This is the final discussion in a “book club” series on Born to Buy by Juliet Schor, which focuses on consumerism issues and young children.

During this series, a lot of people wrote to me and asked why I was covering this book in such detail. One reader’s comment: “i get the point don’t expose kids to ads.” Saying that, though, is a really disturbing oversimplification of what’s being said here.

The point of this book is not to merely avoid exposing kids to ads. The point of this book is to show how pervasive marketing is in the lives of children. It’s not just television - it’s movies, video games, magazines, and so on. It’s about marketing to students in schools. It’s about even using children as marketers by having kids do the marketing work themselves, convincing their friends to try it and also to demand the product from their parents. Just shutting off the television isn’t enough.

I grew up with a sense that money was to be spent, not saved. If you had a windfall, the healthy response was to go buy something fun. In my house, we watched a lot of television - it was pretty much always on - and thus looking back I can see how the television repeatedly altered my views on things. Since it was perceived as the normal thing to spend money when you got it, and there were lots of messages floating around about the things a kid should want, I bought in big time.

The end result? I grew up and became a shopaholic and it nearly wrecked us. My story is one that a lot of people share, from the childhood of learning to want the things that were marketed to you to the early adulthood of spending like crazy to the crisis situation with tens of thousands of dollars in credit card debt.

The key is that first step. I have at least some control over the lessons that my children take in, right now. They learn from my choices and from the things I choose to teach them. If I put a high value on consumer culture, they will, too. If I leave the television on and am influenced by it, they will be, too. If I don’t teach them that much of what they hear about products is pure advertising, they’ll believe the advertising and come home wanting products.

This book woke me up to one of the biggest responsibilities I have as a parent - or even as a citizen. I’m raising children who are going to be productive members of society one day, and they’ll be making choices for themselves based in part on the things I’ve taught them and showed them over the years. What am I teaching them? What am I encouraging society to teach them? What will they learn? These questions go way beyond avoiding ads and into something much more fundamental about building them into self-reliant people who will make good financial decisions throughout their life.

I certainly hope I’m teaching them the right stuff.

Here’s a checklist of all of the entries about this book:
Introduction
The Changing World of Children’s Consumption
Playing Less and Shopping More
From Tony the Tiger to Slime Time Live
Nickelodeon and the Anti-Adult Bias
Pester Power
The Virus Unleashed
The Commercialization of Public Schools
Dissecting the Child Consumer
Inside the Child Brain
Habit Formation
Who’s Responsible: Parents or Advertisers?
How Consumer Culture Undermines Children’s Well Being
Patterns of Media Use
Consumer Involvement as an Undermining Force
Empowered or Seduced?
Decommercializing Childhood
The Invention of Modern Childhood

This is the eighteenth and penultimate discussion in a “book club” series on Born to Buy by Juliet Schor, which focuses on consumerism issues and young children. You can jump back to the first discussion if you’d like. This discussion covers the latter half of the final chapter, “Decommercializing Childhood”, starting on page 200 at the subheading “The INvention of Modern Childhood” and finishing out the book.

The book closes with a very strong section that discusses the role that parents and local communities play in shaping the growing commercial identities of children. There’s also an interesting bit about how the definition of childhood has changed over time. Both are intriguing and worth discussing.

The Changing Meaning of Childhood
Schor offers a very good description of the development of the modern idea of childhood over time. In the far past, children once past the infant and toddler stage were largely treated as miniature adults, particularly when puberty arrived. A post-puberty child was considered to be a full adult - dressed like one, acted like one, and interacted with others like one. The separation of childhood into its own separate state, particularly one stretching past puberty, is a relatively modern human invention.

What does that mean? It means that the idea of protecting children is only a good idea in the short term. In the modern era, that boundary between adult in child is porous and becoming more so all the time. The real question is what’s coming through those pores? Is it material that values and respects people or demeans people? We can protect children from the “bad” stuff all we want, but profound change won’t occur until we start addressing these questions as a greater society. We’ll get there, but it will take time - there are profound cultural changes going on right now and the best thing we can do as individuals is to make these changes better for everyone rather than fighting them tooth and nail every step of the way.

Ten Things You Can Do
Over the last ten pages or so, Schor sprinkles a ton of suggestions for what parents can do in the home to minimize consumer culture influence. Many of these boil down to “spending more time together,” but they’re still excellent food for thought. Here are several of my favorites:

Eat together. A family meal is a perfect time to discuss things and bond more as a family. Establish it as a tradition.

Eat healthy food. Instead of just making an “easy” prepackaged meal (the end result of a clever marketing campaign), focus on making healthy and natural meals from scratch.

Try gardening. Gardening is an activity the whole family can participate in together, plus it drives right into the idea of eating healthier, natural food.

Turn off the television. Yes, that’s a pretty obvious theme, but it’s a good one. Replace TV night with game night or reading night.

Spend time in the outdoors away from urban areas. There’s no media interaction there, plus it’s incredibly healthy mentally and physically to get away on occasion.

Be open with your finances and consumer choices. If you can’t open the books, what are you hiding? You should be able to explain every choice and every bill to your child - not only will this educate your child, but it’ll keep you on track financially, too.

The next discussion, coming in two days, will be the final discussion and will wrap up the book.

This is the seventeenth discussion in a “book club” series on Born to Buy by Juliet Schor, which focuses on consumerism issues and young children. You can jump back to the first discussion if you’d like. This discussion covers the first half of the final chapter, “Decommercializing Childhood”, starting on page 189 and continuing until the subheading “The Invention of Modern Childhood” on page 200.

The final chapter of Born to Buy focuses on solutions, with the first part focusing in on solutions from a broad perspective, mostly calling for Congress to enact legislation.

Thus, this is the portion of the book I disagree with the most. I firmly believe that the best solutions start at home because, frankly, you can have a great deal of impact on one child, but it requires a huge amount of politial groundswell to even enact the simplest changes in terms of legislation. Not only that, I would actually oppose some of the stuff that Schor proposes here.

Let’s take a look.

Let’s Legislate Morality!
Here are a few of Schor’s suggestions, from pages 195 through 197:

Congress should pass a federal act mandating disclosure for all sponsored product placements in television, movies, books, radio, and the Internet.

Congress needs to address whether advertising to children is warranted at all.

Congress should also request a General Accounting Office or FTC report, similar to those that have been done on school commercialism and the marketing of movies and video games, which catalogues the full range of current marketing practices.

Congress should enact comprehensive legislation to restrict school commercialism.

I only agree with one of these four. Can you guess which one?

For anyone who’s been reading this blog for a while, it’s probably pretty clear that I’m only in favor of that last one. Children go to school for the purpose of being educated - their minds are opened by teachers who are supposed to be filling them with tools to navigate our complex world. When marketing starts being slipped in there, then you’re taking advantage of the teacher-student relationship and undermining the entire point of schooling.

What about the other three? Why would I oppose things like those? I’m largely indifferent to the first one, except that it would create costs for actually enforcing it - the FTC would have to hire people to make sure this was enforced and it would largely be ignored anyway, so it comes off as a waste of taxpayer money to me. The second one has a lot of problems, particularly in terms of restricting freedom of speech - when you start banning things and restricting freedoms, it’s easy for “ban creep” to occur until you’re blocking things that people should have access to. The third one is similar to the first one - a lot of money is spent on something that very few people will ever look at. By the time it’s compiled, marketing techniques will have evolved and all that research will be outdated at the taxpayer’s expense.

For the most part, I think it’s a waste of time to legislate things, especially on a national stage, that aren’t cut and dried - all such laws do is create more business for lawyers and eventually get overturned by a judge who can’t make a reasonable decision on such a sticky issue. For example, an advertising ban would be a giant restriction of freedom of speech, for example, but to only ban children’s advertising requires a law that defines a very unclear area that can’t be enforced well and will quickly be trampled over. The only legislative solutions here are far-reaching enough that anyone who values free speech would oppose it because of the other restrictions it would trigger.

Instead, the answers that are most useful are closer to home. If you want to ban advertising in schools, start in your local school district. Advocate for a ban on ads in schools coupled with a tax levy to help the schools recover the lost income. That’s one good way to start.

Next time, in the last section of the book, we’ll look at solutions that are closer to home.

The next discussion, coming in three days, will cover the last half of the final chapter, “Decommercializing Childhood,” starting on page 200 at the subheading “The Invention of Modern Childhood” and finishing out the book.

This is the sixeenth discussion in a “book club” series on Born to Buy by Juliet Schor, which focuses on consumerism issues and young children. You can jump back to the first discussion if you’d like. This discussion covers the entire ninth chapter, “Empowered or Seduced?”, starting on page 177 at the subheading “Statistical Results: Consumer Involvement Undermines Children’s Well-Being” and finishing out the chapter to page 188.

This is the next to last chapter in the book, following the previous chapter which was clearly the peak of the book’s argument. Here, Schor addresses most of the arguments that the marketing industry puts up in their defense concerning marketing to children.

I actually found this chapter to be pretty thought provoking because in the end, it’s all about the moral accountability. It is extremely difficult to legislate “ethical” ads without basically banning all ads (and that’s never going to happen), so we’re left with a reliance on the moral accountability of the industry, and if you have a client demanding results or else your head will roll, it’s pretty easy to see how someone would bend the moral rules a bit to keep their job.

The Three Arguments of the Marketers

Schor basically breaks down the arguments in favor of child marketing into three pieces.

Ads and Products Help Children to Feel Powerful
On page 179, Schor states:

It says that kids need to feel independent and master their environments to feel in control of their parents. Lisa Morgan argues that “kids want to be in control in a world where they create their own rules … we always try to put them in situations where they … demonstrate mastery of a specific situation.” Gene del Vecchio contends that “kids have very little control over the world in which they live. Therefore, they love to gain any measure of control over their sphere of existence … Control touches a strong need that children have to be independent.”

I agree with this point in general, but I disagree with where marketers take it. Marketers argue that this need for control is fulfilled through things like the power to choose a particular product over another. I argue that this need for control can be fulfilled through free play, not through having your child choose what kind of prepackaged food to buy.

When I read this, I actually imagined Calvinball. For those unfamiliar, Calvinball is a game from the comic strip Calvin and Hobbes in which the young boy, Calvin, makes up the rules of this game as he goes along. The analogy is pretty clear - being able to make up the rules of Calvinball as he goes along lets him feel powerful over that game, giving him that sense of fulfillment that the quote above is talking about.

Go out in the yard and play Calvinball with your kids instead of letting them feel “power” by choosing between two products on a store shelf.

Ads Create Other Benefits
On page 181:

… advertising is justifiable because it creates other benefits, such as free television, better products, and economic growth and employment. Psychologically, these are the most powerful arguments because they reinforce the utter inevitability of advertising.

Schor breaks this argument down quite well, pointing out that advertising is actually paid for by consumers who pay a premium for a name brand - that premium pays for the ads and thus for the programs supported by the ads. Also, ad campaigns are expensive, and thus without an established product or a huge company behind a rollout, it’s hard to advertise a new product - this reduces competition and innovation.

Advertisements don’t carry any hidden benefits except for the bottom line of the advertiser.

It’s the Parent’s Fault!
On page 183:

Industry’s final line of defense is that parents always have the option of protecting their children from advertising. They can turn off the television and just say no. When parents let their children watch, they are giving tacit approval. Of course, the proliferation of marketing in schools and other public institutions undermines this claim, but it remains a mainstay in the industry’s arsenal of arguments.

This is easily their most compelling argument, and they’re right - letting children watch television is a choice that parents do control, and when they allow their children to watch television or absorb consumer culture, the parents are opening the door themselves and letting the marketers into the room.

This doesn’t justify marketers using a heavy arm to market to kids, of course, but parents do have the power to seriously restrict media access, and they help the marketers when they fail to exercise that power.

The next discussion, coming in two days, will cover the first half of the final chapter, “Decommercializing Childhood,” starting on page 189 and continuing until the subheading “The Invention of Modern Childhood” on page 200.

This is the fifteenth discussion in a “book club” series on Born to Buy by Juliet Schor, which focuses on consumerism issues and young children. You can jump back to the first discussion if you’d like. This discussion covers the final portion of the eighth chapter, “How Consumer Culture Undermines Children’s Well Being,” starting at the subheading “Statistical Results: Consumer Involvement Undermines Children’s Well-Being” on page 167 and continuing until the end of the chapter on page 176.

Three days ago, we talked about how kids absorb a reasonable level of media and also generally have a good relationship with their parents. However, in both cases, there were children far out on the long tail - some kids absorbed a huge amount of television, for example, and some kids had a poor relationship with their parents.

What was unclear is whether these two sets were related, a question answered by Schor in the final part of the chapter.

A Strong Correlation Between Media Exposure and Well Being
Right off the bat, Schor confirms it on page 167 (my own emphasis added):

The [statistical] estimates provide strong support for our hypotheses. High consumer involvement is a significant cause of depression, anxiety, low self-esteem, and psychosomatic complaints. Psychologically healthy children will be made worse off if they become more enmeshed in the culture of getting and spending. Children with emotional problems will be helped if they disengage from the worlds that corporations are constructing for them. The effects operate in both directions and are symmetric.

Here it is in a nutshell, folks: there is a direct relationship between the time your kids spend watching television and playing video games and their emotional, psychological, social, and physical health. The more time they spend with media sources, the worse off they’ll be.

Obviously, this doesn’t apply to every child, but the correlation is very statistically significant. Schor spends a big part of this section focusing on the statistical evidence for this and it’s strong - p-values approaching .5 in some cases, for all of you statistical junkies. That’s a strong correlation.

A Strong Correlation Between Parental Involvement and Attitude and Well Being
Similarly, there’s a very strong correlation between parental involvement and the well-being of the child. From page 171:

The descriptive data show that the Boston children articulate extremely positive attitudes toward their primary parents. These attitudes may form a protective shield against the negative portrayals of parents in consumer culture and insulate these children from the kinds of conflicts found among the suburban kids. By contrast, although Doxley children are also positive about their parents, they are less so. They report more fighting with their parents about issues of access to consumer culture.

As an aside, throughout this chapter it was made rather clear that the Boston parents were more involved in the day-to-day life of their children than the Doxley parents. The Doxley parents seemed to be more focused on involving the kids in a mountain of extracurriculars, carting them off to soccer practice all the time, for example. That time lost to the extracurriculars was replacing time with the family, as the Doxley kids only had slightly less media use time than the Boston kids.

The statistics given by Schor are again quite strong, exhibiting a very strong relationship between parental involvement and attitude and children’s well being. There was almost a direct correlation here - the kids that spent more time with their parents did better, especially if their parents were genuinely involved and interested in their children.

What Parents Can Learn
The take-away message from this entire study can be summed up in one sentence: instead of letting your kid watch television or read magazines by themselves, take them out in the yard and play catch with them or play a board game with them or take them for a walk in the woods. That’s what being a parent is really about, and in this chapter, Schor statistically demonstrates that doing this will benefit your child. Not only that, I’ve found over and over again that quality time with your children can benefit you personally as well - it’s a win-win.

Just spend good quality time with your kids, do it regularly, and make that time come out of the time you’d spend watching television. You’ll all benefit from it.

The next discussion, coming in two days, will cover the entire ninth chapter, “Empowered or Seduced?”, starting on page 177.

This is the fourteenth discussion in a “book club” series on Born to Buy by Juliet Schor, which focuses on consumerism issues and young children. You can jump back to the first discussion if you’d like. This discussion covers the middle portion of the eighth chapter, “How Consumer Culture Undermines Children’s Well Being,” starting at the subheading “Patterns of Media Use” on page 153 and continuing until the subheading “Statistical Results: Consumer Involvement Undermines Children’s Well-Being” on page 167.

As was discussed last time, this portion of Born to Buy focuses in on a very detailed survey of ten to thirteen year old kids in Boston and one unnamed affluent suburb of Boston. In the middle portion of the chapter, the media use and psychological health of the children are laid out but not connected.

Media Use
In a nutshell, the children surveyed watched television for an average of about 10 hours a week (the median was in the 6 to 10 bracket, but a small fraction of the children watched huge amounts of television - 30+ hours a week) and consumed other media sources about the same amount of time, if not more (media sources include videos, movies, computer use, and video games). That means the average child in this survey was spending about three hours every single day either watching television (or a video), using a computer, or playing video games.

For me personally, depending on the content of the stuff that they’re doing and the involvement of the parents, I don’t think this is a overly ridiculous amount, but exceeding it can easily make it so, as can exposure to morally and ethically conflicting material without parental involvement.

Modern life is full of media sources. If you’re reading this, as a parent in the modern world, you’re going to be completely unable to totally isolate your child from them without being hypocritical (after all, given Schor’s definition, The Simple Dollar would be an example of media use). The key, at least from my eyes, is parental involvement.

Take, for example, this nugget from page 153:

We asked only one or two questions about what children were watching and found that 19 percent in Doxley and 57 percent in Boston watch MTV or VH1 regularly., and quite a few watch every day.

This is an example of parental involvement (or lack thereof) in media use. If you’re near a television, flip on MTV right now. I’d say there’s at least an 80% chance that whatever you see on there represents some sort of value that you’d not want to see in your children, and that value is being glorified. If your child watches that stuff without context, then your child is going to adopt those values as being the right ones to have.

Well Being
In terms of well being, most of the children were pretty well adjusted, too. In the study, the children were shown to have a low average level of depression but were regularly bored and sometimes had headaches (but within what’s considered a normal range). In other words, much like the spectrum of media use, most of the children were in a reasonable range, but there were a handful of outliers (15-20%) that showed serious signs of poor wellness.

Similarly, the surveys indicated a generally positive relationship with parents. Again, about 80% of the kids seemed to have a generally good relationship with their parents - trust, love, and at least some mutual respect. The concern, again, is with that 20% of outliers - the ones who fight with their parents over and over again.

It’s easy to conclude from these two studies that there isn’t a well-being problem in children today, and for the most part that’s correct. The majority of kids today are well-adjusted and at least reasonably healthy. The concern, though, is with those outliers - what’s causing them to be out there on the tip? Even more worrisome, is there a connection between media use and personal and emotional problems? This data set is a perfect place to look - it seems to be a pretty normal sampling of kids with lots of data on these issues. Are they really connected? We’ll look at that next time.

The next discussion, coming in three days, will cover the final portion of the eighth chapter, “How Consumer Culture Undermines Children’s Well Being,” starting on page 167 at the subheading “Statistical Results: Consumer Involvement Undermines Children’s Well-Being” and finishing out the chapter to page 176.

This is the thirteenth discussion in a “book club” series on Born to Buy by Juliet Schor, which focuses on consumerism issues and young children. You can jump back to the first discussion if you’d like. This discussion covers the first portion of the eighth chapter, “How Consumer Culture Undermines Children’s Well Being,” starting on page 141 until the subheading “Patterns of Media Use” on page 153.

If the rest of the book wasn’t troubling enough, this chapter basically took it over the line. After reading it, I wanted to march downstairs, toss out every toy with a licensed character on it, and pitch the television out in the dumpster.

Chapter eight of Born to Buy describes the results of an extensive survey on the connections between children, media, consumer culture, and physical, emotional, and psychological well-being. The results are pretty disheartening, to say the least - there’s a direct correlation between media exposure and obesity, media exposure and antisocial behavior, media exposure and violent behavior, and media exposure and mental health issues.

Needless to say, this chapter was very intense for me. There were many specific aspects described here that reminded me of my childhood in many different ways, and I attribute most of those remembered experiences to setting the groundwork for my own rampant consumerism and subsequent financial meltdown. Let’s dig in to some of the more interesting - and troubling - specifics.

A Look at Some Specific Results from the Survey
As Schor describes on page 144:

The Survey on Children, Media, and Consumer Culture has now been taken by 300 children between the ages of ten and thirteen, in and around Boston, Massachusetts. These children come from varied socioeconomic and racial backgrounds, and span the spectrum from avid spenders and TV watchers to kids who are mostly isolated from commercial culture. Three hundred may sound like a small number in comparison to national polls, which typically start at a thousand, but within the psychological literature that are most closely related to this study, 300 children is actually a large sample size. Most important, it’s far bigger than is needed to establish statistical reliability and confidence in the findings.

In other words, this data holds up to scientific rigor. I went through a few of the references and Schor’s survey here is spot-on - it’s good science.

So what kinds of questions and answers were given? Schor provides a long list of questions and responses on pages 149 to 151. One result, however, really surprised me: 88.0% of surveyed children either agree or strongly agree that when they go somewhere special, they usually like to buy something.

In other words, a special event revolves around the acquisition of material goods for more than seven out of eight children. Somehow, that makes me really sad inside.

Another aspect of the survey I found disturbing is that a large portion of the children consistently believed that the brand of a product was directly connected to the quality of it - perception above reality. These are children aged ten to thirteen years old, and the majority of them are already convinced that two identical tee shirts can be distinguished in terms of quality if one of them says abercrombie and fitch on it.

The pervasive consumer culture is real, and it is altering how children perceive the world. The next piece of the chapter looks at the effects of that alteration.

The next discussion, coming in two days, will cover the next portion of the eighth chapter, “How Consumer Culture Undermines Children’s Well Being,” starting on page 153 at the subheading “Patterns of Media Use” and continuing until the subheading “Statistical Result: Consumer Involvement Undermines Children’s Well-Being” on page 167.

This is the twelfth discussion in a “book club” series on Born to Buy by Juliet Schor, which focuses on consumerism issues and young children. You can jump back to the first discussion if you’d like. This discussion covers the latter half of the seventh chapter, “Habit Formation,” starting on page 130 at the subheading “Who’s Responsible, Parents or Advertisers?” and finishing out the chapter, ending on page 139.

I’ll be frank: I feel that the responsibility for consumer education falls squarely on the shoulders of parents. Parents are the ones that make the choice to turn on the television and allow their children to watch it. Parents are the ones that allow their children to drive purchasing decisions. Parents are the primary educators of their children. Most important, parents are the ones making food choices, and they’re the ones choosing to put prepackaged foods or fresh foods on the table. Add those up and it’s pretty clear to me that marketing is like a never-ending flow of water - but parents are the tap, able to slow down or turn off the flow as desired. You’re a parent, you’re responsible.

I’m a parent of two kids and I know quite well that this is a difficult stance to take. It’s really easy to get irate at marketers and blame them for creating clever packaging. I’ve watched my son nearly bounce off the wall for specific treats already - and I’m aware that the biggest part of that is clever methods by marketers. Seriously, what child wouldn’t want smiling, cheese-flavored fish crackers in a brightly colored bag? The marketers make it tough - they make the crackers out of whole grain and the nutrition facts on the package indicate that they aren’t entirely unhealthy…

And that’s where the rubber meets the road. I’m a parent. I’m the one making that purchasing decision. Beyond that, my son is sitting there taking cues from me - parents are the first role models that a child has, not the marketers. It’s up to me to make the right decision - all marketers do is make that right decision a little bit tougher.

Schor’s Counterargument
Schor makes a strong counterargument to this case on page 130:

A second industry theme is that parents can “just say no.” Paul Kurnit takes the view that “if you don’t want your child to eat pre-sweetened cereals, don’t buy them. If you don’t want your child to eat at McDonald’s, don’t take your child to McDonald’s. I mean, on some level it is truly that simple.” [Child marketer Amanda] Carlson concurs: “They [the parents] should set the guidelines. They should set precedents. They should be good examples, which they’re not, in terms of how to eat healthfully.”

A careful look at industry practices suggests things aren’t as simple as Kurnit and others claim. The soft drink companies have demanded exclusive access in schools. The chains dominate highway rest stops, airports, malls, and other public places, so fast or junk food is usually all that’s available. Agriculture and food lobbies have pushed through food disparagement laws in twelve states where they’re politically powerful. (These laws make certain statements about food products illegal.)

The argument that Schor is making is that governments have given the food industry unfair advantage over consumers, and I do agree that these moves do make it harder for parents to make good choices.

But the answers are out there and they’re not really very hard to follow, either. In Michael Pollan’s excellent book on modern eating, In Defense of Food (which I discussed a while back), he basically boils down everything a parent needs to know about a healthy modern diet into just seven words: Eat food. Not too much. Mostly plants.

Obviously, a bit of clarification is needed here - by “food,” he means not prepackaged stuff, but as much fresh stuff as you can get into the diet. Stick to the fresh produce section and the meat counter at your local grocery - that’s where the vast majority of your grocery shopping should be.

What about the convenience situations, like when you’re on a road trip and the only easy options are fast foods? That’s easy, too - plan in advance and pack a “road picnic.” It takes about ten minutes and enables you to stop off at a nice park to eat a meal instead of at Mickey D’s. If you just want to cure the munchies, pack a bag of baby carrots or a 100% juice box instead of an order of fries and a giant Slurpee.

What about emotional contradictions, with things like GoGurt? On page 131:

Carlson explained that the marketers are “using words like health … wholesome. Teddy Grahams are probably wholesome … You have the goodness of graham … There’s definitely a halo. I mean, parents will look at Lucky Charms and say, ‘Well, it’s oats.’ They look at Go-gurt that has twelve grams of sugar and say, ‘Well, it’s yogurt. It’s got that bacteria in it that’s good for you.’” Taking advantage of these emotional contradictions has contributed to a pervasive loosening of parental rules around food. Faced with the barrage of food advertisement, too few parents have been able to hold their ground.

When I read this, I don’t blame the barrage of food advertisement, I blame the inability of a parent to walk down the yogurt aisle and compare the nutrition facts label between several kinds of yogurt and make the choice that’s best for their kids. Reading, understanding, and knowing how to use a nutrition facts label is vital for any parent in the modern world - if you can’t do that or are unwilling to, you’re shortchanging your child.

Sure, there are obstacles, but the ultimate responsibility is up to the parent.

The next discussion, coming in two days, will cover the first portion of the eighth chapter, “How Consumer Culture Undermines Children’s Well Being,” starting on page 140 and continuing until the subheading “Patterns of Media Use” on page 153.