Mom at Outside the (Toy) Box wrote a post about the ever-decreasing range of playtime choices for today’s little girls — specifically, do you like Barbie or Disney Princesses? And while the “character” choice may be limited, the number of products available has exploded: she lists no less than forty Princess-themed items you can’t live without (before she stops, exhausted).

I recently read that Disney plans to offer 2,000 licensed products in conjunction with High School Musical 2. That’s TWO THOUSAND. I sat my 10-year-old down to come up with a list of 2,000 possibilities. We couldn’t even get to 50 (of course, things like “musical eggs” didn’t even cross my mind).

And what’s wrong with that? asks Disney’s John Hardie:

What we do is very honest and direct. Children live in the same commercial world as the rest of us. We make TV shows and movies for kids to watch. What’s wrong with that? Imagine a world without Jungle Book or Finding Nemo. And what’s wrong with then having products which tie into that?

Well, since he asked:

Decreased attention span, obesity, intellectural passivity and inhibited imaginative play: seems that all those TV shows and videos may not actually be good for kids.

Choking hazards, lead contamination, and burn hazards: in their mad dash to produce more crap to sell, safety issues sometimes, just maybe, might be, well, overlooked. 

It’s time for the big corps to stop and ask themselves: by mass-producing these products and spending billions to make sure someone buys them, are we contributing to children’s health? And the well-being of American families?

originally published in a similar post at twoknives.net

This entry was posted on Wednesday, November 14, 2007 at 6:00 am and is filed under The Problem. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.