child, Quart examines the situation in which many child prodigies find themselves: isolated from the rest of their peers by the same gifts that make them special, they often look back on "stunted childhoods," declared Vanessa Bush in Booklist, "haunted by not living up to their promise, being ‘a cross between a has-been and a never-was.’" Although she pins much of the blame for these children's lost childhoods on their parents, who push them to excel, "Quart argues in favor of better training for gifted-education teachers," stated a Kirkus Reviews contributor, "and increased funding for gifted programs in schools, which she warns have been cut back severely." "Quart interviews, interprets and assesses," concluded a writer for Publishers Weekly, "with a sympathy for her subjects and their caregivers that is emotionally profound."