So You Think You Can Raise a Brand-Free Kid?

from Tyee, via AlterNet:



So You Think You Can Raise a Brand-Free Kid?

By Colleen Kimmett, The Tyee. Posted November 5, 2007.


From day one, you've got to fight Disney and the Winnie the Pooh.



Parents, be warned: It takes only a single visit to McDonald's for your child to get hooked on the greasy stuff for life.

Okay, so that's an exaggeration. But the three-year-old son of Angela Verbrugge still remembers his one and only meal under the golden arches. Which has Verbrugge worried.

And Kyla Epstein swears if her young son Max ever wants to eat there, he'll be doing it on his own dime.

These parents aren't raging against the health detriments of fast food. Instead, they are making a conscious effort to limit the amount of branding and advertising their kids are exposed to in all aspects of their lives; what they eat, wear, watch and play with.

It's not easy. Brands are everywhere -- literally.

Disney 24/7

Genevieve McMahon says she experienced an "eye-opening" moment the first time she bought disposable diapers for her newborn daughter Imogen, who was then too small for the cloth variety her parents preferred.


"We were unpacking them to put them in her drawer and realized there were Walt Disney Winnie the Pooh characters all over them," she says.

"It was at that point when we were like, oh wow ... it's everywhere. I mean, she's not even conscious and yet here they are advertising. I'm staring at it everyday. And eventually...she's going to recognize them."

Exactly. In her book Buy Buy Baby: How Consumer Culture Manipulates Parents and Harms Young Minds, Susan Gregory Thomas explores the widespread and controversial phenomenon of using spokes-characters in advertising to young children.

She describes one study in which toddlers are shown a made-up commercial with a mouse character. The researcher's hypothesis? If the mouse was seen eating a certain kind of cracker, when given a choice later, the child would choose those same crackers. .....(more)

The complete piece is at: http://www.alternet.org/mediaculture/66913/

But raising a completely brand free kid is going to do just as much damage to their psyche and socialization skills as raising a completely consumerist, brand obsessed kid will.

Be conscious, be healthy, and be safe with choices and make sure your kid understands the benefits and values of those choices, but treating your kid like some kind of sociological experiment is just not healthy in my opinion. Not shopping at Wal Mart is one thing. Not letting your kid eat crap food just because it has a character on it is one thing. Not letting your kid have only brand name designer clothes is one thing. But actively prohibiting them from such a wide swath of things just to prove a point seems silly and less about the kid than the parent.

I grew up with all that shit around me and I could care less about any of it.
The LAST place I want to go is Disney World. We drive UNglamorous cars,
eat mostly at non-fast food restaurants (unless we're on a road trip and in a big hurry),
and watch mostly PBS. Of my three kids in thier 20's, only one is into brand names - she's into fashion
and so are her friends....so what?

I had the strangest experience with the way in which advertisers make something into a "must have" obsession for kids.

When my kids were in kgarden and preschool, we lived in Europe for a year b/c of work stuff.

When we came back to the U.S., our neighbor picked us up at the airport with her three kids. All three of them were completely insane over the rage du jour... mighty morphing power rangers. they knew all the "stats" and had all varieties of accoutrements...

my kids had missed this entire moment and the difference was startling. The marketing of cartoons and fictional characters is pretty amazing... Pokemon took this whole issue over the top, imo, and made the insanity pretty clear. Or maybe it was adults trading in beanie babies. sheesh