Screen-Free At Last!

Here’s a sentence I never thought I’d write: I am so looking forward to Screen-Free Week. 

When CCFC began hosting Screen-Free Week, I didn’t think about it in personal terms.  After all, my daughter (now 3.5) is screen-free. And me? I barely watch TV.  Sure, I’m on the computer a lot.  But for good reasons.  To do my job. To follow important events. As part of my non-work activism.  If I’m using screens to be a more engaged citizen, what’s the problem?

Last year’s Screen-Free Week didn’t lead to lasting changes in my screen habits, but it  punctured my denial.  That little voice in my head saying “turn off the damn computer, already” has gotten progressively – and annoyingly -- louder.  And as Screen-Free Week approaches, it’s hard to deny that voice is right most of the time.

I need a break from screens -- computers specifically.  My eyes need a break from backlighting.  My brain needs a break from information overload.  My body needs a break from days of too-little movement and nights of too-little-sleep.

And my family needs a break from a distracted dad/husband.  Because my daughter is still screen-free, I tell myself we’re doing great job. But really, managing her screen-time is only one part of my responsibility.  I need to stop modeling screen-addiction.  And I need to be present when I’m with her, instead of thinking about my next email or tweet.

So in my quest to regain some balance, I’ve made two rules for Screen-Free Week:

1. No screens at home at all.  I’m not going to distinguish between entertainment, communication, and work because almost all of my screen time can be justified under the latter two. I’m just going dark.

2. Screen-free lunches. I preach the importance of screen-free meals all the time, but eat my lunch in front of the computer every workday.

Instead, I plan on reading books more, sleeping more, eating lunch outside more, and being less generally distracted.  I also plan on using some of my extra screen-free hours to develop a realistic plan for managing my computer time when it’s over. I really don’t want to be writing this same post again next year!
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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

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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.

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