A Child’s Casino
Neon lights and the dinging of bells surround me. The continuous clinking of coins in exchange for dollar bills tickles my ears. Contestants scurry down the isles of gambling machines, carrying their coins in cups, eager to try their luck and win big. I hear a wailing siren and one of the lucky toddlers, smiling from ear to ear, yells,
“Mommy, I won the jackpot!”.
No, I’m not at the Golden Nugget Casino, and no, underage gambling has not been legalized. Shockingly, I’m at Chuck E. Cheese. Everything about it is the same as a modern-day casino; however, rather than the musty odor of cigarettes, I smell processed pizza and dirty diapers. And rather than seeing the old lady who spends hours dropping quarters down the slot machine, I see young children glued to and mesmerized by the money-sucking contraptions.
Upon bringing my friend’s little brother, (who I was babysitting at the time) to
Chuck E. Cheese, I was shocked and disturbed by the new place it had become. One specific thing caught my attention immediately. Where had the tubes, balls, and slides gone? What’s the point of Chuck E. Cheese without them? It felt as though a massive vacuum had come in, sucking out every inch of what used to fill me with joy, leaving behind a vast void cluttered with nothing but a few machines and extension cords.
Supposedly, the “play zone” put the children at risk for “e-coli”. However, we must ask ourselves - have kids actually become more fragile and germ-susceptible, or have the priorities of today’s children changed? I certainly believe it’s due to the latter.
Childhood is extremely important, especially in regards to human development.
It’s a time when the young brain absorbs the exterior world like a sponge, ultimately

developing their values and beliefs. Therefore, prematurely exposing children to the materialistic world, not simply limited to the Chuck E. Cheese “casino”, has devastating consequences. The American “consumer” society - especially the media, advertisement, and entertainment industries - targets children and in result, gains heaps of profit.
Consequently, we see loads of unnecessary products being laid upon children, to the point of excess. Children grow to interpret these materials as necessary, finally morphing their values towards superficiality. In addition, and specifically in the case of a child, materialism teaches children to obtain things they don’t deserve, because usually a young child doesn’t work a job. This, in response, numbs and desensitizes the products a child obtains. Products lose sentimental value when they are simply handed on a silver platter.
Sadly, the “consumer” industry remains ignorant to the ramifications placed upon the children of our future.
Some of the consequences from this change in values can be witnessed through children’s new and complex desires. For instance, children have begun to care about the labels on the clothes they wear at much too early of an age. In my opinion, a shallow notion like this should be incomprehensible to the innocent mind of a child. They’ve been lured in by the traps of consumer society, and naively believe in the social benefits from expensive products. Juliet Schor states that “Increasingly the brands kids want aren’t just any brands. They crave designer duds and luxury items…Girls aged six to ten became more fashion and label conscious…They started asking for Hilfiger and Donna Karan labels”(Schor, 99). I’ve seen this occur with a family friend of mine. She accidentally got pregnant at the age of seventeen. She was a young teen mother and was too embarrassed to dress her newborn child in anything but the best of the best. Luckily, her parents were

wealthy and gave her the money to do so. The little baby boy looked like a fool (much more the mother herself) crawling around in his “True Religion” designer-brand jeans.
Needless to say, she now suffers with quite a bratty child on her hands. She’s now twenty-four, lost the financial help from her parents, and struggles to accommodate her child’s luxurious and elegant lifestyle. Everyday is tough for her, as she can no longer provide what her child begs, nags, and cries for. Unfortunately, the child’s brain was molded from early on to believe that only the expensive products suffice.
I have yet another example of the materialization of children. The coolest kid in the second grade was Beau. He had everything. The most expensive toys, the coolest movie theatre, and the best candy could be found at Beau’s mansion of a house. I was in elementary school during the “beanie-baby” phase and little boy Beau had all of them, even the pricey rarities that ranged well over a hundred dollars. He’d bring them to school in their glass display cases and tag protectors, flaunting his wealth and gaining popularity among the campus. The question is, however, did we actually like the beanie babies as toys, or were they just a symbol of wealth? From my own experience, beanie babies did not make a very fun toy. In fact, all of mine were stowed away in a plastic trunk up in the attic, never to see the light of day. In actuality, beanie babies just pose as a symbol of money.
In my opinion, the words “gambling”, “True Religion”, or “expensive” should never be spoken in the same sentence as the word “child”. Yet, in modern times, these objects have somehow merged themselves into the brains of our children. This poses many issues. The common thread of wealth links all of these ideas and examples. Yet, children do not work for their money, and therefore, live in a world where it is as though

money grows on the trees. This instills bad qualities and an immoral and unnatural perspective on life. Their reality becomes skewed. Money becomes objectified and loses its underlying substance – the work we put in to achieve it. It becomes a central focus in children’s lives. For example, “Children’s top aspiration now is to be rich, a more appealing prospect to them than being a great athlete, or a celebrity, or being really smart, the goals of earlier eras” (Schor, 37). The “consumer” society materializes its victims, altogether ridding children of their creativity and innocence. The idea of having money has overwhelmed the process of actually obtaining it. However, children must realize that the journey to achieving their wealth will be a much more important endeavor.
Overall, children have developed an obsession over money and material goods.
They’ve become lost in the world of materialism, before they even had a chance to experience childhood. Rather than playing hide and seek in the woods, children instead spend their time dropping quarters down the slot machines at Chuck E. Cheese.