Cover via Amazon

What does ‘The Situation’, Lady Gaga, and the Mad Hatter have in common?

» Continue Reading

Amidst the swine flu scare, first grade teacher Jennifer Fixman has decided to make a difference. She is giving away a free song called “Wash Your Hands” to help children and their families to stay healthy. “Miss Jenny” encourages everyone to download the song and video FREE from the Home page of her site, www.edutunes.com.

“Miss Jenny” has written over 200 songs for children. She hopes that all of her educational tunes, or “Edutunes,” can make life better for children world-wide.

Press

There is a wealth of information both online and in journals about the effects of advertizing on children.  Really, it’s too much to put into a blog post; you could have a whole blog with daily posts dedicated to the topic of children and advertizing. 

But we do know that children absorb messages from the wider culture, and advertizers are the ones who put those messages into the wider culture.  Now, this isn’t all bad; how will consumers know what’s available if we don’t see it advertized?  People need to sell stuff and people need to buy stuff, and advertizing facilitates that relationship.

The scare stuff is when that relationship is built on exploitation of any group of people, but especially kids.  There are ads that exploit kids’ need to fit in, to feel secure, or to get positive attention.  There are ads that exploit gender or racial sterotypes, and kids just assume that anything they see on TV or in print is reliable.  Now, we adults know that’s not true, but kids accept the authority of what they see. 

Among the overwhelming amount of information and opinion on this topic, here are a few facts, gathered chiefly from the Love Your Body Day website.

•  
  • For children ages 6-17, the number one after-school activity is watching TV.

•  
  • Students spend about 900 hours in the classroom and 1,500 hours in front of the TV each year.

•  
  • Children who watch four or more hours of TV a day are less likely to read at grade level or play well with friend. Children who watch four or more hours of TV a day are more likely to believe claims made by advertisers.

•  
  • Saturday morning commercial TV advertisers bombard children with ads for sugary cereal, salty snacks, fast food and junk food.

•  
  • Before teens reach the legal drinking age they have watched 100,000 alcohol commercials.

Those are only a few of the alarming statistics you can find about kids and ads.  We don’t have to wrap our kids in cotton wool or lock them away from the world.  But we should take the time to talk to them about what they see and hear, so that they will learn to think critically about the advertizing that they abosrb. 

Remember, advertizers’ job is to sell stuff.  They are not interested in our children’s well-being…that’s our job.

This news story isn’t exactly new, but I still found it very interesting.  It’s about a dad, Isaac Daniel, who had a bad scare a couple of years ago–he received a call while at a conference that his son had gone missing.  Every parent’s worst nightmare.  He left his conference, jumped on a plane, and flew back home, only to find that his son was safe, and that his “missingness” was only due to a miscommunication.

But just because the danger is past doesn’t mean the fear has really gone away. So Daniel began working on a product, a GPS tracking chip that can be embedded into shoes.  The way I understand it, the chip remains dormant unless the parent calls into the monitoring company to activate satellite tracking.  Then the chip is activated and the shoe-wearer can be quickly located. 

These are pretty pricey–adult shoes go for $300-$325, and then there’s the $19.95 a month for the monitoring company.  And you can’t just use them to check whether your teens lied about where they would be, because activating the chip automatically involves notifying authorities. 

And I’m not sure that tracking kids every minute of every day is necessarily a good thing…at least I say that while I know exactly where my kids are (home sick with an ear infection, Girl Scout meeting, bus home from middle school).  But if one of my kids went missing, I’d be on that plane as fast as Isaac Daniel was.   If I had the resources of a large business on my side, I’d use them to keep kids safe in a heartbeat. 

So, the thought of all of us having tracking chips in our shoes is pretty creepy, but the thought of our kids being safe…that’s pretty appealing.