Childhood Under Siege: How Big Business Targets Children by Joel Bakan, Free Press, 277 pp, hardcover, $26.

“With those children [Winston] thought, that wretched woman must lead a life of terror,” George Orwell wrote in 1984 of the challenges of parenting under a totalitarian regime. “Another year, two years, and they would be watching her night and day for symptoms of unorthodoxy. Nearly all children nowadays were horrible. What was worst of all was that by means of such organizations as the Spies they were systematically turned into ungovernable little savages, and yet this produced in them no tendency whatever to rebel against the discipline of the Party.”

As with the Hilter Youth or the Soviet Union’s Young Pioneers, in Orwell’s dystopia, the state inducts kids into a twisted version of the Boy or Girl Scouts, thus recruiting the family’s youngest and most impressionable members as bratty agents of outside control.

Fortunately, we don’t live under a totalitarian state. But our families are still under siege from powerful outside forces.

In today’s consumer societies, the powers-that-be continue to recognize the value of driving a wedge between kids and parents, but they needn’t be so crude and obvious about it. Instead, large corporate makers of products from junk food to video games to cosmetics can simply market their way into kids’ hearts and minds through ads, sponsorships and slanted program content on the media that other big corporations control, primarily TV and the Internet.

And that’s a big reason of why, to paraphrase Orwell, nearly all children nowadays are horrible, according to Joel Bakan’s new book Childhood Under Siege: How Big Business Targets Children.

Don’t worry — be very, very scared

Bakan is not blaming corporate America for the terrible twos or the teenage hell-years. But he is saying that corporate profiteers exploit kids’ vulnerability to peer pressure and the allure of grown-up pleasures in ways that make children physically and emotionally unhealthy.

It’s not news that ads make kids nag parents to go to McDonald’s or Chucky Cheese’s, as Bakan discussed in his previous book, The Corporation, later made into a documentary of the same name. What is news is just how much effort big companies of all sorts spend to turn childhood into a profit center while making kids and parents bear all the costs.

For example, chemical companies pollute our air, water and food, which poses a particular danger to children’s developing bodies and minds, while continually refusing to take responsibility for birth defects or childhood asthma or cancer. “Don’t worry, our products are safe” they say, as do the makers of violent video games and addictive mobile devices. And government regulators won’t intervene until a product is proved beyond a doubt to pose a threat, an unrealistically high standard.

By contrast, other corporations are fearmongers, scaring parents into buying solutions to problems that don’t exist, fixes that are at best ineffective and at worst, dangerous. Perhaps the biggest offenders are drug companies, which, by corrupting researchers and physicians to medicalize normality, have created a huge new market for drugs to treat psychological conditions that didn’t even exist 30 years ago such as ADHD.

But when it comes to fearmongering, Edison Schools and other companies that profit off of getting local governments to close down supposedly “failing” public schools and then letting Edison re-open them as outsourced for-profit businesses, aren’t far behind.

The challenge for parents today, according to Bakan, is to develop the “capacity to fear accurately,” in the words of Erik Erikson. But telling the difference between what parents really need to worry about and what they should avoid fearing is harder than ever in today’s media-saturated culture. Bakan’s book, with its stories of corporations behaving badly and then putting all the responsibility to protect kids in the laps of parents, is a good place to start.

Generation Now or Never

What’s at stake is nothing less than our future, which soft-focus TV ads and pandering politicians alike remind us depends on our children. America could enter a new Dark Age where teens are lost in a world of text messaging and sexually violent online gaming, doped up on OxyContin, and pushed by standardized testing into an underfunded for-profit career academy where they learn none of the skills of critical thinking or good citizenship, but are merely trained to fill a corporate cubicle.

Or, we can protect our kids from corporate control so that they, in turn, can help liberate us.

“For democracy to thrive, or even survive, it is not only parents, but youths as well, who must take on the tasks of citizenship,” writes Bakan. He takes heart that youth movements toppled the apartheid regime in South Africa and fought for democracy in Tienanmen Square  back in the day just as they recently ousted Arab autocrats from Egypt to Libya. If young people can keep corporations from co-opting their natural urge to activism in the future, Bakan is optimistic that the idealism of youth can change the world for the better.

With more Americans cynical about and turned off from politics than ever even while enduring the worst economy since the Great Depression, society is overdue for another dose of youthful idealism. The Occupy movement is a good start. If Bakan is right, Zuccotti Park is just a sign of things to come.

– Erik Curren, Occupy Parenting

The whole world really is in our hands. Now what are we going to do with it? Photo: dasolar.com

Is energy really an issue for parents? When you have kids, there’s so much to think about these days: shuttling them to school and soccer practice, keeping them away from junk food and moderating the amount of TV they watch or, if they have a cell phone, making sure that texting doesn’t take over from homework. No parent wants yet another problem to worry about.

But in the rush of urgent tasks today, every parent also imagines their kid’s future as a bright one, with lots of opportunity. And so we focus on SAT prep, college visits and career options. But for me, there’s one issue that will affect our children’s future much more than whether they go to State U or Stanford or whether they become an attorney or an anesthesiologist. It’s the issue of energy.

Energy runs our whole society by filling our gas tanks and keeping the lights on. But energy is now becoming a challenge again for the world and for America. Will we have enough of it? And will it be clean?

That seventies show

When I was a little girl in the late 1970s, the US faced an energy crisis from problems in the Middle East that spawned long lines at the gas pumps. As hard as those moments were for life-as-usual in the States, it made clear that our country was dangerously dependent on foreign energy sources. Everyone understood our predicament.

Soon oil, gas, and the concept of energy in general was on everybody’s lips, prompting President Carter to deliver a key White House address on energy. Some folks made fun of his suggestion to turn the thermostat down and put on a sweater instead. But it was sound advice, and pretty conservative, too. Americans had long taken pride in being frugal.

Perhaps even more forward thinking was Carter’s installation of solar panels on the White House itself.

Energy leadership

Carter wasn’t the first president to address the role of energy in our lives. And he wasn’t the last, as this hilarious Jon Stewart video shows. What Carter has in common with all those other presidents is that none of them took the issue to the real heart of his administration, leaving the US and Americans as vulnerable today as we were in the 70s.

We’re still dangerously dependent on foreign oil — and our domestic sources are running out fast even as our population increases and we’ve grown more energy reliant through our suburban way of life. That means supplies will get scarcer faster, and prices will rise.

Some folks mistakenly believe that our ongoing energy crisis means that we should try to get more of our oil from the dirtiest of energy sources — tar sands and oil shale — in essence, trying to solve a fossil fuel crisis with even worse fossil fuels. They think it makes a difference just because these are domestic “oil” sources. It’s the whole drill-baby-drill mantra, as if that was all there was to it. I can only guess that they’re not the ones whose kids have asthma or the attention deficit problems that have increased as we’ve added more mercury and other toxic poisons to our environment, many from burning coal and other fossil fuels.

Health aside, what about the economy? It’s tough enough for young people to get good jobs these days when they graduate college.

But no one seems to be thinking about what our kids will face as fuel supplies get tight in the future and prices go back up. With many families still tucked into cozy suburban cul-de-sacs that require a car drive to get to work, school and church, and even to pick up a quart of milk, pain at the pump is sure to strain family budgets even further, in some cases, to the limit.

Where are we headed?

Those who argue that exploiting the dirtiest fossil fuels is the solution conveniently leave out the implications of global warming through increased fossil fuel use. They also leave out the undeniably dangerous accumulation of pollution in our air, waterways, and soil. What kind of life will we live on a choking, toxic planet?

In my worst moments, I honestly think that our society — and we as individuals — don’t really care about our kids’ futures very much. In those terrible moments I think, “We’re throwing the next generation to the wolves and as long as we have our SUVs, fancy vacations, and newest iGadget, that’s all that matters.”

Fortunately those are just my bad moments.

What I really know is that most of us just aren’t aware of the relationship between energy and our quality of life, energy and the economy, and energy and consumerism. We hear the words, “fossil fuels are a finite resource” but we honestly can’t picture them running so low or becoming so expensive to threaten the patterns of our daily lives. We don’t think that pollution will get so bad that only those who can afford oxygen tanks and fancy water filtration devices will survive, for whatever life that would be.

So we just keep on keeping on, never thinking it will affect us, much less our kids.

But oh, it will.

And I ask you to imagine what kind of world these kids will have, and their kids will have, when the powerful but deadly fossil fuels effectively run out (are unaffordable) and we’ve done nothing significant to put replacements in?

What’s the solution?

We need the fossil fuels of today to build the rail lines of tomorrow so our kids can get around in a decent way in the future, because it’s likely to be very expensive for the average person to own and drive their own car in the future, and that includes electric vehicles.

We need the fossil fuels of today to build the solar panels and wind turbines of tomorrow, lest our kids and their babies be left sitting around in the cold and the dark, shivering and hungry.

We need the fossil fuels of today to build the cities of tomorrow, both small and large, retrofitting what we’ve got for more walkability so that transport and energy won’t matter as much.

We need the fossil fuels of today to very specifically build out the world our kids will inherit or there will not be very much for them to inherit.

If we don’t do this we’ll get wars over precious energy sources instead of thoughtful planning, and our legacy to the next generation will be an instant-gratification, live-for-the-moment gluttony that leaves the landscape littered in bad reminders of an era that died with nothing meaningful to take its place.

We can do better.

Probably the single most important act in Occupying Parenting is to address the energy infrastructure of today and put it in the service of the clean energy infrastructure of tomorrow. It involves demanding of the government that Big Oil and Big Coal no longer receive subsidies, giving more support to the clean energy sector instead.

It demands that we shame our “pro-business” culture into embarrassment for falling so woefully behind countries like China and Germany in terms of making clean energy sources and rail transport (and other mass transit) a societal priority and business opportunity. We must demand the amazing job opportunity (that can’t really be outsourced) that would come from an Apollo-style effort to build out the clean energy economy of tomorrow in America.

Be part of the solution

To love our kids means to think long term. One view, the one in which we do nothing and use fossil fuels to “save us” from declining fossil fuels is a vision of a choking planet with despoiled waterways, poor health and less access to good food.

The other vision is one where society is transformed by turning a crisis into an opportunity, and leaving to our kids the clean energy of the sun and wind along with walkable cities for their health, organic farms for their nutritious foods, and mass transit for getting around.

The people of this country can no longer play around with our future through petty politics, corporate intimidation, and personal denial. We have to wake up our hearts and minds to the real implications of declining fossil fuels and show the courage and will to make the changes that will put in place something better.

Three easy things you can do to get started are:

1. To reduce waste that strains our resources and creates pollution, commit to cutting down on one-use coffee cups, plastic water bottles and styrofoam anything. It’s also better for your health to bring your own.
2. Cut your driving by 25% this year through car pooling, combining errands and walking, biking or taking the bus or train whenever possible.
3. Teach your kids about how energy is in everything and how important it is for them to conserve it to be frugal and healthy.

And finally…stay tuned to Occupy Parenting, where we’ll have a lot more to say about the relationship between energy and our kids’ futures.

–Lindsay Curren, Occupy Parenting

When every day means a treat, nothing is special anymore. Photo by Mamaloco via Flickr.

This week I did something that I probably do only once or twice a year. I went to a mall.

My daughters, 14 and 16, who live a fairly spartan existence, were given gift certificates for Christmas this year from various relatives. So I planned a mother-daughters shopping spree not only so they could redeem their cards, but also as a kind of cultural experience for us all.

Because we shop so little, I decided not to be too picky about their purchases. I won’t say I loved everything they bought, but none of it was offensive or in poor taste, so this once I just let it be an indulgence rather than about necessities. We also grabbed coffee and hot cocoas at Starbucks on the way out, ate lunch and cookies in Nordstrom’s cafe, indulgently browsed Barnes and Noble, and got road snacks for the way back.

The day was, in every way, a treat. It stood apart from our normal activities in every way and so each indulgence made us giddy with anticipation and delight.

But if we did this every week or even monthly, it would be far from a treat. It would just be normal life. And if we went to the mall often enough, it would carry a hefty price tag too.

What is a treat?

What qualifies as a treat to us is the normal life for many Americans today, with gratuitous purchases and continual consumption a part of everyday life. Even those of us who don’t shop till we drop once a week, still live a life that, by any historical or cultural comparison to most of the rest of humanity, is rife with treats.

A few of of the definitions of the a treat are:

• A celebration, entertainment, gift, or feast given for or to someone and paid for by another,
• Any delightful surprise or specially pleasant occasion,
• Entertainment, food, drink, etc., given by way of compliment or as an expression of friendly regard,
• Anything that affords particular pleasure or enjoyment.

We all love treats, of course, and being treated to a treat by someone else is always fabulous. But it’s my observation that we have little shared concept today of the specialness a treat is meant to be. Our abundant lifestyle allows for the nearly continuous access to, and affordability, of many kinds of treats that have become commonplace and ordinary for all but the poorest of the poor in our society.

Take candy bars, sodas, fast food, chips and ice cream, for example. Once the domain of summer vacation perks, birthday parties, picnics and road trips, these foods are now everywhere, all the time.  These are not treats anymore for most people, but have become a staple of many diets, available in one form or another — at the office, with a friend, on the run — every week.

Now, holidays and birthdays are hardly distinguishable from other days given how often kids are “rewarded” by some well-meaning but misguided individual who thinks the kids “need something a little special for all their hard work.”

Too much of a good thing is still too much

It used to be that folks celebrated special occasions,  the end of the year or the end of a season, with a party or treat. Now, “the kids played a great game so we took them out for ice cream” might be heard once a week after a class, game, or practice.

It’s constant.

And not only does such constant rewarding, treating and indulging set our kids up to expect junk food and rewards all the time, but it also sets them up for the increased diseases of modernity — obesity, diabetes, heart disease, cancers.

Making every day a party makes party days inherently less magical, full of promise and spectacle. Halloween is now about super-size candy bars scooped up by the ladle-full to kids who hit the stores one day, the hottest Halloween neighborhoods the next. A week later they can just go buy the same stuff from the corner market, a gas station, or in the grocery aisle. And they do.

Clothes, sweets, electronics, toys and gadgetry of all sorts are cheap, abundant and ubiquitous in our commercialized common spaces, rendering them desirable, necessary, essential, obsolete, superfluous and inadequate all at the same time. Only more of the same can assuage our overly full empty bellies.

As within, so without

Our kids’ rooms are studies in gross abundance.

No longer is one doll or stuffed animal okay, but a new one is needed every Saturday from the boutique toy shop at the faux “town square” style mall, the only places many of us go to get outside.

We don’t just have the family cat or dog, but the Chia Pet, ant farm, Tamagochi, and Sims worlds to take care of, all of which hover on the precipice of ruin for our inability to manage all our possessions in time and space.

And as bad as all this gorging at the buffet of perpetual abundance is on our waistlines, moods, and living spaces, it’s equally destructive to our world — to our precious natural resources and ecosystems. The growth paradigm infecting our “every day is a treat” mentality leaves a wake of toxic debris littering landfills and the oceans, despoiled waterways, choked-off air, and stressed-out and increasingly desertified soil.

The answer to much of our current dilemma is simple: We need to redefine what it means to have a treat, and to give a treat to our children.

We need to fight back against corporate encroachment on our value system by supporting each other as parents so that if “all we have to do is turn off the TV” or all we have to do is “just not buy it” (which are actually superficial answers to a much deeper problem) at least we are not the one lone family doing it by ourselves.

We need to have a more prominent national conversation about our values concerning consumption, and concerning at what ages it is appropriate for kids to watch TV, see movies, use computers and social networking sites, and have personal possession of cell phones, smart phones, iPods and other electronic gadgetry.

And we need to help each other understand why holidays and birthdays and ends-of-seasons are special, and make them that way, preserving and supporting traditions, while making clear that every day or every Friday is far too often for “treats.”

As a people we’ve gone too far. On myriad levels we’re woefully out of balance. It’s time to treat ourselves to some self-correction. Our reward is our sanity, more money in our pockets for the things that really matter, and a healthier world to leave to our kids, rather than one in disastrous crisis.

–Lindsay Curren, Occupy Parenting

Marketer Lucy Hughes from the film version of "The Corporation."

“We found the way a child nags isn’t always the same,” says Lucy Hughes, then-director of strategy and insight for Initiative Media. “There’s one of two ways that they nag— either with persistence or with importance.”

Persistent nagging is “really whiny,” according to Hughes. “‘Mommy, I really, really want the Barbie Dream House, wah, wah, wah, wah…’” Important nagging by contrast is more reasoned: “‘Mommy, I need the Barbie Dream House so barbie and Ken can live together and have children and have their own family.’”

Kids’ nagging may sound like a frivolous topic of study, but Hughes’s motivation is dead serious. Realizing that kids want to buy products and are more easily influenced than adults (up to age 8, kids watching TV can’t even tell the difference between ads and programming, according to American Academy of Pediatrics) but usually lack their own money, Hughes invented the Nag Factor.

“Advertisements must be aimed not at getting [kids] to buy things but at getting them to nag their parents to buy things,” as Hughes told Joel Bakan, author of The Corporation: The Pathological Pursuit of Profit and Power.

The Corporation: The Pathological Pursuit of Profit and Power by Joel Bakan, Free Press, 2004, 228 pp, $15.

With her understanding of the way kids nag, Hughes then connects each type of nag with a category of parent. For example, “Bare Necessities” parents have money to spend but are unresponsive to a child’s whining. To reach them, marketers will try to get the kids to nag with importance “to show them the value or benefit this product has to them, why it’s important to the child. And in the right circumstances the parent will be receptive to it,” explains Hughes.

Other types of parents, such as “Kids Pals” (younger and more casual parents), “Indulgers” (working moms who buy kids stuff to assuage their guilt for not spending more time with them) and “Conflicteds” (usually single moms who don’t like impulse buying but do it anyway) will be more susceptible to unrelenting whining, that is, to the Nag Persistent.

Beyond Barbie

Marketers like Hughes spend a lot of money and do a lot of work into creating ads that will get kids to nag their parents in just the right ways. And it goes beyond the usual suspects of sugary cereals or toys. Now, ads are trying to get kids to nag parents to buy cars, financial services and yes, even beer. Bakan writes about how he took his son to the National Hockey League Stanley Cup play-offs and his son nagged him to buy a 24-pack of Labatt Blue beer because it came with a plastic Stanley Cup replica.

Labatt’s knows of course that kids can’t drink. But how many adult sports fans are really going to be attracted to a toy Stanley Cup? Bakan thinks that the company knows perfectly well that offering a toy with beer is a sure way to get kids to nag their dads to buy that brand.

Return on investment

But does it really work? Hughes thinks so. “With McDonald’s…parents wouldn’t be going there unless their child nags.” And what about Chuck E. Cheese’s, asks Bakan. ”Oh my goodness..It’s noisy, and there’s so many kids. Why would I want to spend two hours there?”

Indeed, according to research by Hughes’s company, it turns out that 20 to 40% of purchases would never have happened without kids nagging, including four out of ten visits to places like Chuck E. Cheese’s.

Of course it’s not ethical, but that’s not Hughes’s problem. She says kids are “fair game for marketers…if we move products…then we’ve done our job.” Another ad exec says that “they aren’t children so much as what we like to call ‘evolving consumers.’”

When parents complain, corporations give their typical response: It’s not our fault, it’s yours. Jill Holroyd of the Canadian Restaurant and Foodservices Association told Bakan that “The kids aren’t driving themselves to the restaurants. The real issue, in our view, is personal responsibility. Parents have  a responsibility to make sure their children are consuming a balanced diet and getting enough physical activity.”

Just say no — Right?

Bakan isn’t buying the parental-responsibility talk:

It is more difficult to say “no” to a child when the child has been urged by advertisers to question the parent’s authority over food and is persuaded that he or she needs the advertised product. under these conditions, the result of saying “no” is often petulance, sulking, acting out, and family conflict — which is why so many parents are prone to just put the kids in the car and drive to McDonald’s.

Bakan then calls out corporations for trying to have it both ways: “With the industry actually working to incite children to punish their parents for saying ‘no,’ its blaming parents for saying ‘yes’ has more than a ring of hypocrisy to it.”

What’s the solution? Don’t expect corporations to police themselves, but they will respond to sufficient pressure from parents. As a short-term solution, parents should complain as often as they are able to corporations that try to manipulate their kids to nag. Of course, complaining about every slimy ad aimed at kids could be a full time job!

The only practical, long-term solution is better public policy. In 1981, when the Federal Communications Commission lifted restrictions on children’s advertising that it had put in place in the sixties, ads aimed at kids exploded. Now, the average American kid sees 30,000 ads on TV alone each year, according to Harvard Medical School’s Dr. Susan Linn.

Since 1991, Sweden has banned all ads aimed at children under 12. The European Union is considering a similar ban. It’s time for the US to follow suit.

The last thirty years after the FCC ban was lifted have shown that market solutions don’t work. Corporations are required by law to maximize profits to their shareholders. So they will never voluntarily do anything that would reduce sales, including cutting back manipulative ads to kids. The only solution is to change the rules of the game so that the public interest is served.

– Erik Curren, OccupyParenting

“And just like that, misinformation is spread like the wings of an eagle soaring high above America’s freedom-loving people. Professional misinformanting. It’s a dirty job. But somebody’s gotta do it.”

The particular campaign targeted in these videos is what Big Pharma and industry front groups dubbed “Obamacare.” But if you’re at all bothered by the way big corporations pay people to lie professionally and make sure that misinformation spreads through Fox News and the rumor mill, then you’ll enjoy these flicks done by Healthcare for America Now!

And while the issue of PR campaigns goes beyond children and families, the premise of a corporate agent infiltrating a kindergarten to ask kids things like “Hey, did you hear that Obama’s going to kill our grandmas?” offers a rich field for hilarity.

The child actors are priceless, especially the girl who plays Bethany. After teaming up with Spewman because she also likes to tell lies, Bethany challenges the teacher during a spelling lesson of the word “enough.”

“You lie!” she shouts from her seat, Joe Wilson-style. “Oh, so this is how you ‘spell’ the word ‘enough.’” Going to the board, Glenn Beck-style, she connects the letters “gh” to “God haters” and “good health…healthcare…Obamacare!” She then calls on the class: “You spell it with an F…for freedom!” The room erupts in cheers and triumphal music comes on.

Watch “The Misinformant” Part 1

Watch “The Misinformant” Part 2

Our naked empire, violent, intolerant, awash in contradictions. Image: Principiadialectica.co.uk/blog

What a quandary we find ourselves in.

As parents, we want to uplift and encourage our children, to have them believe with hope and admiration in the founding documents of our nation —the Declaration of Independence, the Constitution, the Bill of Rights.

The last thing anyone wants is to foster in our kids an early cynicism that unmasks the betrayals in our system, its failures and glaring contradictions.

What is Occupy?

Yet kids today, with their access to various forms of media know about the Occupy Wall Street movement. Even if you personally restrict media, families are subjected to it in shopping centers, gyms, waiting rooms, restaurants, public spaces of all sorts. Those kids who deal with current events assignments may even know that the movement aims to get corporate money out of politics and restore regulations that keep banks from running amok with investor dollars.

So as people have taken to the streets with an openly non-violent protest approach, emphasizing that the movement follows the examples of Gandhi and Martin Luther King Jr., it has been possible for parents to share the aims of the movement and the manner of engagement with their kids.

As the movement has spread, an explosion of stories across the blogosphere has inventoried the practical installations at the encampments. There are the lending libraries, wellness awnings, teach-in circles, nightly General Assemblies for consensus decision making, food tents, counseling opportunities and more. Each aspect illustrates what’s necessary for “freedom of assembly.” But moreover, it reveals the complexion of the demonstrations in clear form to anyone who sincerely wants to see the true ethos of the movement.

Long time Washington Post architecture and urban landscape critic Philip Kennicott even penned a glowing analysis of the “vibrant urbanism” present in Occupy DC.

Vibrant urbanists, meet our friends Billy Club and Pepper Spray

So with clear intentions, and believing in their Constitutional rights to participatory democracy, why are peaceful protestors getting skull-bashing blows from out of control cops?

Why are protestors being pepper sprayed in the face? Why are cloistered midnight raids happening, ordered by elected officials and resulting in brutal evictions, and the destruction of those lending libraries and wellness tents? Why are the necessary accessories to an assembly of human beings being systematically repressed by state powers and shift cops?

But most of all, how do we tell our kids that the nation we believe in, the rights we hold dear,  will be openly trampled, battered, and brutally quashed with violent fury by those entrusted to uphold the right of law?

I wish I had the answer. I wish I could give the five-point plan that would be both honest and maintain a child’s belief in this country. I wish I could say, “we’re better than Pol Pot and Myanmar and Burma and Ghaddafi.”

But are we?

In degree, maybe. But in practice? And if the practice is just different by degree, how long until it’s not?

In practice we tout claims to equality, fairness, and justice. Yet we let white collar crime go not just with a pass, but we reward it with a bailout. And when the public cries foul, we club the people upside the head.

We laud the spirit and form of the Tahrir Square gathering, calling on then Egyptian President Hosni Mubarak to respond to the demands of the people. When our people gather for similar protests against corruption, we tar them with wholesale pejoratives, calling them “stinky hippies,” from the children to the students to the business persons to the grannies. Stinky hippies, all.

Now club ‘em, spray ‘em, jail ‘em.

Patience, Grasshopper

Sure, we could tell the story of the wrenching struggle for liberty and justice. How it takes time. How sometimes people get hurt, even when they practice non-violence themselves. But why are we having to tell this story in the United States of America in the first place?

This isn’t supposed to be us.

But there’s no denying it now. It is us.

How do we avoid cynicism in our kids when they’re told we’re the higher minded country and then they see seated college students aggressively pepper sprayed? When they see peaceful crowds fired upon? How do we prop up the dream when that’s what they’ll see?

Not in front of the kids? Hey, we can’t hide our nation’s fall anymore. So if any of you readers have thoughts on what we’re supposed to tell the wee ones, I’d love to hear them.

The best I have right now is the story The Emperor’s New Clothes. Only it’s the updated version. The Emperor’s New Clothes and His Bad Ass Pepper Spray, A Watch Out Punk, Your Ass is Grass Story from Kangaroo Congress Inc. And that’s not exactly the “avoiding cynicism” that I’m looking for.

Comments?

–Lindsay Curren, Occupy Parenting

A cartoon world of sugary treats everywhere made just for your kid by Sweet N Low. Photo: Onextrapixel.com

In 1980, the U.S. Congress passed a law to protect adults who prey on children.

You read that correctly. Public Law 96-252 prohibits the Federal Trade Commission from enacting rules that would protect the nation’s children from commercial advertising that exploits their vulnerable and trusting natures.

This law is corporate power incarnate. It should be the role of Congress to protect children, not those who would prey upon them. Congress ought to repeal it.

Aren’t you a cute little market share

Back then, the FTC was trying to respond to an increase in aggressive marketing aimed at children. Now, two decades later, that increase has become a deluge. Kids are literally assaulted from morning to night. Advertisers target them at home, school, and virtually all points in between.

According to Professor James U. McNeal, an expert on marketing to children, “Virtually every consumer-goods industry, from airlines to zinnia-seed sellers, targets kids.”

Because of this, it has become nearly impossible for parents to control advertisers’ access to their kids.Ialpin, CEO of Gepetto Group, which specializes in marketing to kids, explains that “Kids marketing in general is becoming more sophisticated” in competing for what she calls “share of mind.”

Mike Searles, former president of Kids-R-Us, a major children’s clothing store, said that

If you own this child at an early age, you can own this child for years to come. Companies are saying, “Hey, I want to own the kid younger and younger.”

Own them

Marketers believe they are succeeding.

Professor McNeal says that

Advertising targeted at elementary school children, on programs just for them, works very effectively in the sense of implanting brand names in their minds and creating desires for the products.

That’s great for advertisers but bad for parents. The problem is that children appear to be developing health problems because they do precisely what the ads are urging. For example:

Alcohol

Alcohol is a major cause of death among teenagers. It contributes significantly to motor vehicle crashes, injuries, suicide, date rape, and problems with school and family.

It makes no sense to encourage children to drink beer or hard liquor. Nevertheless, the Federal Trade Commission recently found that the alcohol industry often advertises to audiences that include large numbers of children including placing their products in PG and PG-13 films with significant appeal to teens and children, such as films featuring animals or coming-of-age stories.

The industry also advertises on 8 of the 15 television shows most popular with teens.

Tobacco

The deadly effects of tobacco advertising on American children are well-documented by the FTC and the Journal of the American Medical Association.

RJR Nabisco’s Joe Camel helped seduce hundreds of thousands of children into a lifetime of smoking. Each day, another 3,000 children start to smoke. About a third of them will have their lives cut short by smoking-related illnesses. Almost two-thirds of 12th graders who smoke choose Marlboro. That is no accident. The Marlboro Man plays to the desires of young people for independence.

Violent entertainment

Following the school shootings in Jonesboro, Pearl, Springfield, Paducah, and Littleton, some media experts, psychologists, and elected officials have suggested that violent entertainment including violent video games, movies, and television may be contributing to the occurrence of such events.

For example, Lieutenant Colonel Dave Grossman, coauthor of the new book Stop Teaching Our Kids to Kill, argues that first-person shooter video games such as Duke Nukem, Time Crisis, and Quake “teach children the motor skills to kill, like military training devices do. And then they turn around and teach them to like it like the military would never do.”

Junk food and fast food

Children are subjected to a barrage of ads for Whoppers, Happy Meals, Coke, Pepsi, Snickers bars, M&M’s, and other junk foods and fast foods.

They are urged by these ads to buy these products directly themselves or, if they are too young, to nag their parents. These ads may contribute to skyrocketing levels of childhood obesity. About 25 to 30 percent of American children are now clinically obese. Severe obesity among young children has almost doubled since the 1960s. Similarly, childhood diabetes is also on the rise.

As a minimum response, Congress should now take the initiative to restore the full authority of the FTC to rule on marketing to children, to cure these fundamentally unfair and deceptive practices.

Furthermore, Congress should now tell the FTC to make such rules, and give the FTC enough money to enable the FTC to move quickly to protect children from this part of the advertising industry and its commercial molestations.

–Ralph Nader, Occupy Parenting

This excellent article was published by Ralph Nader in 1999 and is cross posted from the Nader Page.

Malnutrition results when an excess of sugar is consumed. Photo: Laughingsquid.com

Ever spent an afternoon with a kid junked up on sugar?

You know the scene. Maybe it’s after a high octane birthday party where mounds of whipped icing on store-bought sheet cake was paired with a “juice” drink of dubious color and origins in celebration of some young soul’s arrival at age five. After the festivities, you bring your wee one home, brain buzzing, moods racing, body bouncing off the walls like an accident waiting to happen.

Not your best Saturday afternoon.

Every day’s a party!

Now imagine what it’s like to have about 21-30 kids hyped up on that buzz on a daily basis. That’s the reality in too many public school classrooms because of the reality in too many school cafeterias, according to Ivana Kadija, chair of the School Health Advisory Board in Charlottesville, Virginia.

Some argue that there’s no correlation between sugar and behavior or cognitive ability. But every parent knows differently. Either way, there are issues with sugar and health.

Kadija, a nutrition and wellness counselor and owner of Yourishment.com, has made it her mission to expand awareness of how much sugar is allowed in public schools by USDA standards, which she thinks are too industry-friendly. She recently ran a campaign for Charlottesville School Board on a platform of Health is Academic. Though she lost that race, it hasn’t dimmed her passion for childhood nutrition in general, and school nutrition in particular.

In a recent video on YouTube, “Sugar Daddy: Ivana Kadija Chews Out Cafeteria Food*,” Kadija lays out the numbers — an appalling 35% sugar limit on school food — explaining what this high allowance does to the human body, and to the learning environment.

Getting it right

Not one to just gripe about current conditions, Kadija is also quick to point out schools that have reduced the allowable sugar content in their schools — or banned the stuff altogether — and how that’s led to a more focused learning environment, higher scores and budget savings in those schools.

But why would the USDA set the sugar allowance so high in the first place? Who are the sugar-pushers lobbying for approval of those standards? And what thinking lawmaker would approve such an anti-nutritonal plan? But maybe worst of all, why do folks bellyache when efforts are made to redefine what’s allowable?

Are our schools for educating our citizens, or for creating a pipeline of consumers who will pony up to the pharmaceutical track once they develop diabetes and other diseases?

To #OccupyParenting we need to redefine the conditions that make for healthy learning environments, beating back corporate lobbyists who see schools as a gravy train for their products, from corn-heavy foodss, to loads of sugar. Parent advocacy voices must be at the center of public school policy.

Sugar is one of the most addictive substances known to man, says Kadija. Confronting our collective addiction won’t be easy. But the alternative is just continuing the doped up sugar high followed by the crashing sugar blues. And that’s no good for any of us, least of all our kids.

–Lindsay Curren, Occupy Parenting

*(See more from the Sugar Daddy Movie project.)

Pediatricians' offices may feature plastic Legos stamped with the name of a drug. Photo: The Fix.

In an New York Times opinion piece about various ways that corporations use their “rights” as persons to exercise their “free speech” and get to our kids, Joel Bakan addresses the widespread use of psychotropic drugs to treat kids for conditions such as ADHD.

Not only might oft-prescribed drugs like Ritalin be unnecessary or unhelpful in many cases. These drugs might also be dangerous.

“In the early 2000s, for example,” Bakan writes, “drug companies withheld data suggesting that such drugs were more dangerous and less effective for children and teenagers than parents had been led to believe. The law now requires ‘black box’ warnings on those drugs’ labels, but regulators have done little more to protect children from sometimes unneeded and dangerous drug treatments.”

And as Walter Armstrong explains in “Big Pharma’s Dangerous Drive to Push Drugs on Little Kids,” in the past decade, companies have aggressively marketed dozens of drugs to millions of children. “Drug giants spend billions a year promoting their pills to children, ignoring FDA rules. Johnson & Johnson even advertises its latest anti-psychotic on Legos, ignoring evidence that the drug leads to diabetes and wild weight gain and sprouts breasts in both boys and girls.”

Even worse, by showering physicians with millions of dollars in giveaways and goodies every year, sales reps turn doctors into drug pushers, abusing the trust of parents and prescribing unnecessary or even harmful drugs to kids.

The solution? In today’s ever more complex world, even the most well informed parents cannot be expected to protect their kids against both drug companies and their family doctor. Government regulation to protect families from ineffective or dangerous drugs needs to be strengthened. Meantime, some physicians, hospitals and clinics have already pledged to show the door to Big Pharma sales reps. Let’s hope that more follow suit.

–Erik Curren, Occupy Parenting

And you probably won’t be surprised to learn that texting is addictive. Literally.

“Neuro-imaging studies have shown that those kids who are texting have that area of their brain light up the same as an addict using heroin” brain specialist Dr. Michael Seyffert told Seattle TV reporter Amy Allen.

Researchers say that texting and the instant gratification of getting a text back flood the brain’s pleasure center with the mood enhancing chemical dopamine.

And if you’re not careful, texting will change your kid’s brain functioning, perhaps permanently. Technology Addiction Specialist Dr. Hilarie Cash says over time that texting can change how people think and how their brain’s function. “Whatever children are doing, to a great extent, is going to be the way their brains are wired” Dr. Cash explained.

But her solution is just to put more responsibility on the back of already stressed out parents. First, they should make sure their kids have a “well rounded” life with plenty of activities like sports that will distract them from their phones. And if texting starts replacing human interaction, parents may need to limit phone time or just confiscate the darn thing. “That’s when parents need to step up and be a parent” Dr. Cash explained.

However, it’s easy to wonder if the phone companies from Verizon to Apple that do so much marketing to kids also share some of the blame for today’s texting epidemic. By giving kids an all-too-tempting way to communicate with their friends, the telecommunications industry is inserting itself yet again between parents and their kids.