by Susan Linn, Ed.D., May 2010 CCFC News

I know I’m not alone in my inability to stop thinking about that oil gushing into the Gulf of Mexico. Sometimes it’s foremost in my thoughts, but often it’s more in the background, like chronic anxiety, or some dull but persistent toothache. And, as we go about our daily work at CCFC, I’m thinking more than ever about sustainability and its links to our mission of reclaiming childhood from corporate marketers.  We can’t achieve a sustainable society without curbing consumption.

Lifetime consumer habits begin in childhood. That’s one big reason why children are targeted so intensely with marketing and why it needs to stop. As Josh Golin and I wrote a piece for the Huffington Post on Earth Day last year, “Marketing doesn’t just sell children individual products.  Its dominant message is that consumption is the path to happiness and self-fulfillment.” Marketers sell consumption, not just as a lifestyle, but as the lifestyle. Limiting children’s exposure to corporate marketing allows them the time and space to learn to take their pleasure in other people, nature, and their own creative play, rather than relying for satisfaction on the things that corporations sell. Children deserve a commercial-free childhood, and the earth deserves it as well.

So, while what may be the worst un-natural environmental disaster of all time unfolds, I am reminded that the commercialization of childhood affects so much more than families currently raising children.  The primacy of marketplace values — and instilling those values into the next generation — imperils everyone. It’s true that children benefit immediately and directly when we limit their exposure to commercial marketing.  But the impact is so much broader. Allowing kids to grow up free from bombardment by marketing messages is our best chance to nurture adults who recognize the value of preserving, rather than exploiting, environmental riches-who define themselves more as stewards than consumers. By working for the rights of children to grow up-and the freedom for parents to raise them-without being undermined by commercialism, CCFC promotes a more sustainable world.

Thanks to James Lardner I can introduce you to Demos (@Demos_Org), non-partisan public policy research and advocacy organization, and to Green Gone Wrong: How Our Economy Is Undermining the Environmental Revolution.

James, a senior policy analyst with Demos, attended my lunch discussion about social media in advocacy at the Consuming Kids Summit in Boston.

His colleague Heather Rogers takes a critical look at eco-friendly consumption in Green Gone Wrong. In this short promo from Simon and Schuster, Rogers talks about the emphasis placed on personal choices and the idea that by buying the right products we can help save the planet:

[But] what choices are we given? What are the decisions that are made before we’re in the store choosing the products that we buy? What decisions are governments making? What decisions are manufacturers making?

How do we go into the realm of understanding ourselves as political actors and agents in our lives and not just consumers?

Understanding children’s developmental stages is the foundation for marketing directed at kids.

Via Derek Baird, here’s a slide show created by Dan Pankraz, an Australian “youth planning specialist.” Keep in mind that I’m not picking on Mr. Pankraz in particular. This is just an example of how marketers go about trying to influence your children.

In summary, a marketer’s job is to:

– Help young children feel imaginative, clever, understood, connected, and valued;
– Help “tweens” feel self-confident and proud; and
– Help teens feel independent.

Excuse me, but isn’t that my job?

The lie in all this, the lie that can lead to family stress, depression and low self-esteem, is that children will not really feel understood, self-confident or independent by buying something.

This is exploitation for profit — pure and simple. And how youth marketers can continue to use kids’ developmental deficiencies to make money is beyond me.

Remember, kids are not little adults. They do not understand the intention of commercial messages the way we do.

Talk to your kids. Constantly. Because marketers do.

New resource for kids, parents and teachers: Admongo.gov, the FTC’s advertising literacy site

Two recent reads have triggered flashbacks to the world in which corporations will do anything to sell, sell, sell.

From Ph.D. in Parenting, one of my new favorite blogs, comes the Child’s Hierarchy of Needs (and the followup, Intersecting Needs: Maslow, interdependence, parenting, caregiving, relationships).

Sadly, this reminded me of how marketers use Maslow to pinpoint weaknesses in children’s developmental stages to create more effective marketing.

I first ran into this concept when reading The Great Tween Buying Machine: Capturing Your Share of the Multi-Billion-Dollar Tween Market.

No longer children and not quite teenagers, tweens – kids aged 8 to 12 years – are one of the fastest growing market segments for corporate America. With significant influence on household and family purchases, the four key motivating drivers for tweens are fun, freedom, power, and belonging. The Great Tween Buying Machine will demystify the newly discovered tween market using research findings and by discussing product development techniques and the latest marketing strategies in packaging, advertising, and promotions.

As one customer review states,

Siegel demonstrates why it is that this “tween” market has become so interesting for businesses: this particular age group is old enough to make suggestions to their parents about how to spend their money but still young enough to be utterly manipulated.

And just when you thought it couldn’t get any creepier, Truthout exposes more about the practice of neuromarketing — using medical technology to determine your brain’s reactions to various commercial marketing techniques. I guess the kid’s version of this would be whatever goes on at the Disney Advertising Research Lab.

I find these standard practices wholly unethical when applied to children. You?

An American Girl Doll catalog arrived in our mailbox yesterday. When I called to be removed from their mailing list, I found out our address had been purchased from another company but that the customer service representative could delete our address from all future mailings.

The rep was quite nice on the phone, and I swear I was not looking for trouble. After we had conducted our business, she continued: “Why don’t you give your catalog to a little girl in the neighborhood? Or donate it to your local library? They love to get our catalogs!”

Really? I was skeptical. A call to my local library confirmed this. “You’re right in thinking that’s odd, I don’t know what we’d do with a catalog,” a librarian at Minneapolis’ Central Library told me.

Another Minneapolis librarian told me that they’d probably donate it to a local shelter.

Our copy stayed in our house. While I worked in the kitchen, my seven-year-old read it to me, and I used it as an exercise to help her understand the value of money. For example, instead of paying $44 for the “homemade cookie” accessory pack, we can use what we already have in our own kitchen to make cookies — and figure out what else $44 could buy.

After that, she took her scissors to it and created stories surrounding the cut-out pictures of the the dolls and the dogs and the horses.

Seems an American Girl Doll sales catalog is good for something.

Related: The cutline from the photo accompanying Chris Riemenschneider’s Strib column today about the Mall of America was changed in the online version. The original reads:

Real American girls rest at the MOA’s American Girl store. With luck and a few made-up stories (such as the one about the doll that bit a girl), our author can steer his daughter away from the place.

Precious!

 ♦ ♦ ♦

Run, now, to True/Slant to read Stephen C. Webster’s The Most Offensive Commercial Ever Produced. A beautiful dissection of a current Levi’s commerial in which Walt Whitman and his words are bastardized, Webster exposes the profit-fueled hypocrisy that brings together a poor, abolitionist poet and a company known for numerous fair labor violations.

What would Whitman have written about such a uniquely American company [Levi Strauss]?

Would he have joyously celebrated an institution which left its equal daughters and equal sons to rot in the baking Texas sun?

Would the great poet have rejoiced in the servitude of those not fortunate enough to live on allegedly free soil?

Oh yes, perhaps he would have taken up for a company that stitches $5 of cloth together and resells it for nearly $100.

Or would he have beat his breast in bitter sadness and populist fury at what the “grand, sane, towering, seated Mother” America had wrought on her children?

Read and talk your (older) children through this one. True/Slant, where have you been all my life?

♦ ♦ ♦

Scholastic Corporation continues to hide behind their “book publisher” label and promoting Goosebumps-branded products for Halloween: The televison series will air on Cartoon Network five days a week; Goosebump ”premiums” will be featured at Taco Bell, bookmarks, treat bags and posters will be distributed via AAA to public schools,* and free Goosebump-branded activities will be offered at shopping malls on Saturdays.   

Television’s Cartoon Network? Fast-food restaurant Taco Bell? And shopping malls? I must not be the only one confused, as even the good folks at  Scholastic’s blog need to remind us:

. . . we can’t forget that Goosebumps is all about the THRILL of reading . . . .

Uh-huh.

*Note to Scholastic: Better check school policies. Minneapolis Public Schools prohibits selling to children — and teachers — in school.

♦ ♦ ♦

And finally, Target Australia is selling matching bras and underwear to toddlers: Frightening pressure is putting young girls in bras.

A quick memo to parents concerned that their children will be a captive audience to President Obama’s speech to school children today: I understand your worries.

My full-time job is in public education, so I’ve heard from lots of folks concerned about what their children might hear.

In between calls from parents last week, I also found out that a shoe buyer from Minneapolis’ Target Corporation was hoping to make appointments to stop by some Minneapolis schools to check out what the kids are wearing on their feet.

Talk about captive. Don’t parents want to know if their children are going to be used as research subjects?

But such is nature of public schools. Some children will be a captive audience today; most children are a captive audience every day. Corporate capitalists have long had free access to children in schools, teaching them to be loyal to brands without question. That owning more will make you successful and happy. And that good Americans are good consumers.

How? Take the shoe-selling Target brand and its famous red logo. Target awards grants to help schools pay for field trip transportation. But, as part of the deal, kids return from their trips carrying a black Target-logoed backback, essentially making every one of them a walking ad.

Of course it’s not just the Target Corporation. Junior Achievement is allowed free access to your kids, as are companies like Bus Radio (to and from school),  PepsiCo (in the lunchroom), Procter and Gamble (in health class), McDonald’s (on report cards), Piper Jaffray (in high school), and Scholastic (everywhere), among many others. 

So, parents, I understand your concerns. Sanctioned messages that go against my values appear in my children’s classrooms all the time.

Thankfully, it looks like the President’s speech will be pretty innocuous.

My advice? After the speech, which they will probably hear or read at some point, talk to them. Ask them what they heard. Tell them what you think about what President Obama said. Point out any differences in the values you hold for your family and the message that they heard.

Because after all, as I’ve been told many times, you can’t shield your child from the evils of the outside world.

But you can talk to your kids. At least that’s what I do.

From today’s Star Tribune:

When preteen girls as young as 5 get their first manicure, pedicure or updo at birthday parties held in Twin Cities’ beauty schools, it’s all about making them feel special and beautiful.

Because the best way to indoctrinate (yes, I said indoctrinate) girls into our consumer culture is to a) start her young, b) make sure she feels her value is equated with beauty and c) create an image of female beauty that is impossible to attain so that she continues to spend her money on products that promise to help get her there.

And I guess it works.

Fun!

Back. To. School. Time to be inundated with messages on what kids must buy to be cool this fall.

Summer’s just about over — time to get ready for a new school term! Back-to-school fashions for your kids are lots more exciting than they used to be.

Exciting? Really? A friend extols this writing rule: If you have to say it’s exciting, IT PROBABLY ISN’T.

Granted, parents this year are being more careful with their spending.

One mother, Clarissa Nassar, signed up for alerts about sales on a Web site called Shop It To Me. When she saw that her daughter’s favorite brand, Baby Phat, was on sale at Macy’s, she promptly drove to the department store to shop for school clothes.

“I got an alert for the cutest tie-dye pink top,” said Ms. Nassar, a mother of two, Mikayla, 7, and Joseph, 3, in Johnstown, N.Y. “Originally it was $36 and I got it for $9.75.”

Your 7-year-old has a favorite clothing brand? How? HOW?

For some perspective (and dare I say balance?) during the back-to-school shopping frenzy, read Kelsey Timmerman’s (@KelseyTimmerman) blog, Adventures of an Engaged Consumer.

Another gem: Why Parents Should Reject Back-to-School Ads in August by Luann Bradley (@inthegreenlane).

My goal this fall to to buy nothing new. Clothing from the thrift stores, supplies from the unused stash we’ve accumulated over the years. More ideas at The Not Quite Crunchy Parent.