The Parents' Bill of Rights

[Guest guest]

http://www.alternet.org/story.html?StoryID=15754 The Parents' Bill of Rights

Jonathan Rowe and Gary Ruskin, Mothering Magazine

April 25, 2003Viewed on April 28, 2003

 

Paul Kurnit is the president of KidShop, an advertising firm that specializes in

marketing to children, and he has plans for our kids.

 

" Kid business has become big business, " Kurnit says. To make it even bigger, he

preaches what he calls " surround marketing " -- saturation advertising that

captures kids at every possible moment.

 

" You've got to reach kids throughout the day -- in school, as they're shopping

at the mall, or at the movies, " says Carol Herman, a senior vice president at

Grey Advertising. " You've got to become part of the fabric of their lives. "

 

 

 

Parents' Bill of Rights

 

To send a letter to your members of Congress in support of the Parents' Bill of

Rights, visit Commercial Alert's website.

 

WHEREAS, the nurturing of character and strong values in children is one of the

most important functions of any society;

 

WHEREAS, the primary responsibility for the upbringing of children resides in

their parents;

 

WHEREAS, an aggressive commercial culture has invaded the relationship between

parents and children, and has impeded the ability of parents to guide the

upbringing of their own children;

 

WHEREAS, corporate marketers have sought increasingly to bypass parents, and

speak directly to children in order to tempt them with the most sophisticated

tools that advertising executives, market researchers and psychologists can

devise;

 

WHEREAS, these marketers tend to glorify materialism, addiction, hedonism,

violence, and anti-social behavior, all of which are abhorrent to most parents;

 

WHEREAS, parents find themselves locked in constant battle with this pervasive

influence, and are hard pressed to keep the commercial culture and its degraded

values out of their children's lives;

 

WHEREAS, the aim of this corporate marketing is to turn children into agents of

corporations in the home, so that they will nag their parents for the things

they see advertised, thus sowing strife, stress and misery in the family;

 

WHEREAS, the products advertised generally are ones parents themselves would not

choose for their children: violent and sexually suggestive entertainment, video

games, alcohol, tobacco, gambling, and junk food;

 

WHEREAS, this aggressive commercial influence has contributed to an epidemic of

marketing-related diseases in children, such as obesity, type 2 diabetes,

alcoholism, anorexia, and bulimia, while millions will eventually die from the

marketing of tobacco;

 

WHEREAS, corporations have latched onto the schools and compulsory school laws

as a way to bypass parents and market their products and values to a captive

audience of impressionable and trusting children;

 

WHEREAS, these corporations ultimately are creatures of state law, and it is

intolerable that they should use the rights and powers so granted for the

purpose of undermining the authority of parents in these ways; THEREFORE, BE IT

RESOLVED, that the U.S. Congress and the 50 state legislatures should right the

balance between parents and corporations and restore to parents some measure of

control over the commercial influences on their children, by enacting this

Parents' Bill of Rights, including the following legislation:

 

 

Leave Children Alone Act: Bans television advertising aimed at children under 12

years of age.

 

 

Child Privacy Act: Restores to parents the ability to safeguard the privacy of

their children. It gives parents the right to control any commercial use of

personal information concerning their children, and the right to know precisely

how such information is used.

 

 

Children's Advertising Subsidy Revocation Act: It is intolerable that the

federal government rewards corporations with tax write-offs for the money they

spend on psychologists, market researchers, ad agencies, and media in their

campaigns to instill their values in our children. This act eliminates all

federal subsidies, deductions, and preferences for advertising aimed at children

under 12 years of age.

 

 

Advertising to Children Accountability Act: This act helps parents affix

individual responsibility for attempts to subject their children to commercial

influence. It requires corporations to disclose who created each of their

advertisements and who did the market research for each ad directed at children

under 12 years of age.

 

 

Commercial-Free Schools Act: Corporations have turned the public schools into

advertising free-fire zones. This act prohibits corporations from using the

schools and compulsory school laws to bypass parents and pitch their products to

impressionable schoolchildren.

 

 

Product Placement Disclosure Act: This law gives parents more information with

which to monitor the influences that prey upon their children through the media.

Specifically, it requires corporations to disclose, on packaging and at the

outset, any and all product placements on television and videos, and in movies,

video games, and books. This prevents advertisers from sneaking ads into media

that parents assume to be ad-free.

 

 

Child Harm Disclosure Act: Parents have a right to know of any significant

health effects of products they might purchase for their children. This act

creates a legal duty for corporations to publicly disclose all information

suggesting that their product(s) could substantially harm the health of

children.

 

 

Fairness Doctrine for Parents: This act provides parents with the opportunity to

talk back to the media and the advertisers. It makes the Fairness Doctrine apply

to all advertising to children under 12 years of age, providing parents and

community with response time on broadcast TV and radio for advertising to

children.

 

 

Children's Food Labeling Act: Parents have a right to information about the food

that corporations push upon their children. This act requires fast-food

restaurant chains to label contents of food and provide basic nutritional

information about it.

 

 

 

This is what parents today are up against -- corporate advertisers who seek to

entwine themselves with children's lives. By most measures, they are succeeding.

Each week, the typical American child takes in some 38 hours (yes, a full work

week) of commercial media, with its endless ads and come-ons. And that's not

counting the ads that commandeer their attention from billboards and the

Internet, the omnipresent brand logos, and the advertising that increasingly

fills the schools.

 

The merchandise pushers have invaded the commons of childhood, the free open

spaces of imagination and play, and turned it into a free-fire zone of

commercial importuning. In some quarters, this appalling situation is seen as

success. " There have never been more ways in the culture to support marketing

towards kids, " enthuses Kidscreen, a publication for ad firms and corporations

that target kids. (That there's a market for such a publication is revealing.)

 

Corporate advertisers have contrived to wedge themselves into the space between

parents and their children. They enlist the best psychologists and market

researchers money can buy to lure kids to products and values many of us don't

approve of and even abhor. Parents find themselves in a grim daily battle to

keep these forces at bay.

 

On their own, parents cannot contend with the nation's largest corporations and

their weapons of mass childhood seduction. It's time Washington stood up for

parents. It's time for politicians to recognize that raising children is the

most important task of our society.

 

It's time, in other words, for a Parents' Bill of Rights.

 

Not that long ago, parents actually had control over the front doors of their

homes. Sure, a kid might hide a racy magazine under the mattress, but little

came into the house without the parents' okay. Even outside the home and school,

for adults to approach kids with the thought of influencing them was considered

an antisocial act, and offenders could be put in jail.

 

The invention of electronic media changed all that. The history of the last

century, in fact, could be written as the story of how marketers contrived to

bypass parents and speak directly to impressionable children. The front door

became a permeable membrane, admitting the advertising industry to its promised

land. Children are " natural and enthusiastic buyers, " a child psychologist wrote

in the 1938 book, Reaching Juvenile Markets. For advertisers, he went on, there

was a " tremendous sales potential. "

 

Psychologists, who are supposed to help children, were now employed to help

ensnare them. No longer were such adults considered predators; because they wore

suits, sat in offices, and operated at a distance through the media, they were

respectable executives and even " pioneers. " In the 1930s, the medium was radio;

sponsors of children's shows included Ralston cereal and Ovaltine -- products

that parents actually might want their kids to have -- and the ads themselves

seem almost tame by today's standards. The young ear is not as impressionable as

the eye, and advertisers were still concerned that Mom or Dad might be

listening.

 

Then came television and the beginning of the modern era in the assault on kids.

Television is inferior to radio as a story-telling medium; radio engages the

imagination, while television numbs it. But as an advertising medium, television

is unsurpassed. Children want what they see, and with television advertisers

could offer an endless parade of things to want. After Welch's grape juice

became a sponsor of the Howdy Doody show in the 1950s, sales of grape juice to

families with young children increased almost five-fold.

 

With television, moreover, the ads weren't just between the shows. They could be

in the shows as well. The Disney Corporation created a series about Davy

Crockett, starring the actor Fess Parker in a coonskin cap. In short order, kids

throughout the country were nagging their parents for the mock coonskin caps

that coincidentally appeared in the stores. Crockett gear became a $300 million

business -- roughly $2 billion in today's dollars.

 

Increasingly, advertisers had the children to themselves. Few parents sat

through the Mickey Mouse Club or the Saturday morning cartoon shows. Even shows

for general audiences held untapped possibilities. Since kids are the most

impressionable audience in the house, why not enlist them as sales agents in

regard to everything the family bought? " Eager minds can be molded to want your

products! " enthused a firm that produced " education " materials for schools.

" Sell these children on your brand name, and they will insist that their parents

buy no other. "

 

Corporations literally were alienating the loyalty of children away from their

parents and toward themselves. Rejection of parental authority became a

persistent and embedded theme, even in seemingly innocuous shows like Howdy

Doody. Television figures became surrogate parents who pushed consumption at

every turn. Dr. Frances Horwich, the kindly " principal " of Ding Dong School,

popped vitamins and urged her preschool viewers to tell their mothers to pick

the bottle with the pretty red pills at the drugstore.

 

Perhaps it was not entirely accidental that the generation weaned on such fare

would become, a decade later, the " Me Generation " of the 1960s. Advertisers were

thinking long term. " Think of what it can mean to your firm in profits, " Clyde

Miller wrote in " The Process of Persuasion, " " if you can condition a million or

ten million children who will grow into adults trained to buy your products as

soldiers who are trained to advance when they hear the trigger words 'Forward,

march.' "

 

These developments did not go unnoticed at the time. In his landmark book " The

Lonely Crowd, " David Riesman observed that corporations had designed a new role

for children, as " consumer trainees. " In the process, Riesman said, they had

turned traditional values upside down. Earlier in the century, children's

publications had promoted such qualities as self-discipline and perseverance.

" The comparable media today, " he wrote, " train the young for the frontiers of

consumption -- to tell the difference between Pepsi-Cola and Coca-Cola, as later

between Old Golds and Chesterfields. " (The latter were popular cigarette

brands.)

 

Some parents did resist. In the 1950s there often were a few kids in the

neighborhood who weren't allowed to watch TV. But most parents then, as now,

were reluctant to deny their kids what their friends had. Moreover, parents

themselves were caught up in the commercial euphoria of the post-war years, when

a new car or television seemed a just reward for the hardships of the Depression

and a world war.

 

Soon the commercial saturation of childhood became the new norm, and people

hardly noticed any more. An entire industry arose to mold young minds to crave

products, and to cast parents into the subordinate role as financiers for these

fabricated wants. James U. McNeal, a former marketing professor at Texas A & M

University, is perhaps the most influential advocate of modern marketing to

children. " [T]he consumer embryo begins to develop during the first year of

existence, " McNeal writes, without a hint of embarrassment or shame. " [C]hildren

begin their consumer journey in infancy and certainly deserve consideration as

consumers at that time. "

 

It is not comforting to know, as we cuddle our newborns, that there exists an

industry of James McNeals eager to prod them onto their " consumer journey. " Nor

is it comforting to know that there are marketing consultants, like Cheryl Idell

of Western Initiative Media Worldwide, advising corporations on how to harness

the " nag factor " to increase sales. Idell contends that nagging spurs about a

third of family trips to fast-food restaurants, and of purchases of videos and

clothing.

 

And what about the naggees in this arrangement? In the writings of people like

McNeal, parents exist as deep pockets to be siphoned by kids whose role is to

influence purchases. This mentality has become the dominant force with which

parents must contend. They encounter it at every turn: They take the kids to a

sports event and are barraged by ads. They buy a video for them and find that it

is choc-a-bloc with " product placements " -- brand-name products that are built

into the story.

 

Parents feel the heavy breathing of the marketers even on their little ones.

Teletubbies, for example, is an animated TV show aimed at toddlers as young as

one year. The producers portray it as educational. But Marty Brochstein, editor

of the Licensing Letter, is more candid, calling Teletubbies a " major big bucks

opportunity. " The show has done promotions with Burger King and McDonalds. If

that's education, it's not the kind most parents have in mind.

 

The morphing of advertising into life extends even to the schools. Corporations

have taken advantage of tight school budgets to turn classrooms and hallway

walls into billboards for junk food and sneakers. As for the Internet, it's a

marketer's dream, a technology that children roam unsupervised, and that offers

endless opportunities for getting into children's minds. " Kids don't realize

they're reading advertisements, " says Lloyd Jobe, the CEO of Skateboard.com.

 

Marketers know exactly where to find children, too. The collection of children's

personal information, and the invasion of their privacy, has become commonplace.

American Student List LLC (www.studentlist.com/lists/main.html), a list broker,

sells a list of " 20 million names of children ranging in age from 2 to 13, "

along with their addresses, ages, genders, telephone numbers, and other personal

information.

 

For advertisers, it all has been a bonanza: Market researchers estimate that

children ages four to twelve influence some $565 billion of their parents

purchasing each year, and McNeal calls children the " superstars in the consumer

constellation. "

 

For kids, however, the role of consumer " superstars " has meant an epidemic of

marketing-related diseases. American kids are fatter than ever, and rates of

obesity and type-2 diabetes are soaring. Teenage girls have become obsessed with

their bodies, due largely to the images of physical perfection that barrage them

in fashion magazines and ads. More than half of all high school girls say they

were on diets during the previous month. Likewise, eating disorders are now the

third leading chronic illness among adolescent girls.

 

Drinking is a problem, too. A study by the National Institute on Media and

Family found that the more a beer company spends on advertising, the more likely

seventh- to twelfth-graders are to know about that beer -- and to drink it.

Perhaps not coincidentally, alcohol is a factor in the four main causes of death

among young people ages 10 to 24: car crashes, other accidents, homicide, and

suicide.

 

The merchants of death are adept at using marketing to undermine the good

influence of parents. Tobacco marketing is especially successful at

counteracting parents who encourage their children not to smoke. Each day,

another 3,000 children start to smoke; roughly a third of them will have their

lives shortened due to smoking-related illnesses.

 

Added to all this is the production of misery and dissension in the home. Our

children are being coached and prodded in the arts of petulance and nagging, by

those whose sole purpose is to turn them into conduits for their parents' money.

As the anthropologist Jules Henry once noted, advertising has become an

" insolent usurper of parental function, degrading parents to mere intermediaries

between children and the market. "

 

A survey by the Merck Family Fund found that 86 percent of Americans think that

young people today are " too focused on buying and consuming things. " Business

Week, no enemy of corporate America, perhaps put it best: " Instead of

transmitting a sense of who we are and what we hold important, today's

marketing-driven culture is instilling in [children] a sense that little exists

without a sales pitch attached and that self-worth is something you buy at a

shopping mall. "

 

You might think our representatives in Washington would show some concern, but

politicians in both major parties seem reluctant to stand up to commercial

predators. Back in the late 1970s, for example, the Federal Trade Commission

(FTC) proposed an end to advertising to children too young to grasp that ads

aren't necessarily true. In response, Congress stripped the FTC of any authority

to enact rules against advertisers who take advantage of the vulnerabilities of

impressionable youth. J. Howard Beales III, chief of consumer protection in the

current administration, is an economist perhaps best known for his scholarly

defense of R. J. Reynolds and its infamous " Joe Camel " ad campaign. And David

Scheffman, the new head of the FTC's bureau of economics, also worked for the

tobacco industry.

 

Parents deserve a little more respect. Their job is hard enough without the

marketing culture treating them as cannon fodder. The technology of seduction

has increased tremendously in sophistication and reach, and corporate seducers

have gained new legal rights too. Yet the means for parents to contend with

these intrusions, and to talk back to the intruders, have scarcely grown at all.

In many respects they have diminished.

 

The time has come to right the balance. The government can't do parents' job for

them, but it certainly can give them the legal rights they need to stand up

effectively to corporations that target their kids. Parents should not be

second-class citizens. They should not feel under siege by a culture designed to

shake them down for money, and to usurp the function of instilling values in

their kids.

 

The time has come for a Parents' Bill of Rights.

 

Jonathan Rowe is director of the Tomales Bay Institute. Gary Ruskin is executive

director of Commercial Alert (www.commercialalert.org), whose mission is to keep

the commercial culture within its proper sphere and prevent it from exploiting

children and subverting the higher values of family, community, environmental

integrity, and democracy.

 

 

 

© 2003 Independent Media Institute. All rights reserved.

 

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