Consuming Families: the Voices of Parents
Nancy Carlsson-Paige, Ed.D
Lesley University

I've been interviewing parents who represent diverse backgrounds and experiences on a wide range of topics relating to parenting in these times. In every interview, the commercial culture of childhood has stood out as an issue that pervades many aspects of the lives of children and parents. Some of the key themes that have emerged from these interviews are:

#1. Childhood culture is now largely shaped by forces outside of the family that have increasingly edged parents out of the picture.

Many parents talked about how their children's preferences are determined by people with no connection to them and their families. Children's preferences for food, toys, clothing, and entertainment are all largely shaped by the consumer culture, marketing, and advertising.

One parent talked about trying to buy sneakers for her two young children. She described the awful scene: her two kids attaching themselves to the sneakers with the Spiderman logo on them and her struggle with the conflict this created. Licensing is a tool marketers use to get young children to want their products. It takes advantage of young children's tendency to see one salient aspect of an item and focus on that alone. Marketers know that logos like Spiderman, Flash Gordon, and Power Puff Girls can almost guarantee success in sales.
 

Another parent talked about how advertising disrupts relationships between parents and kids. She was concerned about the undermining influence of advertising to the health of the parent-child relationship:

"From a very early age children are programmed to think that somebody outside of their most intimate relationships knows what will make them happy. Some other authority figure is telling children what's good for them. A child wants a certain cereal in the supermarket and is fighting with the parent to get it. Children don’t trust their parents because they have seen the cereal on television--and this is the cereal to buy."

#2. Some parents are concerned about how childhood consumer culture undermines children's creative and original thinking.
 

One parent described the consumer culture as "a crushing influence." "I see consumer culture as a huge machine that crushes kids," he said.

Another parent took her children to see the movie Finding Nemo. In the days after that, they encountered Finding Nemo posters on the bus, Finding Nemo toys, Finding Nemo backpacks, books, Finding Nemo hats, t-shirts, coloring books, stickers; they went to Finding Nemo birthday parties.

She says, "There is a part of your children that is in danger of being sucked into this machine that is going to feed you the movie, give you the hat and the t-shirt, buy you the toy and then show you how to play with it, and that is what you are going to do. You are going to have this pre-packaged experience. And it will make the children less flexible thinkers. It will limit their imagination. They'll get preconceived ideas about the world and expect to see it a certain way."

#3. Many parents are concerned about violent entertainment media and its harmful effects on their children.

A parent who is also a teacher said that some of the six-year-old boys in her first grade classroom seemed "obsessed" with violent video games:
"I have found children coming to school tired in the morning. I say, "What did you do last night?" "I played video games," they answer. And I find it a lot in their writing--talking about the games they are playing. For instance Jeremy would write, "Michael came over my house to play and we played video games." I was Blood Master and he was Dragonfly and I opened the dungeon and I took the sword and I killed him."

This parent goes on to say how she sees that these children confuse fantasy and reality. She says, "It is scary because these children actually think that they can do these things and no one is going to get hurt." The video game industry draws young children into violent video games by marketing action figures and hand held video games rated "E" to young children that are linked to violent games for mature players and to movies rated PG-13 and R.

One parent with a 14-year-old son found Grand Theft Auto III (an extremely violent game rated M "mature") hidden in his room. Her son told her that everyone had the game and he wanted to have it too.

Another parent of two sons ages 8 and 12 said that her twelve-year-old Nick wanted to get an X-Box because "all of my friends have it and no one wants to come to my house because I don't have video games." After a long negotiation, they agreed that Nick could get the X-Box but no violent or sexist games. The mother said that when the X-Box arrived at their house, it came with a free video game--a free, violent video game. This same mother went to pick Nick up at his friend's house one afternoon and watched them playing a point-and-shoot video game through the window. Nick and his friend were shooting people with an Uzi through the windows of their suburban living rooms.

Nancy Carlsson-Paige, EdD (ncarlsso@lesley.edu) is a professor of education at Lesley University, researcher at Lesley's Center for Peaceable Schools, author and activist.