The Parent's Bill Of Rights: Helping Moms And Dads Fight Commercialism

By Jonathan Rowe and Gary Ruskin

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.¹ To make kid business even bigger, he preaches what he calls "surround marketing": saturation advertising that captures kids at every possible moment.²

"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."3

This is what parents today are up against: corporate advertisers who seek to entwine themselves with children's lives. By most measures, the advertisers 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.⁴ 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.⁵ 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 politicians recognized 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."⁶

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.