The texts, imagery and commodities of popular culture encode constructs of childhood and parenthood which act as powerful public pedagogies in the production of social identities of the 'child', 'family', 'gender', and 'race'. This paper focuses on (i) the corporate construction of childhood in the toy and media industries and, (ii) the textual and market construction of childhood and parenthood in childcare and parenting magazines. The analysis suggests that the social and consumer lessons children learn early, through the world of media and toys, are matched by similar visions of childhood in parenting magazines. It describes the marketplace of childhood, and the contradictory cultural logic of 'postfeminist' images of family, child, and parenting.
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