Susan Linn, Director of the Campaign for a Commerical-Free Childhood, and Joan Almon from the Alliance for Childhood conducted a workshop on creative play at the CCFC Summit in April.

Linn began the workshop with a simple exercise: she held up three puppets, one at a time, and asked us to write down a) what it was, b) what its name was, and c) something it might say.

The first puppet was really just a white sock over her hand with two eyes attached. The second was similar but also had ears and a mouth. The third was a blue, furry monster we all recognized as Sesame Street’s Cookie Monster.

As you may have guessed, the first puppet elicited a variety of identifications, names, and statements from the participants. The second puppet drew a more limited response. Cookie Monster, of course, was a cookie monster and didn’t say too much beyond “Me want cookie.”

This exercise blew me away in its simplicity and its significance, as does Linn’s new book, The Case for Make Believe: Saving Play in a Commercialized World.

Linn is a ventriloquist, among other things. She started as a child, performed on the street corners of Boston and eventually moved on to the Smithsonian and even Mr. Roger’s Neighborhood.  She eventually used her skills and education to become a puppet therapist at Boston Children’s Hospital.

In addition to being the cofounder and director of the Campaign for a Commercial-Free Childhood, Linn is the Associate Director of the Media Center at Judge Baker Children’s Center and Instructor in Psychiatry, Harvard Medical School.

In The Case for Make Believe, Linn does just as she promises: makes a case for childhood play by helping us to understand why it so important for childhood development and making us realize how far away from play we’ve gone:

Play is so fundamental to children’s health and well-being – and so endangered – that the United Nations lists it as a guaranteed right in its Convention of the Rights of the Child. . . . In the United States and other industrialized nations, seduction, not conscription, lures children away from creative play.

Lovable media characters, cutting-edge technology, brightly colored packaging, and well-funded, psychologically savvy marketing strategies combine in coordinated campaigns to capture the hearts, minds and imaginations of children – teaching them to value that which can be bought over their own make believe creations.

Reading the book, I was really struck by the fact that our society does not value creative play. Linn talks about how play has almost been eliminated in schools in favor of government-backed policies that “promote rote learning.”

I asked her, in an email interview, if we should return play to the classroom and how we could do that.

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The best way to tell you about the Campaign for a Commerical-Free Childhood Summit is to introduce you to some of the people who were there. (If you’d like a summary of the Summit, read my guest post at So Sioux Me, and while you’re there, find out how Tracee Sioux is empowering mothers and daughters.)

All the way from Australia came Julie Gale, founder of Kids Free 2B Kids. Julie presented on advertising, regulations, and the sexualization of children. She elaborates on the issues faced in Australia in a 2007 television interview (which is also a great introduction to childhood sexualization):

Part 2 of the interview and other interviews are here.

I met Julie when she attended the lunch roundtable for bloggers. I hope she is able to join us in the blogosphere soon.

Parents for Ethical Marketing shares a goal with Kids Free 2B Kids: to gather concerned parents — and others — in one place as a voice for community standards. Join us.

Additionally, I was able to meet Mom from Outside the (Toy) Box and Amy from Shaping Youth. As bloggers, Mom and Amy have been with me since my Two Knives days, and it was crazy fun to finally meet them face-to-face. Mom also introduced me to Amy from Equally Shared Parenting, a resource and blog about, well, equally shared parenting.

More takes on the CCFC Summit:

MomsRising.org
Twixter’s Sabbatical
Center on Media and Child Health
Equally Shared Parenting

The number of people who are unfamiliar with blogging always takes me by surprise, as it did at the CCFC Summit. I get so entrenched in the blogosphere that I forget about the whole real world out there. (That’s not good. I’m going to get out more.)

But for my colleagues at the CCFC Summit, and anyone else engaged in activism, allow me to take a step back to answer the question: Why blog?

Today’s post will cover how word of your cause can be spread through the blogosphere.

Blogs reach people. From the Pew Internet & American Life Project’s most recent data:

– 75 percent of American adults use the Internet;
– 91 percent of those use search engines,
– 81 percent look for information on services or products, and
– 39 percent read blogs.

One of the groups that I’m most interested in reaching are parents. According to Technorati (a blog ranking site), there are more than 7,000 blogs identified as being about parenting and more than 45,000 individual posts about parenting.

Bloggers pass information along. My posts reach other blogs and their readers through linking. For example, Mark’s Daily Apple, a health and fitness blog, picked up my post about candy designed to look like illicit drugs. More than thirty of Mark’s readers clicked over to read Corporate Babysitter.

Another good example is an aggregator like BuzzFeed. BuzzFeed takes popular stories and features links to blogs that write about them. BuzzFeed picked up the Abercrombie & Fitch/children’s hospital naming rights story and featured a line from a post I wrote about it. That link brought more than 150 readers — and those 150 people, like the thirty from Mark’s Daily Apple, may never before have been exposed to the concepts behind Parents for Ethical Marketing.

Commenting on blogs is another way to make outside audiences aware of your cause. Every day I run across posts from people discussing the very issues we’re trying to address. If I post a comment on their blog, it links back to Corporate Babysitter and the site becomes a reference for them. I commented on a post about Nancy Nord, former interim head of the CPSC, at the hugely popular blog Crooks and Liars, which brought me handful of readers. I try to comment thoughtfully on at least five blogs a day. 

A blog, over time, becomes an archive of information. Just because a post is a week or a year old doesn’t mean someone isn’t still going to read it. I still get comments on a blog post I wrote on my old blog in February, 2007: Bratz girls are not sexy and you’re sick for thinking so. (Check out the comments if you’d like to see how girls defend their Bratz collections.)

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Back from the CCFC Summit and am at a loss as to how to begin describing all the wonderful work that is happening out there on behalf of our kids. Reports from me will trickle out over the coming weeks.

I didn’t want to leave Boston. It was probably the only time I’d be able to hang with so many like-minded people and sense no need to explain or, more importantly, justify this work.

I did bring back with me, however, a renewed and true sense that Parents for Ethical Marketing is a right and needed cause. I hope that the Corporate Babysitter blog can continue to educate parents and other concerned people about the damaging effects of marketing and media on our children.

And I finally met inspiring guy Josh Golin.

If you attended the Summit, please say hello in the comments, add Corporate Babysitter to your RSS feed, and be sure to sign up for PEM’s newsletter.

I’m anticipating some new visitors to Corporate Babysitter after I pass around my card at CCFC’s annual summit (Consuming Kids: The Sexualization of Children and Other Commercial Calamities) this week in Boston. For them, here’s a quick introduction to Parents for Ethical Marketing.

Welcome CCFC Summit Attendees! 

Parents for Ethical Marketing is a group of parents (and others) who are concerned about the effects of marketing and consumerism on children.

Our mission statement:  Through parental awareness, public pressure, and legislative initiatives, Parents for Ethical Marketing encourages corporations to adopt responsible marketing standards and practices that sustain the health of children and families.

We define ethical marketing as

– targeting only consumers who can perceive and understand the persuasive tactics in commercials;
– promoting products that are not harmful to children; and
– supporting strong families by respecting parental authority in the parent-child relationship.

To read about why I started PEM, please visit my old blog.

News and events are listed on the left-hand column of this page. You can access our Resource page by clicking on the word “Resources” along the top of this page.

Depending upon your interests, new readers may enjoy one of these blog posts:

What Do Parents Want, Anyway? 
Ad creep in the last available space, or, why do tweens need more pulp?
Your alternative to the Scholastic Book Fair

And if you are new to blog reading, you can find something of interest by either typing in a search term in the box in the upper right corner or by clicking on a topic from the list in the right-hand column (under “Categories”). You can also browse around through everything I’ve posted by clicking on “Previous Entries” at the bottom of each page.

If we’ve met at the CCFC summit, please say hello in the comment section by clicking on the word “Comment” at the end of this post.

And finally, take a moment to sign up for our newsletter and be counted among the members of Parents for Ethical Marketing.

Thanks for visiting!