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Will Obama take action? - Parents send appeal to regulate media marketing to children
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On Thursday, June 18, 2009, the Campaign for a Commercial Free Childhood (CCFC), the Boston based non-profit national coalition of health care professionals, educators, advocacy groups and concerned parents, faxed an appeal that included over 2,500 signatures along with personal statements to President Barack Obama asking, him to “direct the Federal Trade Commission (FTC) and the Federal Communications Commission (FCC) to evaluate their current policies and regulations on marketing to children.”
Since we live in a fast-paced world where advertising to children proliferates 24 hours a day, seven days a week on virtually every media platform, CCFC, which was founded in 2000 has worked to “counter the harmful effects of marketing to children through action, advocacy, education, research, and collaboration.”
CCFC believes that corporate marketers are taking “unfair advantage of children’s developmental inability to understand the persuasive intent of advertising messages,” thus training children to be consumers from cradle-to-grave instead of “healthy, well-rounded citizens.”
Another one of CCFC’s ongoing campaigns, in addition to their appeal to Obama, is an excellent and enlightening documentary from the Media Education Foundation, Consuming Kids: The Commercialization of Childhood, which targets the effects of media and marketing on children that according to the CCFC has proliferated since the 1980s, when children’s television programming was deregulated, and the FTC’s authority over advertising regulation was restricted by Congress.
In the last quarter of 2007, Common Sense Media, a leading nonprofit, nonpartisan organization dedicated to improving the impact of media and entertainment on kids and families, submitted a detailed questionnaire to all the presidential candidates running for the 2008 election. Each campaign responded to a variety of questions regarding issues that spanned the violence in video games, to the role of the Federal Communications Commission.
Among the number of questions posed by Common Sense Media, one in particular, “As a parent what is your biggest concern when it comes to the media’s impact on your kids?” – drew a thoughtful response from Obama when he said, “Michelle and I have tried to instill in our children a sense of what’s right and wrong; a sense of what’s important, of what’s worth striving for. As best we can, we also try to shield them from the harsher elements of life, and introduce them to the realities of adulthood at an appropriate age. But the concern shared by so many parents today – a concern that frankly hasn’t been taken seriously enough by some on the left – is that raising your children this way has become exceedingly difficult in a mass media culture that saturates our airwaves with a steady stream of sex, violence and materialism. I worry that even if Michelle and I do our best to impart what we think are important values to our children; the media out there will undermine our lessons and teach them something different.”
Obama continued by adding, “But there is big opportunity here for families as well. We live in an age of historic access to information and inter-connectedness. We need to make sure that all our children have access to these technologies and we must teach our children how to harness the huge potential of this technology. I want to make sure my kids are protected from the dangers of the new media world, but I also want to make sure they reap the benefits of it.”
CCFC’s Director, Dr. Susan Linn, psychologist at Judge Baker Children's Center and Harvard Medical School said in a press release, “The President rightly observes that media can be beneficial to children. But media and marketing also contribute to what he calls, an ‘overall coarsening of our culture.’ We hope that having a President who understands, firsthand, the struggle to raise healthy children in a commercialized culture means that parents can finally expect some help.”
Author and CCFC supporter Joe Kelly adds, “The limited resources of hard-working moms and dads are no match for multi-billion dollar marketers. Their rapidly evolving technologies bypass parents and educators to target children directly on TV, the Web, cell phones, video games, and even at school.”
As of this publication date, CCFC awaits a response from the President.
If you enjoyed this article, you may want to read:
The selling of childhood: Have commercials and product placements gone too far?
The selling of childhood: Part 2
How to use Common Sense Media: Making informed choices for your child’s entertainment
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