The cute child -- spunky, yet dependent, naughty but nice -- is largely a 20th-century invention. In this book, Gary Cross examines how that look emerged in American popular culture and how the cute turned into the cool, seemingly its opposite, in stories and games.

"The strengths of Cross's work are his extended analysis of the rise of the consumer market and his thorough grounding in the details of children's popular culture in the United States since the late nineteenth century. On balance this is a lively, provocative, and very readable analysis of a persistant social concern about children and youth."--American Historical Review "A powerful critique of the commercial culture directed at kids--particularly its mockery of adulthood and promotion of highly unrealistic fantasies--the book is the most thoughtful and richly researched work we have on the history and societal implications of the commercialization of childhood."--Journal of Social History "A wake-up call to a culture that acts out its most irreconcilable passions, representations, and convictions through its children. In this bold account of the commercialization of childhood, Cross illustrates the ways in which the child is pinioned by interminably incompatible adult expectations. Engagingly written, compellingly argued, all too enlightening, this is a study that comes as an unremitting corrective to our current social fictions about how to raise children."--Virginia Blum, author of Hide and Seek: The Child between Psychoanalysis and Fiction "No historian has thought more fruitfully about the intersection between modern childhood and consumerism than Gary Cross. In The Cute and the Cool Cross brings these observations and his accumulation of a group of fascinating commercial sources to an important culmination as he demonstrates how our adult addiction to childhood innocence has created many of the conflicts and frustrations of modern parenting."--Paula Fass, author of Kidnapped: Child Abduction in America "This sprightly and erudite book dashes us across an impressive array of facts to confront us with the deepest contradictions of child-rearing in our consumer society."--Anne Higonnet, Barnard College, Columbia University "This is an imaginative take on the emergence of new kinds of images for children in American society, and about their role in accelerating consumerism. Vital reading for anyone concerned with adult-child relations."--Peter N. Stearns, George Mason University "Building on a dramatic account of changes in the ways that American teachers, cultural critics, merchandisers, media, and parents have understood children's innocence or sophistication, Gary Cross shows how the history of childhood illuminates American cultural history in general."--Viviana A. Zelizer, author of Pricing the Priceless Child: The Changing Social Value of Children

Author of An All-Consuming Century: Why Commercialism Won in Modern America, Kids' Stuff: Toys and the Changing World of American Childhood, and seven other books relating to the history of modern society, Gary Cross is a Distinguished Professor of Modern History at the Pennsylvania State University.