“The Commodification of Parental Anxieties”

Abstract: In the US, parents’ high level of spending on children would seem to incentivize corporate profiteering, particularly in the context of neoliberal economic pressures. And yet, prior sociological research has said little about how corporations try to exploit parents’ investments. Drawing on a 12-month digital ethnography of Facebook advertising, including analyses of 1,527 parenting-related ads from more than 500 e-commerce companies, I show that corporations capitalize on parents’ desire to invest in their children through a process I call the commodification of parental anxieties. In this process, social media companies sell access to parents, which e-commerce companies buy. E-commerce companies then develop ads tuned to parental anxieties, which social media companies target to parents, beginning with parents’ present anxieties and expanding to new potential anxieties over time. Building on these findings, I argue that corporations—including social media and e-commerce companies—are creating and exploiting markets where parents’ anxieties can be bought, sold, and amplified for profit. I also discuss the implications of these findings for family sociology, for economic sociology, and for policy efforts to protect children and regulate social media companies.