The Parent’s Bill of Rights: Putting Families Before Commercialism

Paul Kurnit is the president of KidShop, an advertising firm that specialises 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.’

— 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.

— This pathology is spreading rapidly. The manufacturers of junk food target children in just about every corner of the planet. For example, Coca-Cola bought world-wide exclusive marketing rights for the movie Harry Potter and the Chamber of Secrets for $150 million. McDonald’s has used Winnie the Pooh, 101 Dalmatians, Nemo and the Beanie Babies, among others, to sell its high-calorie Happy Meals. Even UNICEF has joined the global junk food brigade, as a partner in McDonald’s World Children’s Day. With the ubiquitous marketing for junk food, it’s no surprise that childhood obesity rates are rising – along with family conflicts over what kids will eat.

— At the same time, movies have become seductive come-ons for the tobacco industry. Kids are mimics, and ad agencies know this. They know that kids who see smoking in movies are far more likely to smoke themselves. A recent study in the British medical journal Lancet found that about half of adolescents who started smoking did so because of smoking in the movies. The human toll of such marketing to teens is enormous. According to a World Health Organization survey, about 250 million children alive today suffer from tobacco-related diseases. The lives of Europe’s children are so saturated in advertising that when Sweden assumed the Presidency of the EU in 2001, it proposed to ban televised marketing to children. EU advertising agencies and business lobbies managed to defeat the proposal; but that it even came up is telling.

Prominent religious leaders, too, are expressing alarm about the way corporations are turning children into targets. Rowan Williams, the Archbishop of Canterbury, has chastised the ‘marketing culture that so openly feeds and colludes with obsession’ to stimulate desire for purchases. ‘The Disney empire,’ he writes ‘has developed this to an unprecedented degree of professionalism.’

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 politicians stood up for parents. It’s time for politicians to recognise 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 nutritious cereals and breakfast drinks – 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 mum 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, the legendary frontiersman, complete with 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 towards themselves. Television figures became surrogate parents who pushed consumption at every turn. The matronly host of one popular children’s show actually popped vitamins and urged her preschool viewers to tell their mothers to go to the drug store and pick the bottles with the pretty red pills. Perhaps it was not entirely accidental that the generation weaned on such fare would become, a decade later, the ‘Me Generation’ of the 1980s. 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 seminal 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 neighbourhood 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 mould young minds to crave products, and to cast parents into the subordinate role as financiers for these fabricated wants. ‘The consumer embryo begins to develop during the first year of existence,’ one marketing professor observed, without a hint of embarrassment or shame. ‘Children 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? Parents become little more than deep pockets to be siphoned by kids whose role is to influence purchases. They encounter this scenario 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 placement’ – brand-name products that are built into the story. Parents feel the heavy breathing of the marketers even on their littlest 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. In the US, corporations have taken advantage of tax cuts and 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. Marketers know exactly where to find children, too. The data collection industry has seized upon them with a vengeance. 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, all this has been a bonanza: market researchers estimate that children aged four to twelve influence some $565 billion of their parents’ purchasing each year in the US alone. For kids, however, the role of consumer ‘superstars’ – as they have been called – has meant an epidemic of marketing-related diseases. American and Australian 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 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 aged 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.

–A survey found that 86 percent of Americans think that young people today are ‘too focused on buying and consuming things’. Business Week 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 elected representatives would show some concern, but politicians 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. 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.

‘Think of what it can mean to your firm in profits 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”.’ Clyde Miller: The Process of Persuasion

The Parents Bill of Rights

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 behaviour, 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 Australian Parliament 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: o 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 tax subsidies and deductions 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-for-all 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 Labelling 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.