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Buy, Buy Childhood: Helping Children Resist the Lure of Today's Media and Commercial Culture
By Diane Levin, Ph.D.

Today’s children are growing up in a media-saturated environment. They average 35 hours per week of “screen time,” during which they watch TV or videos, play with computer and video games, and use the Internet. Before entering kindergarten, the average child will have spent over 4,000 hours watching television alone—more time than doing anything but sleeping. All this time spent in front of a screen affects how children interact with and what they expect from their world.

Much of what children see on the screen can undermine healthy development and is permeated with content that teaches lessons that go against what the adults who care about children try to teach. What they see affects their developing ideas and behavior—about violence, gender roles, sex, and more. For instance, by the end of elementary school, the average child will have witnessed over 8,000 murders and 100,000 other acts of violence on the screen, much of which is glamorized, just-for-fun violence. “Screen time” also takes valuable time away from the concrete experiences that young children need to learn best. It can also promote passivity and a need to be entertained by others.

The impact of media goes far beyond what children see on the screen. There is also the commercialism linked to media—thousands of media-linked products that permeate most aspects of children’s lives, from toys and clothes to food and lunch boxes. Selling toys and other products to children through TV programs was not allowed until 1984, when the Federal Communications Commission deregulated children’s television. Deregulation led to enormously successful programs like “Masters of the Universe,” “GI Joe,” “Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles,” and the “Mighty Morphin Power Rangers,” which were created to sell products. Indeed, these “program-length commercials” transformed the very nature of childhood. Since deregulation, a majority of the best- selling toys have been linked to the media, such as Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles, Transformers, and Spiderman. Deregulation has led to big changes for children, their parents and teachers—many of which we are only now beginning to recognize and understand.

What’s the problem?
Since deregulation, many parents and teachers worry about how they see media and commercial culture affecting their children. They report having increasing difficulty trying to limit the influence of today’s media and marketing forces on their children. They say they see negative effects in:
• how children use their free time—often saying they are bored and asking for more and more screen time;
• how children play—often having trouble becoming engaged in play, even when they have a room full of toys; • how children use the content they see on the screen, including bringing in the violent and sexual content they see into their play and interactions with others;
• what they are learning about being boys and girls—with extreme stereotypes about how boys and girls are supposed to look and behave;
• their children’s frequent nagging for things they want or “need” and the fleeting happiness that acquiring new objects seems to bring before the nagging begins again.

Media and commercial culture are having too big an impact on young children’s learning and development for we, as parents and teachers, to try to brush it aside. It is time for everyone who cares about children to work together to reduce the hazards that media and marketing are creating for them. Here are two examples of the kind of rethinking that can help you develop effective responses.

The impact of media on play
From a parent: “I started using television and DVD’s with my daughter when I was making dinner or taking a shower. She started asking for it at other times and gradually, without our even realizing it, it took up a lot of her free time. Now, when she has free time and we don’t turn it on, she says she’s bored, even though she has a room full of toys. Is this a problem or am I just being a nervous parent?” From a teacher: “It’s harder and harder to have ‘free play’ in my classroom. Some children can’t cope with the lack of structure. They roam around the room dabbling with this or that, but rarely getting involved in any activity for long. When they do, it often quickly dissolves into a conflict. I’ve stopped putting out some of the more traditional materials, like playdough. Children don’t do much with it; they just poke at it and then go on to something else. It’s often easier to plan structured activities that I lead.”

Play is vital to all aspects of children’s development and learning. Children actively use play to master experience and skills and to try out new things. In the process, they learn a lot about how to find interesting problems to work on and how to solve them in creative ways. This helps children feel the sense of power that comes from actively figuring things out on their own. It helps them be excited about finding new problems and solving them. It also helps them see themselves as problems solvers—an attitude that serves them well in all aspects of learning, both formal and informal.

How children play affects what they learn as they play. When play is a creation of children’s own imaginations, experiences, abilities, and needs, it is likely to more fully meet their social, emotional, and intellectual needs and contribute to a solid foundation for later learning.

Like the accounts above, many parents and teachers say a lot of children have trouble creating their own play. Children have less time to play as more of their time is taken up watching a screen. When they do have time to play, the highly realistic, media-linked toys they often use can channel them into imitating what they see on the screen rather than engaging their own creative play and problem solving.

Children who do not engage regularly in creative play are less likely to learn the important skills that the play can teach. When this happens, we would expect to see children who have short attention spans, flit from thing to thing, and are at loose ends when they have free time or during “free play.” In a sense, these children have developed what I call “Problem Solving Deficit Disorder (PSDD),” the inability to find and engage in solving interesting problems. This can jeopardize the very foundation that is needed for optimal learning which requires the ability to problem solve.

Helping children reclaim play
Helping children become good players is one of the best ways we can reduce the impact of PSDD. In many cases this will mean placing more emphasis on:
• reducing the time children spend glued to the screen so that they have more time to play;
• helping children find interesting problems to work on and then helping them develop the skills they need to solve those problems;
• providing children with deeply meaningful content to bring to their play that comes from their direct experience rather than the superficial content that often comes from the screen;
• helping children learn to use open-ended materials such as playdough, blocks, etc., in the service of their play, rather than expecting toys to tell them how to play;
• entering children’s play in unobtrusive ways to help them engage in and sustain creative play.

The impact of media on social development
From a teacher: “I find I’m spending more and more time helping my children settle disputes. Many kids seem to have fewer skills than the children I had when I started teaching [15 years ago]. More kids hurt other children as soon as they can’t get their way. I keep telling them to ‘use words, not fists,’ but it’s often like talking to a wall. I think some kids actually feel scared by what’s going on.”

Children learn how to interact positively with others through a slow process of construction. They use content from how they are treated, their interaction with others, and how they see people treating each other to build their own ideas about how to behave. They gradually learn what to say and do to work out problems with others in a peaceful manner and to have respectful give-and-take relationships. It is vital that children learn these skills when they are young, because research suggests that patterns of behavior at age eight are related to behavior in adulthood.

Screen time takes time away from interacting and learning how to interact with other children, so many children have fewer opportunities to learn positive social behavior. It teaches a great deal about aggressive and mean-spirited behavior. In addition, media and commercial messages teach girls to judge themselves and other girls as objects—how they look and what they can buy determines their value, not what they can actually do. Boys learn to judge girls this way, too. And boys learn to judge themselves and other boys by how strong, independent, and ready to fight they are. In a sense, both girls and boys are made into objects, and it’s much easier to be mean and uncaring to an object than a person. This undermining of the development of positive social behavior and relationships can relate in what seems like “compassion deficit disorder (CDD)”, whereby children have less ability to take or care about the point of view of others.

What often results from CDD are accounts about problems with aggression among children like that of the teacher above. Many teachers say they spend too much time trying to maintain the safety of their classrooms and admit to resorting to more “time outs” and harsher “discipline techniques” than in the past. Schools abolish recess because children hurt each other on the playground. And parents rely more on screens to keep children well behaved when they get together to play.

Helping children learn positive social behavior
There is much parents and teachers can do to counteract “compassion deficit disorder” that may often involve rethinking conventional practices. For example, you can work on:
• recognizing that children’s aggression is often a result of their not having learned how else to interact with each other in give-and-take ways or to work out their problems with others;
• taking a more active role helping children find positive ways to interact and solve their problems peacefully;
• helping both boys and girls expand their concepts of what’s okay for them to do as boys and girls;
• talking with children about the mean-spirited, sexist and violent content they see on the screen to counteract the harmful lesson taught and teach alternative ones;
• helping children find the deep satisfaction that can come from solving problems and mastering new skills—thereby learning “I can do it!” instead of “I want it!”

In conclusion
Children urgently need the help of the important grown-ups in their lives to overcome the many special challenges that the media and commercial culture have created. Once we have a lens for recognizing how media and commercial culture play can influence our children, we are better equipped to develop strategies that can work for us and for them. The above discussions of play and social development illustrate how we can begin to fashion a comprehensive and meaningful response. And as we do, it will also be important to work with others to try to change the societal conditions that are making it so much harder for us to be good parents and teachers.

To learn more about the impact of the media and commercial culture on young children:

Websites
Campaign for a Commercial-Free Childhood.
www.commercialfreechildhood.org
Coalition working to stop marketing practices that harm children.

Teachers Resisting Unhealthy Children’s Entertainment [TRUCE].
www.truceteachers.org
Educators who prepare materials to help parents counteract the negative impact of media and promote healthy play.

Books
Carlsson-Paige, N. (2008). Taking Back Childhood: Helping Your Kids Thrive in a Fast-Paced, Media-Saturated, Violence-Filled World. New York: Hudson Street Press.

DeGaetano, G. (2004). Parenting Well in a Media Age: Keeping Our Kids Human. Fawnskin, CA: Personhood Press.

Elkind, D. (2008). The Power of Play: Learning What Comes Naturally. Cambridge, MA: DaCapo LifelongBook.

Levin, D. & Kilbourne, J. (In press). So Sexy So Soon: The New Sexualized Childhood and What Parents Can Do To Protect Their Kids. New York: Ballantine Book

Diane Levin, Ph.D., is an internationally-recognized expert on media and children. She is a professor at Wheelock College in Boston and the author of several books, including So Sexy So Soon: The New Sexualized Childhood and What Parents Can Do To Protect Their Kids, to be released in the summer of 2008. Dr. Levin spoke at the Winnetka Alliance’s Networking Dinner in January, 2008. This article was first published in the Spring/Summer 2008 issue of Early Childhood.