Corporate Childrearing

With children influencing a trillion dollars in spending annually, corporations actively seek to shape children's identities in support of consumer culture and profit. Yet there are no scholarly treatments or theories of the legal relationship between children and corporations. Instead, scholars address individual industries such as food, social media, cosmetics, tobacco, or fashion, missing the structural role corporations play in children's identity formation. Family law evaluates child wellbeing interventions using a triangle to map the legal dynamics among child, parent, and state. This article adds corporations as fourth actors, reconceptualizing that triangle as a square. This square provides the first model of the law of corporate childrearing. Using both the triangle and the square, the article identifies and evaluates our three existing approaches to corporations: direct regulation of corporations (tobacco); legislated parental consent requirements (body piercings); or parental authority/self-help frameworks (cosmetics). The article emphasizes the distinction between the institutional actors (state and corporation), and the individual actors (child and parent). Just as the state holds disproportionate power in the family law triangle, corporations wield immense power over both parent and child, with even less accountability than the state. Because corporate interests do not align with children's wellbeing, family law urgently needs a new framework that makes the role of corporations explicit. The square reveals how corporations generate and exploit parent-child conflict in the service of consumerism. The square framework reveals preconditions for effective parental consent laws and indicates where direct state power is needed to beat back corporate childrearing.