DON'T THEORISE! ACCESSORIZE!

[myniamh]

Documentary: Consuming Kids: Commercialization of Childhood
Creepy, creepy, creepy arsed documentary on advertising to children (in the US). Holy crap.

Comments

[aphephobia]

Hopefully parents will watch it and start to get a clue and talk to their kids about marketing and advertising and just the general level of shit foisted onto kids nowadays.

Seriously, I remember being on MumsWeb and the women there whinging about how their kids wanted a heap of crap and they had to buy it and my comment of "I suppose you could talk to them about how advertising is geared to make them want stuff in the same way it's pushed at adults" was met with "But you don't understaaaaand, hippy."

Then again, pointing out to these women that the diet industry was huge and beauty standards are unrealistic was met with some seriously fucked up criticism and fatphobia, too. In a way, I can't help but think if people want to be stupid sheep, then who am I to begrudge marketing people for taking advantage and making a living out of that?

[myniamh]

Did you watch the bit about The Nag Factor? Where the kid throws a tantrum and the father feels judged for having a noisy kid? That's part of it all too, parents are pressured to have perfect kids and one way to hide that they cannot achieve that is to just placate them with crap.

People have been very carefully trained from birth to BE sheep.

[aphephobia]

See, that's where I'm weird. Lewis threw MEGA EPIC LJ-entry-worthy tantrums when we were out... because he was autistic. Or because there'd been some change in his routine or something freaked him out or because we were wanting to go do other things and he wanted to look at the stock market figures on the Teletext TVs in Myer or whatever. Toys wouldn't have placated him... hell, I've tried bribery, and that has only a very limited success rate! I've gotten used to being that parent that cops the filthy looks: if it's not because my kids are being demonic hellspawn, it's because I look young, or because I don't dress like a soccer mum or because I'm smoking or because my kid has green hair or because I've sworn loudly. People will find fault with ANYTHING when it comes to parents

[myniamh]

Mum used to have to get a baby sitter when she went to the shops, my brothers would chuck such a fit if we walked past the toy section.

You are a good mum, because of all of that.

[myniamh]

My god. That bit where marketing companies put a kid in a MRI machine to see what parts of it's brain lit up while he watched adds was so mind numbingly CREEPY.