I am posting a link to a documentary on the commercialization of children. It is a growing epidemic and I found this film to be eye opening for any parent and teacher. I have also included a reflection of the film.
http://topdocumentaryfilms.com/consuming-kids/
Consuming Kids: The Commercialization of Children
Reflection
Marketing and Advertising are billion dollar industries. Their job is to make us as Americans spend
our money and buy the things that they are selling. We consume or buy things we don’t need to
survive. We buy them because we are
conned by marketing and advertising into thinking we cannot live without them. We are the consumer. But the marketing and advertising firms don’t
gear their ploy to us as adults; they set their sights on the one weakness that
we have our children. Children have the
influence when it comes to purchasing.
Marketing executives deliberately market to children. Their sole purpose for this is to turn them
into lifelong consumers. The younger the
child is sucked into the marketing ploy the greater chance they will be a loyal
consumer for life. <marketing execs
also use what is called the Nag Factor – it’s sole purpose is to maximize the
number of times a child will ask for something in order for their parent to
give in.
Children today are buried in
Multimedia, using more than one medium at a time. The marketing firm’s purpose is to mold
children into thinking that life is about buying and getting things. This way they become lifelong consumers. In the 1980’s Reagan’s war on regulation
fueled the FTC Improvement Act which took away the right of the government to
regulate children’s advertising. It
opened the flood gates to marketing to children. Through this era the thoughts of how to
advertise to children changed. There
were no boundaries to dissecting children to figure out what type of marketing
would work on them and how to implement it.
Now it was ok to create a cartoon for the sole purpose of selling a toy
and the products that could go along with it.
In a Kid Power Conference – Youth Marketing Seminar the speaker was
quoted as saying “Kids love advertising, it’s a gift, something they want”….. “Antisocial
behavior in pursuit of a product is a good thing”…. “Brand them young” These marketers are child
experts just like a child pedophile; they feed off of the insecurities of
children.
The marketers have moved away from
selling the product based on its characteristics to selling it with its social
meaning. What you buy is who you
are. You are shat you buy. Values are being sold and the mentality that
brands will make you happy. A marketing
company called Girls Intelligence Agency has created a focus group party for
teenage girls, Slumber party in a box.
Girls are exploiting their friends without even knowing it. There is also Nuero-marketing with a stimulus
and an MRI of the brain done and a blink test where the number of times a child
blinks is recorded when the child is watching the program. The precise color, character, and music is
used to engage and stimulate the child.
We are doing a disservice to our children. The marketing world has also created the idea
of what a tween is. They have year after
year defined this age group as younger and younger, gearing things that should
be for 15 years old to 6 year olds.
Through marketing girls are manipulated into thinking that how you look
is the only thing that matters and the things that you have make you who you
are. Boys are taught that toughness and
violence is fun and necessary and that in a conflict you must fight. The things that are geared towards children
are inappropriate. In the movie rating
scale a once R rated movie in the 80’s is now a PG-13. There is more sexy, language, and violence in
things children watch than ever before.
Marketing companies routinely target 17 and under kids for movies,
music, and games that their own rating and labeling system says are
inappropriate. Dreamworks Production
Company used 9 yr olds to test for R-rated movies. PG-13 movies almost always have toys that are
marketed to 3, 4, and 5 yr olds. The
marketing industry is stealing the childhood of children. Not only does this industry exploit children
they have started to exploit infant and toddlers as well.
The new age of marketing is the
Toddler Industry. The motto for this
industry is Cradle to Grave Branding, owning them for life and getting the
child as soon as possible. This new way
of marketing to parents is through educational advertising and marketing. They prey on a parents wish to have a healthy
intelligent child. If the child doesn’t
have this toy, watch this educational show, and such they will be behind in
their development. This billion dollar
industry is a scam. In actuality
children 0 – 2 years who watch television have poor vocabulary skills. It has been proven through research that TV
can hurt an infant’s learning. It is
actually suggested that children 2 ½ and young have no screen media. They need face to face interaction and
problem solving play to develop properly.
We are transforming how children play by utilizing media. Children have lost their ability to use their
imagination. The toys have been marketed
and created for the child to imitate what they have seen on TV to play with the
toys. They have been taught that their
imagination is not good enough. Not only
is this lack of imagination and problem solving play hurting the child’s
creativity but there is a drastic rise in bi-polar disorders, anxiety, depression,
ADHD, diabetes, hypertension, and obesity that can be linked to media and our
countries addiction to it. The
correlation between the increase in the amount of media we are bombarded with
everyday and the rise of Depression and Anxiety. But despite all this research and concern the
government does not think it is because of advertising to children.
The thought of government is that is
the parents job to shelter and monitor what their children are exposed to. We are the only developed country that does
not regulate marketing to children. The
marketing industry is trying very hard to under mind the parents and it should
be government’s job to help the parents out and hold the marketing industry
accountable for the harm they are doing to our children. What about the rights of our children. There needs to be a swing in the support of
our children. There needs to be a
beginning of a movement to protect our children from marketing.
Besides the parent a teacher is a great asset for fostering that creative thinking. The first and easiest way to start fostering creativity is to develop an activity that is more about the process the children are going through and the problem solving and critical thinking they are using to work through the activity verses the end result of the activity. Think about an art activity that a child can do. If a teacher says please draw a picture of yourself. The teacher gives the children white paper, crayons, and a mirror. Now granted not all the pictures will look exactly the same, but they will be relatively similar and there was not a lot of critical thinking used to complete the activity. Let’s do the same activity, but let the children use what ever supplies they choose to use. The teacher has a large array of supplies from paints, crayons to yarn, sequins, etc. In this activity not only do the children have to think about what they look like, but they also have to figure out what to use, how to use it, and how to make it look like them. I can guarantee you that not only will they be all elaborate self portraits, but they will all be completely different. By just changing a few things the activity has challenged them to use a higher order of thinking and creativity. This is a prime example of process art verses product art. The process of the art activity compared to get to the end result of the art activity.
The wonderful food pyramid. Here is a great way to help your students learn the food pyramid. The food is cut out from magazines and gles to construction paper with the coordinating color to the group they belong to, laminate the pieces and the board, place sticky tac to the back of the food cards, and have the students place the card in the correct spot. They may not realize that they are color coded and can check their answers. I also have taken and used the pyramid each day for the week and graphed were the lunch foods we ate go on the pyramid. You can pre-make these, but that is a lot of prep. I just wrote on the chart with a wipe-off marker. The kids love to use this chart and the sticky cards.
