OH how we love to bitch and moan about the age of the evil Ms: merchandise, media and marketing.
We're all agreed the Ms undermine family values, inculcate materialism and feed off our avaricious, competitive natures. Their effects are disastrous, especially when it comes to our vulnerable children.
Yet we're like moths to the flame, lemmings to the cliff. While we're busy ranting about our heavily commercialised culture, we're hitting the malls in throngs, buying our children everything they ask for and drowning in debt to keep up with the Joneses' kids.
Our suspicious minds are caught in a trap; we are at once cynic and sucker, blaming the bastards and yet buying into it all.
And nowhere is this more apparent than in discussion about tweens.
If you believe media analysts, the concept of a tween was created a couple of decades ago by Machiavellian marketers who saw that children aged between six and 12 could be more fully exploited.
All these shysters needed was a clever spin on the youthful aspiration to be grown up.
And so ensued the demise of childhood as we knew it. One minute our eight-year-olds were healthy innocents, contentedly playing with sexless Kens and Barbies, viewing nothing worse than Skippy. The next they were overweight, prematurely sexualised, brand-name junkies, addicted to screen-based games and fanatics for the cult of celebrity.
The tween was born and now it's all gone too far for us to pull it back. We throw our hands in the air. Damn the Ms.
The truth, if we can handle it, is that marketers don't work in a cultural void. The opportunity to cash in on tweens has its origins in the post-1960s evolution in family relationships. With divorce becoming an acceptable option and growing opportunities for women in the work force, children in this age group were being given more responsibility for their own care.
They were starting to make decisions about their social lives, their homework routines, their sporting and other extracurricular commitments, their personal hygiene and their food consumption.
Old ideas of strict discipline and hierarchical structure within the family were being tossed out in favour of friendship-based relationships, and parents accorded their children equal rights within the family.
At the same time a guilt factor was coming into play.
Keenly aware that their children may be lacking quality time with their elders, parents became more likely to acquiesce to their children's demands, spend more money on their children and give their children more money to spend on themselves.
Enter personal computers and the internet. Children of this age group were uninhibited about screen-based games and new forms of communication.
They accepted and appreciated the ways in which technology took them well beyond their neighbourhood, gave them freedom of information and allowed them to form different kinds of relationships with their peers.
Parents were slower to come to grips with this new era, giving children yet another layer of control over their own lives.
As the authority and influence of the family decreased, the authority and influence of peers weighed in more heavily.
Traditionally it wasn't until the teen years - 13 onwards - that the approval of friends became vital. That convention was shifting: children at a younger age were becoming seriously concerned with being in .
These pre-adolescents were sitting ducks for a teen spin on their toys, clothes, music and other merchandise.
A new echelon of consumers had arisen: free-range children, highly dependent on the opinion of their peers, equipped with the technology to influence each other and with money to spend. It was a marketing bonanza, a vein to be mined.
Tweens, then, are not merely a commercial construct, the outcome of a malevolent marketing campaign waged against innocent, vulnerable bystanders.
They are the result of decades of significant change in Western society, the reshaping of family dynamics along with the widening reach of media, technology and marketing.
While we bleat about the loss of traditional childhoods, let's remember that the traits of tweenhood - consumer sophistication, technological ability, a need to be part of the in-crowd and an assumption of equal rights in family decision-making - have evolved in response to the time-poor, information-rich, commercially motivated political environment that we sustain.
Modern children are multi-tasking and media-saturated.
The influences external to family are unprecedented and unmapped. This is tough on parents. Maintaining codes of conduct and instilling core values in articulate, opinionated, technologically adept, consumer-savvy tweens is a whole new ball game.
Perhaps we find it easier to blame marketers for the demise of a childhood that is no longer relevant than to take responsibility for the children we now have.
Klay Lamprell is a freelance writer and editor and a regular contributor to parenting magazines.
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