by John de Graaf; David Wann; Thomas H Naylor; David Horsey; Vicki Robin
Indeed, nearly 80 percent of food ads on Saturday morning children’s programs still hawk high-calorie, sugary, or salt-laden items. With the hours that children spend in front of the tube, it’s not surprising that children today are far more likely to be obese than they were in the early days of television. Obesity rates among American children doubled in the 1980s alone and have been increasing even faster since then.7
Today’s children are exposed to far more TV advertising than their parents were. The average child sees nearly 40,000 commercials a year, about 110 a day. In 1984, deregulation of children’s television by the Federal Trade Commission allowed TV shows and products to be marketed together as a package. Within a year, nine of the top ten best-selling toys were tied to TV shows.
But more important, perhaps, is the difference between today’s ads and those of a generation ago. In the old ads, parents were portrayed as pillars of wisdom who both knew and wanted what was best for their children. Children, on the other hand, were full of wonder and innocence and were eager to please mom and dad. There was gender stereotyping—girls wanted dolls, and boys wanted cowboys and Indians—but rebelling against one’s parents wasn’t part of the message.
KIDS AS CATTLE
Now the message has changed. Marketers openly refer to parents as “gatekeepers” whose efforts to protect their children from commercial pressures must be circumvented so that those children, in the rather chilling terms used by the marketers, can be “captured, owned, and branded.” At a 1996 marketing conference called Kid Power, held appropriately at Disney World, the keynote address, “Softening the Parental Veto,” was presented by the marketing director of McDonald’s.
Speaker after speaker revealed the strategy: Portray parents as fools and fuddy-duddies who aren’t smart enough to realize their children’s need for the products being sold. It’s a proven technique for neutralizing parental influence in the marketer/child relationship.
Presenters at Kid Power ’96 further revealed how marketers use children to design effective advertising campaigns. Kids are given cameras to photograph themselves and their friends so that marketers can see how they dress and spend their time. They are observed at home, at school, in stores, and at public events. Their spending habits are carefully tracked. They are gathered into focus groups and asked to respond to commercials, separating the “cool” from the “uncool.”
The “coolest” contemporary ads frequently carry the message delivered by Kid Power ’96 speaker Paul Kurnit, a prominent marketing consultant. “Antisocial behavior in pursuit of a product is a good thing,” Kurnit stated calmly, suggesting that advertisers could best reach children by encouraging rude, often aggressive behavior and faux rebellion against the strictures of family discipline.8 There is, some critics say, a serious danger in this: If rude, aggressive behavior becomes the norm for children as they emulate advertising models, to what level will children have to escalate their aggressive activities to really feel they are rebelling?
SHOOTING YOUR NEIGHBOR’S CAT
None of that seems to matter to the marketers who advertise in Electronic Gaming Monthly, a magazine popular with kids who are avid video game players. When her eight-year-old son Arthur first showed her several of the magazine’s ads, Caroline Sawe, a Seattle single mother, was shocked. Her son loves video games, but he was disturbed by an ad he saw in the May 1998 issue. It was for a game called “Point Blank.” Boldly splashed on the ad in giant print was the headline “MORE FUN THAN SHOOTING YOUR NEIGHBOR’S CAT.” “I screamed when I saw it,” Sawe recalls. “I think I scared Arthur, but I was so upset.”9
The ad’s copy was equally blunt:“Bang! Meow! Bang! Meow! Come on already. It’s time you move up the food chain and take aim at something that sounds better when it explodes. . . . The directions are easy. If it’s bigger than a pixel, shoot it.” Sawe leafed through the magazine, growing even more horrified. Ad after ad glorified mindless violence. One, for a game called “Vigilante 8,” pictured a school bus armed with machine guns and missiles, commandeered by Molo, a “psycho” looking for revenge after being expelled from school. That one was especially disturbing because it was published the same month that Kip Kinkel shot up his high school in Springfield, Oregon, killing two fellow students.
Sawe, a tall, passionate woman who immigrated to the United States from her native Tanzania, shakes her head sadly when she thinks about the ads and Arthur’s exposure to them. Is this what she left her tribal homeland on the slopes of Mount Kilimanjaro and came to America for? Are there no limits to what affluenza-afflicted marketers will do in their search for quick profits from children?
GOTTA HAVE THE CLOTHES
The “antisocial” ads are targeted primarily at boys. For girls, the messages are more genteel, but they still place products on a pedestal, above other values. A Sears ad from a few years ago is instructive: In it, actress and singer Maia Campbell tells girls, “You gotta believe in your dreams. You gotta stand up for yourself. You gotta be there for your friends. But, hey, first you gotta have something to wear. You gotta have the clothes.” The ad shows Campbell modeling clothes collectively priced at $267.
Companies selling beauty products are targeting younger and younger girls. By the age of thirteen, 26 percent of American girls wear perfume every day. Christian Dior makes bras for preschoolers. Jeans ads feature preteen girls in sexual poses. Ad critic Laurie Mazur says such images “may have dangerous implications,” pointing out that nearly half a million American children are victims of sexual abuse each year.10
That didn’t stop Abercrombie and Fitch from releasing a Christmas 2003 “field guide” with the teaser headline “Group Sex and More” and articles that essentially encouraged sexual experimentation by teens. The company also paraded teen models in underwear to promote the opening of a new store in Boston and used sexually suggestive slogans to market underwear sized for nine-year-old girls.
TODAY’S LESSON IS BROUGHT TO YOU BY. . .
Not only are the messages different today, but they also aren’t limited to print and television. As marketers attempt to get their message through the clutter of advertising aimed at children, they look to put ads in places where ads have never gone before.
In 1998, a student was suspended at Greenbrier High School in rural Georgia. His crime? Wearing a Pepsi T-shirt on “Coke Day in the Schools.” It seems the six hundred students at Greenbrier had been instructed to wear Coke T-shirts and to spell out Coca-Cola on the school lawn to impress a visiting Coca-Cola executive and give the school a chance to win $500 from the soft drink company. If we had had anything to say about it, it would have been the principal who was suspended, for allowing such a blatant commercial misuse of his school. But the incident at Greenbrier High is only the tip of an iceberg of commercialism that has penetrated deep into America’s schools, allowing serious affluenza infections to follow close behind.
BETTER THAN STRAIGHT A’S
In the Age of Affluenza, voters demand tax cuts and reductions in public spending as their personal spending habits leave them with growing credit debt. Then too, affluent families increasingly send their children to private schools, further reducing voter support for public school systems.
As funding for education tightens, school boards all across America have turned to corporations for financial help. In exchange for cash, companies are allowed to advertise their products on school rooftops, hallways, readerboards, book covers, uniforms, and buses.
A walk through the hallways of Colorado Springs high schools reveals a string of mini-billboards informing students that “M&Ms are better than straight A’s” and encouraging them to “Satisfy your hunger for higher education with Snickers.” The ads, critics say, constitute an endorsement by the schools of the very foods students are warned against in their health classes. School buses in Colorado Springs also carry ads, for 7-Up, Burger King, and the like, boldly painted—by the students!— on their sides. School superintendent Kenneth Burnley (who was chosen N
ational School Superintendent of the Year for his policy allowing advertising in his schools) defends the ads, saying the money they provide is needed because voters in the prosperous, all-American city haven’t passed a school bond since 1972. “People say, ‘I’d rather buy a boat than give money to the schools,’” Burnley explains.11
CASH CROPS?
“Children in our society are seen as cash crops to be harvested,” says Alex Molnar, a professor of education at Arizona State University who has been investigating commercialism in the schools for many years.1 Angry and passionate, Molnar readily displays his collection of “curriculum materials” created by corporations for use in the public schools.
Students find out about self-esteem by discussing “Good and Bad Hair Days” with materials provided by Revlon. They learn to “wipe out that germ” with Lysol, and study geothermal energy by eating Gusher’s Fruit Snacks (the “teachers’ guide” suggests that each student be given a Gusher to bite and to compare the sensation to a volcanic eruption!). They also learn the history of Tootsie Rolls, make shoes for Nike as an environmental lesson, count Lay’s potato chips in math class, and find out why the Exxon Valdez oil spill wasn’t really harmful at all (materials courtesy of— you guessed it—Exxon) or why clear-cutting is beneficial—with a little help from Georgia-Pacific. Maybe we could turn around the steady decline of our children’s SAT scores if we just asked them questions about good and bad hair days instead of world geography.
Cover Concepts, a company that bills itself as “America’s largest in-school communications partner,” claims to reach 30 million students in 43,000 schools by “working in tandem with school administrators to distribute free, advertiser-sponsored materials such as textbook covers, lesson plans, posters, bookmarks, specialty packs, lunch menus, and other fun educational materials.” In nearly half a million classrooms, 8.1 million children watch Channel One, a twelve-minute daily news program that includes two minutes of commercials. Viewing is mandatory for students because advertisers, who pay as much as $200,000 for a single thirty-second spot on Channel One, are told they can count on a captive audience.
Fortunately, a parent-teacher backlash is emerging in a few communities. In late 2001, the Seattle School Board voted to create an anticommercial policy, including a ban on Channel One.
CAPTIVE KIDS
As affluenza becomes an airwave-borne childhood epidemic, America’s children pay a high price. Not only does their lifestyle undermine the children’s physical health, but their mental health seems to suffer too. Psychologists report constantly rising rates of teenage depression and thoughts about suicide, and a tripling of actual child suicide rates since the 1960s.13
Much of this stems from the overscheduling of children to prepare them for our adult world of consumerism, workaholism, and intense competition. In some places, this reaches truly ridiculous levels. Since the passage of the No Child Left Behind Act, nearly 20 percent of American school districts have banned recess for elementary school children. The idea, as one Tacoma, Washington, school administrator put it, is to “maximize instruction time to prepare the children to compete in the global economy.” This is nuts. We’re talking second graders here.
Kate Cashman, a Seattle Post-Intelligencer humor columnist, wonders if we don’t have it backward. At a time of rising childhood obesity, we’re getting rid of recess while inviting junk food into our schools. She thinks we should reverse that—more recess, less junk food. She says she’d call her policy the “No Child Left with a Fat Behind Act.” Sign us up to lobby in favor of the act. Let’s try to get it passed in every state in the country! It may sound silly, but it makes far more sense than most of the legislation out there these days.
What kind of values do our children learn from their exposure to affluenza? In a recent poll, 93 percent of teenage girls cited shopping as their favorite activity. Fewer than 5 percent listed “helping others.” In 1967, two-thirds of American college students said “developing a meaningful philosophy of life” was “very important” to them, while fewer than one-third said the same about “making a lot of money.” By 1997, those figures were reversed.14 A 2004 poll at UCLA found that entering freshman ranked becoming “very well off financially” ahead of all other goals. Juliet Schor surveyed children age ten to thirteen for their responses to the statement “I want to make a lot of money when I grow up.” Of those children, 63 percent agreed; only 7 percent thought otherwise.
Asked about their “highest priority” in a 1999 poll taken at the University of Washington, 42 percent of those surveyed cited “looking good/having good hair.” Another 18 percent listed “staying inebriated,” while only 6 percent checked “learning about the world.”
Jennifer Gailus and Olivia Martin would have been among the 6 percent. In 1996 Gailus, a vivacious former cheerleader, and her best friend, Martin, who is quiet and serious, wrote a play titled Barbie Get Real, satirizing the hollow life of appearances and shopping they say had become rampant among their peers at Eastlake High School in affluent Redmond, Washington (the home of Microsoft).
Asked at the time why they wrote the play, Gailus, who is a now a high school math teacher, summed up the pernicious effect affluenza has on children. “The kids in our high school,” she said sadly, “take everything for granted. They think they’ve earned it and the world owes it to them. They’ll just take, take, take, and they won’t give anything back. And our society’s going to crumble if we don’t have people that give.”15
CHAPTER 8
Community
chills
Everyplace looks like no place,
and no place looks like home.
—JAMES KUNTSLER, AUTHOR
The Geography of Nowhere
You may have seen the ad. It’s a fairly recent one for an SUV. It pictures a suburban street of expensive, identical ranch-style houses with perfect lawns. The SUV being advertised is parked in the driveway of one of them. But in every other driveway is. . . a tank. A real tank. A big, deadly Army tank. It’s a chilly ad, meant to remind us of how chilling our communities have become as our war of all-against-all consumer competition continues. Psychologically, it suggests that we need to drive something as strong as a tank to compete with all the other killer vehicles out there. But a classy, comfortable tank. Of course, the ad is an exaggeration. Our communities aren’t this cold and hostile. Not yet. But there’s a definite chill in the air.
During the 1950s, Dave used to walk with his grandfather four or five blocks to the town square in Crown Point, Indiana, where the older man lived. Everyone knew his grandfather, even the guy carrying a sack of salvaged goods. Forty-five years later, Dave still remembers the names of his grandparents’ neighbors, and the summer backyard parties they threw. But a sense of place and the trust that comes with it are disappearing from our towns and neighborhoods.
In 1951, Americans sat together with their neighbors, laughing at Red Skelton. In 1985, we still watched Family Ties as a family. But by 1995, each member of a family often watched his or her own TV, as isolation and passivity became a way of life. What began as a quest for the good life in the suburbs degenerated into private consumption splurges that separated one neighbor from another, and one family member from another. We began to feel lost in our own neighborhoods—it wasn’t just the “Desperate Housewives” who were ill at ease. Huge retailers took advantage of the confusion, expanding to meet our demand for cheap underwear, hardware, and software.
Many sociologists are concerned about the health implications of our neighborhoods. In a book titled The Power of Clan, Dr. Stewart Wolf examines a multi-decade study of a small town near Philadelphia, Roseto, where longevity is legendary. He attributes the town’s remarkable health (which has, alas, slipped recently) to three-generation bonding in families, neighborliness, devoted churchgoing, and membership in social organizations. Yet suburban design often turns a cold shoulder on the neighborhood “clan,” with garage doors that resemble drawbridges, privacy fences that be
come castle walls, and private “mini-manors” that encourage exclusive lifestyles. Physical features such as these affect the social and even physical health of suburban residents.
The more we chased bargains and the paychecks that bought them, the more vitality slipped away from our towns. Now, if we want to experience Main Street— the way it was in the good old days—we travel to Disney World, to a faux community where smiling shopkeepers, the slow pace, and the quaintness remind us that our real communities were once close-knit and friendly.
How will Disney portray the good old days of the suburbs, in future exhibits? Will it orchestrate background ambience —highway traffic, leaf blowers, and beeping garbage trucks—to make it more realistic? Will it recreate gridlock as bumper-to-bumper cars, complete with cell phones to tell our families we’ll be late for the next ride? Will our tour of the “gated community” require more tickets than rides through the “inner city” do? Will recreational and business opportunities that have sprung up in recent years be dramatized—businesses like Kid Shuttle, a taxi service for kids whose moms aren’t home to take them to tae kwon do? Will Disney hire extras to play the roles of other suburbanites who can’t drive—elderly, disabled, and low-income residents, peeking out from behind living-room curtains?
BOWLING ALONE
Where can America’s stranded nondrivers go, in today’s world? There’s no colorful cafô down the block, or bowling alley or tavern, where neighbors can “be apart together, and mutually withdraw from the world,” in the words of writer Ray Oldenburg.1 Such “great good places” or “third places,” that are apart from both home and work environments, are now often illegal—violations of zoning codes. The truth is, the term “community life” is perceived as archaic in a world so dominated by business and government.
