Minors, contracts and consequences : Mineurs, contrats et conséquences

The Canadian Toy Testing Council observes “that one of the biggest problems with toy ads is the exaggeration of product claims, so that young children think a toy can actually do a lot more because of the way it is portrayed in advertisements 4.” Without perceiving all the nuances, children quickly understand the role of money in obtaining the products advertised on television and displayed on sto [...] The first of these is that the child makes a choice based on a criterion not related to the product itself but based on the free gift; the second is that the child may select a low quality product by choosing based of free gifts7. [...] This contrasts with the days when the family was conceived as a solidary unit serviced almost exclusively by its members, who sought to fulfil the family’s needs rather than their own, as Ali de Regt points out in an article on the evolution of children’s role within the family: Over the course of the 20th century, the position of children in the family economy has changed fundamentally. [...] Once it is recognized that the work of minors is a way for them, free of the need to contribute to the family’s direct/collective income, to acquire a social identity by becoming familiar with and integrating into the consumer culture for the sole purpose of satisfying their own needs or desires (whether shaped or not by that same consumer culture), the occasionally harmful effects of teenage paid [...] As we will see below, determining the existence of an injury (or, where the common law applies, the doctrine of unconscionability) requires an analysis of the consumer’s subjective conditions; the scientific literature on the child psychology has long recognized that the judgement of minors regarding consumption is defective, whether for reasons of development or socialization.