ADVERTISING AND CHILDREN by Aline D. Wolf Corporate America Is Now in the Business of Dictating Values to Our Children.

How Best Can Parents Respond? Corporate America is dictating interests, choices and values to our children. Disney and McDonald's have more power to shape consciousness and promote a cultural curriculum than do elementary schools, according to Joseph Kincheloe and Shirley Steinberg, the editors of KINDERCULTURE--THE CORPORATE CONSTRUCTION OF CHILDHOOD. The executives who create this cultural curriculum are not educational specialists interested in shaping responsible, creative, well-informed adults. They are marketing specialists whose goal is to develop long-term customers who will insure corporate profits for years to come. These companies employ psychologists, not to help children cope with problems, but to hook them and their parents into spending on whatever product they are promoting. Their appeal to the emotions is extremely clever. Children have no idea how to resist it. And not many parents have the guts or energy to oppose these commercial forces dominating our culture. What parent has not been pestered to buy toys representing Barney or the Power Rangers, to buy Nike sneakers even when other brands are more affordable, to go to McDonald's when there is better food at home and to take a child to yet another questionable Disney movie advertised incessantly on television as family entertainment? A few years ago a young mother of two Montessori students called to see if I could find a Power Ranger Halloween costume for her son. She had exhausted all the retail outlets in their area and wanted me to look in the stores where I live. How old was her son? Three-and-a-half. "He won't wear anything else," she told me. His parents responded to Power Ranger promotions exactly as the marketing executives had planned. The child pestered and demanded. The mother never realized how cleverly she had been hooked. According to Consumer Reports, businesses and trade associations aim no fewer than 30,000 commercial messages at children every day through television, radio and billboards. Many thousands more are emblazoned on school buses, posters, study sheets, workbooks, audio-visuals and clothing. Corporations regularly pay school districts to let them advertise. In our local school district, at junior and senior high school entrances there are big signs announcing "Pepsi" along with schedules of sports and special events. In allowing this, the school district closed its eyes to the large amounts of sugar and caffeine in that drink that addict young people to a lifelong craving for these unhealthy substances. Today's elementary-age children have tremendous spending power. They spend $11 billion per year on a variety of products from food, beverages and clothes to toys and games. In addition, they influence another $160 billion of spending controlled by their parents. One Madison Avenue advertising agency blatantly brags it can put its client's product in kindergarten lesson plans and can help develop product loyalty by distributing samples to elementary students. The recently released documents from the R.J. Reynolds Tobacco Company showed how well corporations know the value of starting product loyalty early. Their corporate papers reveal that

they had aimed their cigarette ads at 14-year-olds. How does corporate advertising "hook" our children? First, they make the audience believe this product will make them happy. Kids in commercials all smile broadly as they consume a particular hamburger, candy bar or soft drink. Second, they strongly suggest all other children have seen this hit movie or wear that brand of jeans or sneakers. This ploy gives a feeling of inferiority to any child without these alleged advantages. Third, they flood every avenue of communication with visual images that reinforce the popularity of their products. This is particularly true of Disney, one of four or five multinational corporations that now control nearly all our media. Disney constantly intensifies its images by repeating them in movies, videos, television programs and commercials, books, clothing, toys and other products that children use. Its media monopoly is so extensive that when you come across a rave review for a Disney movie in a newspaper, magazine, on television or radio you should be aware that that particular medium may be promoting its own product. Fourth, to increase sales, corporate specialists promote the idea of "collecting"--or getting the next one in the series. The mother who buys one expensive American Girl doll for her daughter is soon asked to buy another. The infinite variety of Beanie Babies and Barbies are designed to make children want as many as possible. The back cover of every book in the Goosebumps series gives children a "chilling preview" of the next in the series. Even though these books feature unsavory monsters, terrorizing zombies and disgusting images such as pimples on gangrene, they consistently represent three of the top four best sellers in the Publisher's Weekly list of children's trade books. Collecting as a hobby can be both interesting and productive for children. But would it not be better for them to collect something corresponding to their own natural interests instead of what multinational companies are foisting upon them? As parents and caretakers of children we must be aware of these corporate strategies. Children are infinitely impressionable. Maria Montessori, the great educator (1870-1952), described the mind of the child between birth and seven years as "absorbent," like a sponge, that effortlessly soaks up whatever is in the environment. We have a responsibility to monitor the quality of what our children absorb and look carefully at the characteristics of the corporate pap so pervasive in our schools and homes. What are these characteristics? First there is violence. There are 16 acts of violence per hour of children's television programming, with very few peaceful solutions to conflicts. Video games go a step further by requiring the player to participate physically in what takes place onscreen. To win, the child must commit violent acts. Even though these acts are on a screen and not in real life, they still promote violence as the way to get ahead. Presently video games are found in over one-third of U.S. homes, a $35 billion industry. But the video company Sega recently joined Time Warner Entertainment and Telecommunications to start delivering video games by cable. This represents the beginning of a new interactive

television cable industry that will probably be extremely violent. According to corporate plans, the largest single target audience will be children and teen- agers. The second characteristic is stereotyping. Racist stereotyping, for example, is rampant in the Disney movie "Aladdin." The opening song, "Arabian Nights," begins its depiction of Arab culture with: "Oh I come from a Land/From a faraway place/Where the caravan camels roam/Where they cut off your ear/If they don't like your face/It's barbaric, but hey, it's home." In response to protests, these lyrics were changed in the video. But the producers did not correct the racist representations of supporting characters portraying Arabs as grotesque, violent and cruel. This film subtly teaches children to fear or even hate Arabs at a time when world peace depends on children learning to understand and respect cultures other than our own. Negative stereotypes of women appear in "The Little Mermaid." Mermaid Ariel, modeled after a slightly anorexic Barbie doll, trades her voice for a pair of legs so she can pursue the handsome Prince Eric, thus suggesting to children that real empowerment comes from catching a handsome man. Ursula tells Ariel that taking away her voice is not so bad because men don't like women who talk. The third characteristic is mediocrity that often includes misinformation. By taking stories from history ("Pocahontas"), literature ("The Hunchback of Notre Dame") and myth ("Hercules") and retelling them in cartoon format with only casual attention to the original details, Disney has reduced them to insipid entertainments. For example, history is quite distorted in the film "Pocahontas." Captain John Smith, known historically for his murderous pursuit of Native Americans, is changed in the movie to a morally uplifted character, a Mr. Right for the ill-fated Pocahontas. The quality of such movies and videos is at best mediocre. There are times when all of us can relax with mediocrity, but a constant diet of it limits our children, leaving no room for poetry or for the classic stories that reveal human nature and illustrate the real lessons of life. Perhaps more serious than these negative characteristics is the consequence of children watching long hours of television. The ready-made images of the television world blunt children's imagination, one of the most precious gifts they have. Imagination is largely responsible for many of the great advances in our civilization--scientific discoveries, art masterpieces, symphonies, operas, literature, dance and drama. A child's imagination is strongest during the first seven years, years when it must have many opportunities to be exercised and expressed. When free from corporate influences, children of this age have imaginary playmates; they make a ship from a board and a piece of cloth, or a tent in the mountains from a sheet draped over a living-room chair. Telling children a story stimulates their imagination because it invites them to create mentally their own images of characters and scenes. But television offers children ready-made images; nothing is left to their creative imagination. The child is given an image created by someone else's imagination, one that can be easily recreated for more corporate profit in books, toys, T-shirts and games. Joseph Chilton Pearce, an expert on human intelligence and creativity and author of THE

MAGICAL CHILD AND EVOLUTION'S END, believes that "the major damage of television has little to do with content; its greatest damage is neurological." He says: "Television floods the infant-child brain with images at the very time his or her brain is supposed to make images from within. This imaging is the foundation of future symbolic thought, mathematics, science and philosophy. Children who constantly watch TV gradually weaken this vital ability." The inadequacy begins to show on the playground. Instead of pretending or making up games, many children at playtime simply mimic scenes they have seen on television. The average American at 20 years of age has seen one million television commercials. Not only is this a great waste of time for the young; it has filled their minds with useless details and questionable values. Advertising, with its resultant consumerism, favors manufactured products over the gifts of nature. It frequently disregards environmental issues. It promotes selfishness and accumulation rather than sharing and kindness. It values passive entertainment rather than selfdirected, creative activities. Although consumerism and materialism boost our national economy and enrich huge corporations, they ultimately produce failure in our personal lives. Accumulating material goods can never satisfy the human spirit that yearns for a more meaningful way of life. People obsessed with buying always want one more thing to make them happy. In reality, the more things one has, the less free one is, because things take time and space from our lives. Passive entertainment also fails the human spirit. This is not to say one should never watch television. But we have to be selective and use our power to turn television off when the selected program is over. Watching a good television program can be enlightening or relaxing. But indiscriminate watching, hour after hour, nearly always leaves one with an empty feeling. The human spirit that yearns for expression in creativity, in challenges, in communing with nature or in serving others is left unnourished by inferior fare. What are we, as parents and caregivers, to do about all the commercialism invading our children's lives if we wish to foster values that will lead children to become compassionate, peaceful and loving adults who value their particular role in life? KINDERCULTURE tells us it is our parental, civic and professional responsibility to study the corporate curriculum and become aware of its effects on our children. Simply throwing out the television is not realistic, but we can refrain from using it as a baby sitter. We can carefully select what young children watch. (I know one responsible mother who carefully taped good television programs for her children, eliminating all the commercials.) We can tell our children stories or read them quality books. We can refuse to buy reading material, toys and games that reinforce television images. We can give our children many more experiences of nature. We can encourage children to make their own designs for T-shirts so they can show what is important to them rather than displaying what is important to a multinational corporation. At P.T.A. or church meetings we can remind other parents to resist the corporate curriculum. Perhaps most importantly we can teach children in elementary school how to resist advertising. Without such help our children are victims of marketing psychologists who know how to hook them.

To encourage such resistance, we can bring tapes of ads into the classroom and ask questions to help students analyze the commercial messages. "Do you think that if you drink this soft drink you will be able to do a spectacular ski jump like the Olympic athlete who just drank the same drink?" "Do you really think that using this shampoo will make your hair look like the model in the commercial--a model who is under special lights to make her hair shine and surrounded by special fans to make it blow gently in the wind?" "Do these ads appeal to your emotions or to your good judgment?" We have to enable our children to say confidently: "I am aware of all the deceptions in advertising. I know that Michael Jordan wears Nike sneakers, not because they are the best on the market, but because he is paid MORE to wear them than all the people in the third world countries are paid to make them. I know that wearing a shirt, a cap or sneakers with the Nike mark on them will not make me a better athlete or even a cool kid. It will only make me an easy mark for companies that want me to give them free advertising." If we can help a generation of young people to analyze in this way, to be savvy and discerning, we can break the hold corporations have on their lives. As adults we can give children more of our time. We can give human encounter priority over the media. We can play with our children, laugh with them, hug them, challenge them, listen to their concerns and help them realize that their value lies within themselves and not in their possessions. One of our greatest gifts as human beings is our uniqueness. Individual uniqueness is now threatened by corporate pedagogy that prompts all children to see the same movies, read the same books, have the same toys, collect the same products and play the same games--all chosen, not by the children, but by marketing executives. Each human being has a unique vocation in life, a special gift to contribute to society. As adults, one of our most important challenges is to protect and nurture this special quality within each child so that the child will not be swayed by mass media, but will follow an inner direction to an authentic vocation that will give satisfaction and meaning to each one's life. *** Aline D. Wolf, the mother of nine, co-founded with her husband the first Montessori school in Pennsylvania in 1961.
AMERICA Aug. 1, 1998, pp. 13+ Reprinted with permission of Aline D. Wolf and America Press, Inc., 106 W. 56th St., New York, NY 10019. Originally published in AMERICA's August 1, 1998 issue. Accessed on 11/17/2005 from SIRS Researcher via SIRS Knowledge Source <http://www.sirs.com>