D.I.Y. Valentines

This post was written by guest blogger Brandy King of Knowledge Linking. After spending eight years working with research on children and media, Brandy now faces the challenge of raising two young boys in our media-saturated and commercialized world.

Since it’s my first year with a child in school, I’m new to the “Valentine’s Day Party Procedure.” But I received a notice giving me precise instructions on what to do (and not do) to help my child participate in the celebration. If he wants to give out cards, he can bring one in for every child, signed with his name (but without their names written on them), and if we attach any food items they have to be from the approved snack list because of allergies.

When I was at the grocery store today, I glanced at the Valentine spread and saw that the ONLY options for card kits were covered in licensed characters. I quickly decided we’d be making our own Valentines, which I always thought was more fun anyway. I headed home, cut out 17 red construction paper hearts, and set up our kitchen table with paints and stickers.

My son could not have been more excited about this art project. He chattered on about how he would make some extras for his teachers, how he would manage to carry them all, and how he would hand them all out. He worked diligently all afternoon with several breaks and at the end he had created a grand total of 6 of them. It’s going to be a long few days working up to 17! But I could see the pride and excitement in his eyes when he saw them all laid out to dry on the dining room table.

Inspired by the day of watching him create, I finally caved and joined Pinterest, the online community for saving and sharing images and ideas from around the web. My goal was to create a board of cute Valentine craft ideas for you all to rival the option of mass-market commercialized card kits.

Check out these great Valentine crafts you can make with your kids this weekend. Share your ideas or a link to your own Pinterest board in the comments below! Read more!

Where do you draw the line?

This post was written by guest blogger Brandy King of Knowledge Linking. After spending the last eight years working with research on children and media, Brandy now faces the challenge of raising two young boys in our media-saturated and commercialized world.

When I was interviewing other parents about how they handle holiday gifts, I had two mothers say the same thing to me: I let my kids have licensed characters on pajamas, but not on any other clothes. Their rationale was that they didn’t want their children to be walking advertisements.

I had never thought of commercialization in terms of items used in the home vs. out of the home. So this got me thinking: How is it that I draw the line? What are the determining factors I use to make decisions around commercialized items? And what criteria do other parents use?

I realized that my determining factor essentially comes down to the intent behind the gift. For example, I’ve let a few Mickey Mouse shirts slip into my kids’ wardrobe because they were brought home as gifts from Disney World by close relatives. And I let a Cars racetrack toy through because my son’s Godfather excitedly picked it out as a Christmas gift and couldn’t wait to put it together with him. But when acquaintances pick up a quick gift to bring with them with they visit, they seem to automatically go for whatever they can find with the latest “boy-oriented” Disney character on it. Since my kids don’t really know Disney characters, and don’t usually become attached to the gift, off to charity it goes.

Since this “intent criteria” is not hard and fast, I often wonder if I’m being hypocritical. But in the end, I always come back to my real goal being “commercialization in moderation”, so I feel OK about the very few commercialized items we do have in the house. And just like decisions around what to feed a baby or how to put them to sleep, I believe that what ultimately matters is that it’s the most comfortable decision for that individual family.

Other parents, like the friends I interviewed, had certain delineations, certain rules, that they could more easily apply; characters were either allowed (pajamas), or not allowed (school clothes). (I’m assuming this is more useful criteria than mine when it comes to helping kids understand why decisions are made). And some parents feel like they ultimately want no part of supporting certain companies, so just make a blanket rule not to allow anything even questionably commercialized into the house.

I’m really curious to hear from other parents about how they make decisions. In fact, I’m so interested to hear and learn from others that I am co-hosting a Twitter chat with CCFC on this very topic! I hope you’ll join us, here are the details:

Parenting in a Commercialized World: Where Do You Draw the Line?
February 2nd, 2012 at 9pm EST at hashtag #CCFCchat
Hosted by:
Campaign for a Commercial Free Childhood Twitter: @commercialfree
Brandy King of Knowledge Linking Information Services Twitter: @knowldgelinking
Melissa Wardy of Pigtail Pals – Redefine Girly Twitter: @pigtailpals

Read more!

Where Do Parents Find Support in their Communities?

This post was written by guest Mary Rothschild, facilitator of Witness for Childhood in collaboration with CCFC. Mary, who is the mother of 2 daughters and has worked with pre-school age children and served parents and teachers of children birth to age 8 for fifteen years through Healthy Media Choices.

A friend of mine, mother of two small children, calls this the “cuddling in” time of year. The holidays are over and life settles into a regular pattern and (in our part of the country, at least) the short days and cold weather keep family closer to home. It’s a good time for reflection.

If the bill has yet to come due for the gifts given a mere month ago (where are they now?) this is a good time to make strategies for more intentional getting and giving for the coming birthdays and, eventually, for those holidays again.

That’s not so easy; how do families get the local support they need for that intentionality?

What I hear is that parents talk to each other about concerns that the ways they’re spending their time and money don’t adequately reflect their values. Those friendships form bedrock for many. Then, there are the occasional workshops at school or house of worship around violence or representation of sexuality in screen media.

I’d like to reflect here on another resource: faith and humanist communities, by which I don’t just mean the major religions and humanist organizations, but whatever group gathers specifically for a connection with values and beliefs. There are groups of parents that align around specific parenting issues: breastfeeding or natural parenting, for instance, that might be included. It is difficult to find a term to cover them all.

Don’t such groups afford an ideal situation for focusing on these issues? Here are some questions, for each to ponder about their own circumstance, to start off our conversation:

• Is there recognition of the fact, in religious education curricula or parent workshops, that exposure to screen media can impact the spiritual development of young children, not just because of violence and representations of sexuality, but because it cuts into quiet time and free play, which area essential for children’s development?

• Do families have a venue for sharing strategies about situations that arise about play dates as well a birthday and holiday gifts?

• Stories from family and culture are great alternatives to the popular culture story. Do your children hear those stories of strength, sacrifice, and fulfillment without material wealth?

• Are any community resources for parents usually framed as being for mothers? Including all the adults who live with the child makes changes easier and more effective.

• Does the community take advantage of opportunities such as Screen-Free Week and/or encourage families to establish less formal and more consistent “Media Sabbaths” where all electronics are turned off, even for a couple of hours a week? Is that discussion happening?

• Do you feel supported by your community in your attempts to give your child a commercial-free childhood? If not, what could you do to elicit that support (and find others who are feeling the same way)?

• Faith and humanist communities have long been effective agents for change on a national and global level. Is activism around the commercialization of childhood on the agenda in your community?

• If your community does provide this kind of support, how is it going and what resources might your share?

The essential question is this: Is the impact of screen media on young children’s spiritual development a burning issue for your community? If not, why not?

Thanks, please share below.
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Congress to Kids: Drop Dead

Last month, when Congress declared pizza a vegetable, it was hard to believe things could get much worse. But never underestimate politicians’ ability to put corporate interests ahead of children’s health. In the massive budget bill just passed, Congress stuck in language to require the Federal Trade Commission to conduct a cost/benefit analysis before finalizing a report that would provide the food industry with science-based nutrition guidelines for marketing to children. Experts from four federal agencies put heads together, and for the past two years have tried to complete its charge (which ironically, came from Congress in the first place) amidst powerful industry push-back.

An objective approach is badly needed because Big Food’s own lame voluntary rules allow such sugar atrocities as Reese’s Puffs cereal and Kool-Aid to be marketed to kids. But this latest political delay tactic makes no sense because it’s entirely voluntary for industry to adopt any final guidelines. As Margo Wootan, nutrition policy director for the Center for Science in the Public Interest, noted:

Doing a cost-benefit analysis makes sense for regulations that require companies to actually do something. But there is no cost associated with something that is totally voluntary.

Where then, is this idea coming from? Specifically, before its report is made final, FTC must now attempt to comply with Executive Order 13563. What’s that? Bear with me, as some history is in order.

The order derives from a nasty right-wing deregulation policy that dates back (surprise!) to the Reagan administration. The Office of Information and Regulatory Affairs (OIRA) may sound innocuous, but over the past 30 years, it has become the best tool Corporate America has to kill proposed rules it doesn’t like. It acts as a gigantic hoop an agency must jump through to prove societal benefits outweigh economic costs, tacked on to an already stringent regulatory rule-making process. Here’s how Huffington Post Washington correspondent Dan Froomkin explains it:

OIRA analysts are supposed to rigorously examine proposed regulations and reject or revise them as necessary, based on interagency concerns and whether the costs of policy proposals outweigh their benefits.

This “regulatory bottleneck by design” has been a huge success for business interests over the years:

Since Ronald Reagan opened the OIRA office in 1981, Republicans have used it to particular advantage to pursue an anti-regulatory agenda, defanging environmental rules on things like water runoff and climate change — even blocking attempts to collect information that might lead to regulations.

Despite promises by President Obama to develop a new approach and some positive efforts early on to reverse Bush-era oppressive policies, this past January the White House, as Froomkin explains: “finally issued a limp executive order that basically reaffirmed the principles that had been guiding the office for years.” So much for change. The effect has been that all “significant executive-branch regulations” must get approval from OIRA before being proposed or finalized. That’s some bottleneck. (For more on deregulation and its impacts on health and safety under the Obama administration see OMB Watch.)

Which brings us back to junk food marketing to children. Remember, any final federal recommendations on nutrition guidelines would be voluntary. The entire process was never to result in regulations. This summer, FTC’s David Vladeck, director of the Bureau of Consumer Protection, wrote a frankly worded and humorous blog post in response to a massive industry freak-out led by the advertising lobby warning of “suppression of unprecedented amounts of advertising” to children. (Wasn’t that the idea?)

Vladeck tried to calm industry fears by explaining the FTC is just reporting to Congress, which “provides no basis for law enforcement action.” He repeated: “This is a report to Congress, not a rulemaking proceeding, so there’s no proposed government regulation.” And he added, just in case industry still didn’t get it: “A report is not a law, a regulation, or an order, and it can’t be enforced.” (my emphasis)

If you’re still with me, even if you didn’t attend law school, you may be wondering by now, how could Congress require that an executive order intended for proposed agency regulations apply to a report that “provides no basis for law enforcement action?”

Good question. I’ve been asking a few of my lawyer colleagues the same thing and they agree it makes no legal sense. Public health attorney Mark Gottlieb, executive director of the Public Health Advocacy Institute, which also fights the tobacco industry, told me he thinks the executive order only applies to formal rule-making and “does not seem to apply to promulgation of voluntary guidelines that go to great pains to avoid regulating industry.”

In other words, FTC is likely on solid legal ground to go ahead and release its final report to Congress without conducting any cost/benefit analysis. But I doubt we will ever see the final report. (We do have the proposed version, which can still be used to stick it to industry, as the Environmental Working Group recently did in its damning report on sugary cereals.)

This wouldn’t be the first time Congress overstepped its legal boundaries. As I argued with the pizza-as-vegetable debacle, Congress hijacked the USDA regulatory process to do the food industry’s bidding. Here, it’s not exactly the regulatory process that’s been superseded, because the report FTC is trying to release is voluntary, but Congress is just as wrong.

Apparently, it wasn’t enough for the food, advertising, and media industries to spend $37 million lobbying this year to get its way. Nor has the multi-year delay of this entire process thanks to ongoing corporate bullying sufficed. How about making bogus “job loss” claims or (for the top Chutzpah Award) warning that we’d have to import more produce if kids actually ate their fruits and vegetables? Still not enough.

Industry keeps right on lobbying, it’s what they do best. And for Congress, it’s just business as usual. But the very real consequence of maintaining the status quo is that children will continue to be exploited for their emotional vulnerability, while getting lured into bad eating habits that can last a lifetime.

Cost/benefit analysis? Industry benefits, while children pay the cost.

Postscript: Thanks to CSPI’s Margo Wootan for sharing this take action link – tell the Obama administration, don’t let Congress and the food industry win this fight.

Read more!

Sorry Mrs. O, but jumping jacks aren’t enough

At a recent summit on childhood obesity, the first lady announced a shift in her well-known Let's Move campaign -- away from food reform and toward an increased focus on exercise. Instead of "forcing [children] to eat their vegetables," she told her audience, "it's getting them to go out there and have fun."

Yes, you heard that right. The first lady actually said that eating vegetables is a chore. And that playing is a preferable focus for her campaign because it's easier.

In February 2010, when the first lady announced a campaign to "end childhood obesity within a generation," I was immediately skeptical. I worried that "Let's Move" signaled an over-emphasis on physical activity, a much safer political issue than eating habits, and one that Big Food gladly embraces.

But when I took a closer look, I was pleasantly surprised to see that three of the four issues areas initially identified by the campaign were food-related. (A fifth issue has since been added.) The goals or "pillars" of the campaign are: 1) improving access to healthy, affordable food; 2) providing healthy food in schools; 3) empowering parents and caregivers; 4) increasing physical activity; and 5) creating a healthy start for children.

It's hard to argue with any of those worthy causes, and it's important to have the first lady bring attention to issues such as food deserts, and to serve as a national spokesperson in a way we've not seen before. I have also given praise where praise was due, such as when the first lady recommended -- as part of a checklist for daycare centers to follow -- significant limits on screen time for children.

And while the White House insists that food is very much still on the agenda, it's hard to ignore the potential for politics going into an election year. (When New York University professor Marion Nestle recently dared to question the first lady's renewed emphasis on exercise, she got set straight by White House chef and Let's Move advisor Sam Kass; that's how touchy this subject is.)

Exercise is fun, but it doesn't match the science

Putting politics aside for a moment, let's talk research, which can often get lost in the shuffle or, worse, distorted by corporate interests.

Obesity expert Dr. Yoni Freedhoff, assistant professor of family medicine at the University of Ottawa, says the first lady's focus on physical activity to help "end childhood obesity in a generation" is misguided. More importantly, he says, it's not evidence-based.

He pointed me to many scientific studies showing that physical activity, while important for other reasons, has not been shown to be effective in preventing childhood obesity. (See here, here, here, and here.) On the contrary, data shows that an increase in food intake alone explains the rise in obesity in children.

Children's diets have changed so drastically in the last few decades, with the increase in calories, for example, due to soda and fast food so large, that moderate increases in exercise are not likely to make a difference.

As Freedhoff explains, it's a "testament to the simple fact that it's far more difficult to burn calories than it is to consume them."

To be clear, exercise does have many health benefits; it just shouldn't be used to distract us from overconsumption and marketing of junk food. Also, lots of skinny kids suffer from diet-related health problems, including allergies.

So if science isn't driving the exercise bandwagon, what is?

Playing it safe

After nearly two years, it's clear that Let's Move is steering away from anything that challenges the food industry. In fact, the campaign organizers appear eager to form corporate partnerships. For example, the first lady hailed Walmart's so-called "healthy food initiative" as a new "nutrition charter." Of course, Walmart hasn't exactly kept its promises when it comes to the environment, so we have little reason to trust the company when it comes to nutrition.

Moreover, the first lady's deafening silence over the past few months during extremely heated public battles over children's diets gives us more proof than we ever needed that she is either unwilling or unable to take on the hard political issues.

While Mrs. Obama certainly showed leadership last year to help pass the Healthy, Hunger-Free Kids Act to improve school food, she hasn't followed through. The recent hostile takeover of the USDA's school food regulations by Congress on behalf of the frozen food lobby was one such example.

From the beginning, Let's Move has also been mostly MIA on the extremely contentious and intractable problem of junk food marketing to children.

In one exception, the first lady gave a strong speech in March 2010 to the Grocery Manufacturers Association (Big Food lobbyists) imploring food companies to clean up their act. At the time, she asked: "What does it mean when so many parents are finding that their best efforts are undermined by an avalanche of advertisements aimed at their kids?"

But her admonishments had little impact. Instead, the food industry has launched a no-holds-barred attack on an attempt by the federal government to place reasonable, science-based, voluntary restrictions on food marketing to children.

To make its case to the feds, kids' cereal giant General Mills went so far as to argue that getting kids to eat more fruits and vegetables would hurt the nation's economy because food costs "would increase by a staggering amount."

The argument was based on a bogus economic study, which warned that demand for fruits and vegetables would skyrocket, resulting in almost $500 billion more spent on imported food and $30 billion less on domestically grown grain. As Donald Cohen, who recently uncovered this absurd claim, noted:

Even if the voluntary guidelines were that effective and their study was accurate, it's audacious marketing spin to turn an overwhelmingly positive victory for public health into a big government, job killing attack on freedom.

This one-two punch comes from the very industry players with whom Mrs. Obama claimed she could "find common ground." And it has left many advocates feeling defeated.

So when, instead of speaking out on behalf of the millions of children who will continue to be served french fries and pizza in school and get bombarded daily with Happy Meal ads, the first lady announces (as she did this week) that Let's Move has broken a record for jumping jacks, it's disappointing to say the least.

Here's what Freedhoff had to say to the first lady:

I'd tell her that we should be striving to change the environment so as to make lower-calorie, less-processed food choices the default. Let's Move may be politically palatable, but "Let's Cook" would likely have a far greater impact on health.

Let's Cook? Uh-oh, sounds like a job killer. Read more!