Kids Design Glass began as a temporary educational program at the Museum of Glass in Tacoma, Washington, but has developed into a delightful collection of art. Watching the pieces as they are made is fascinating for the Museum's visitors - and creating them is a test of the glassblowers' prowess. Young visitors to the Museum of Glass are encouraged to submit drawings of whatever their imaginations can dream up for the program. Each month, the Museum's Hot Shop artists choose one drawing and change the two-dimensional design into a three-dimensional glass sculpture. The child, friends, and family are invited, along with the public, to watch the object being created. The child and audience share in the agony if the glass cracks or breaks and the Hot Shop must begin anew - and share the joy as the finished work is placed in the annealing oven to slowly cool down. Two objects are made, one for the child and the other for the Museum of Glass collection. Visiting artists have also been intrigued by the program. John Miller, Nancy Callan, Joseph Gregory Rossano, the Bee Kingdom, Dante Marioni, Preston Singletary, Martin Blank, and even the maestro of Venetian glassblowing, Lino Tagliapietra, have all volunteered to make a creature. This book includes 52 works of art, with full-color photos of both the object and the original drawing. A children's comic-style booklet,"Pip! The Baby Monster and How He Was Made at the Museum of Glass" and a DVD showing the creation of Recycle Robot are tucked inside.

Kids Design Glass

Arts & Photography

Linn, Susan

CHIHULY, Dale

Cobb, Benjamin W.

Collections, Catalogs & Exhibitions

University of Washington Press

The average American child sees about 40,000 television commercials every year. Companies target younger viewers all the time, selling everything from sugar cereals to minivans, and cross-promotional marketing influences everything from the food stocked in school vending machines to the characters who appear in children’s books. Kids are requesting specific brands as soon as they can talk. American corporations spend over $15 billion yearly on marketing to children in an effort to cultivate nagging, insatiable, “cradle-to-grave” consumers. In this shocking and engrossing exposé, psychologist Susan Linn reveals how the marketing industry preys on kids from the day they’re born, exploiting their vulnerabilities and skewing their values in order to influence what they eat, wear, and play with. This advertising blitz stifles creativity and exacerbates obesity, eating disorders, violence, sexual precocity, and substance abuse. Linn—a mother herself—recognizes that parents alone are no match for the marketing experts. What they need is the concerted help of healthcare professionals, educators, and legislators who have children’s best interests in mind. Consuming Kidsis a call to action for anyone who cares about the well-being of children.

Consuming Kids: Protecting Our Children from the Onslaught of Marketing & Advertising

Business & Money

Marketing & Sales

Anchor

With the intensity of the California gold rush, corporations are racing to stake their claim on the consumer group formerly known as children. What was once the purview of a handful of companies has escalated into a gargantuan enterprise estimated at over $15 billion annually. While parents struggle to set limits at home, marketing executives work day and night to undermine their efforts with irresistible messages. In Consuming Kids, psychologist Susan Linn takes a comprehensive and unsparing look at the demographic advertisers call “the kid market,” taking readers on a compelling and disconcerting journey through modern childhood as envisioned by commercial interests. Children are now the focus of a marketing maelstrom, targets for everything from minivans to M&amp;M counting books. All aspects of children’s lives – their health, education, creativity, and values – are at risk of being compromised by their status in the marketplace. Interweaving real-life stories of marketing to children, child development theory, the latest research, and what marketing experts themselves say about their work, Linn reveals the magnitude of this problem and shows what can be done about it. With a foreword written by research psychologist and author Penelope Leach, Consuming Kids is a call to action for parents, educators, legislators and anyone who cares about the health and well-being of children.

Consuming Kids: The Hostile Takeover of Childhood

The New Press

In The Case for Make Believe, Harvard child psychologist Susan Linn tells the alarming story of childhood under siege in a commercialized and technology-saturated world. Although play is essential to human development and children are born with an innate capacity for make believe, Linn argues that, in modern-day America, nurturing creative play is not only counterculturalit threatens corporate profits. A book with immediate relevance for parents and educators alike, The Case for Make Believe helps readers understand how crucial child’s play is—and what parents and educators can do to protect it. At the heart of the book are stories of children at home, in school, and at a therapist’s office playing about real-life issues from entering kindergarten to a sibling’s death, expressing feelings they can’t express directly, and making meaning of an often confusing world. In an era when toys come from television and media companies sell videos as brain-builders for babies, Linn lays out the inextricable links between play, creativity, and health, showing us how and why to preserve the space for make believe that children need to lead fulfilling and meaningful lives.

The Case For Make-Believe: Saving Play in a Commercialized World

Health, Fitness & Dieting

Psychology & Counseling

In The Case for Make Believe, Harvard child psychologist Susan Linn tells the alarming story of childhood under siege in a commercialized and technology-saturated world. Although play is essential to human development and children are born with an innate capacity for make believe, Linn argues that, in modern-day America, nurturing creative play is not only counterculturalit threatens corporate profits. A book with immediate relevance for parents and educators alike, The Case for Make Believe helps readers understand how crucial child’s play isand what parents and educators can do to protect it. At the heart of the book are stories of children at home, in school, and at a therapist’s office playing about real-life issues from entering kindergarten to a sibling’s death, expressing feelings they can’t express directly, and making meaning of an often confusing world. In an era when toys come from television and media companies sell videos as brain-builders for babies, Linn lays out the inextricable links between play, creativity, and health, showing us how and why to preserve the space for make believe that children need to lead fulfilling and meaningful lives.

The Case For Make Believe: Saving Play in a Commercialized World

Who’s Raising the Kids?: Big Tech, Big Business, and the Lives of Children

About the Author\nSusan Linn is a psychologist, award-winning ventriloquist, and a world-renowned expert on creative play and the impact of media and commercial marketing on children. She was the Founding Director of Campaign for a Commercial-Free Childhood (now called Fairplay) and is currently research associate at Boston Children’s Hospital and lecturer on psychiatry at Harvard Medical School. The author of Consuming Kids, The Case for Make Believe, and Who’s Raising the Kids? (all published by The New Press), she lives in Brookline, Massachusetts.\nFrom a world-renowned expert on creative play and the impact of commercial marketing on children, 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’ve 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.

Biographies & Memoirs

Leaders & Notable People

From a world-renowned expert on creative play and the impact of commercial marketing on children, a timely investigation into how big tech is hijacking childhood--and what we can do about it "Engrossing and insightful . . . rich with details that paint a full portrait of contemporary child-corporate relations." --Zephyr Teachout, The New York Times Book Review Even before COVID-19, 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 world of the "kid-tech" industry. In the "must read" (Library Journal, starred review) Who's Raising the Kids?, Susan Linn--one of the world's leading experts on the impact of Big Tech and big business on children--weaves an "eye-opening and disturbing exploration of how marketing tech to children is creating a passive, dysfunctional generation" (Kirkus Reviews, starred review). From birth, kids have become lucrative fodder for tech, media, and toy companies, from producers of exploitative games and social media platforms to "educational" technology and branded school curricula of dubious efficacy. Written with humor and compassion, Who's Raising the Kids? is a unique and highly readable social critique and guide to protecting kids from exploitation by the tech, toy, and entertainment industries. Two hopeful chapters--"Resistance Parenting" and "Making a Difference for Everybody's Kids"--chart a path to allowing kids to be the children they need to be.

See the best price to sell, buy, or rent books by Linn, Susan. BookScouter helps to compare book prices from 25+ online bookstores and 30+ buyback vendors with a single search.

Books by Linn, Susan

See the best price to sell, buy, or rent books by Linn, Susan. BookScouter helps to compare book prices from 25+ online bookstores and 30+ buyback vendors with a single search.

Kids Design Glass

Consuming Kids: Protecting Our Children from the Onslaught of Marketing & Advertising

Consuming Kids: The Hostile Takeover of Childhood

The Case For Make-Believe: Saving Play in a Commercialized World

The Case For Make Believe: Saving Play in a Commercialized World

Who’s Raising the Kids?: Big Tech, Big Business, and the Lives of Children

Who’s Raising the Kids?: Big Tech, Big Business, and the Lives of Children