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Blue About "The Smurfs"
My contemporaries and I should be called Generation Deregulation. Born in the early 1980's, we were the first to grow up immersed in TV programs designed to sell us stuff. G.I. Joe, My Little Pony,...
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Outsourcing Summer: College Essays and the Commercialization of Childhood
A recent article in the New York Times about how high school kids are spending their summers reminded me once again that the commercialization of childhood extends way beyond Happy Meals and sexualized...
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Let’s tell Big Food to stop acting like spoiled kids—and stop inciting real...
The food industry is throwing a zillion-dollar tantrum to quash proposed national nutritional guidelines for food advertised to kids. Meanwhile, yet another research study came out demonstrating the...
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Commercialized Sexualization and the Choice to Opt Out
My initial thoughts about the Canadian couple refusing to make public the sex of their baby were not kind. It seemed like just another media circus fomented by parents exploiting their children for...
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"But Mama, just buy one at the store"
The following post was written by guest blogger Brandy King. After spending the last eight years working with research on children and media, Brandy now faces the challenge of raising two young boys in...
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Nickelodeon Admits SpongeBob Not Fit For Preschoolers
A new study from researchers at the University of Virginia finds that watching SpongeBob SquarePants has a negative influence on preschoolers' executive functioning. Children who watched 9 minutes of...
View ArticleCommercialism Corner
Commercialism Corner: Your one-stop shop for quick summaries and links to all the latest news about the commercialization of childhood.The Next Great American Consumer--Infants to 3-year-olds: They're...
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Channel One Promotes "Not Safe For School" Pics in Schools
If you're one of the 5.5 million students in a school with Channel One News, you have to watch ads every day as part of your taxpayer-funded class time. And one thing you'll see is ads for websites...
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Why do you "bother" living commercial-free?
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...
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PepsiCo wants to “scare the crap” out of your kids
The "chainsaw-wielding maniac" from Frito-Lay's online game.PepsiCo has long been my poster child for food corporations whose actions speak louder than words when to comes to responsible marketing....
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School food politics: What’s missing from the pizza-as-vegetable reporting
Over the last couple of days, news outlets have been having a field day with a proposal from Congress that pizza sauce be considered a vegetable to qualify for the National School Lunch program....
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Handling the Holidays
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...
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Why I’m (Pre)Occupied by Miley Cyrus: Does Hannah Montana Still Matter?
I don’t know how you feel about the Occupy Movement or about Miley Cyrus. As for me, having spent the past decade speaking out against the corporate takeover of childhood, I tend to be sympathetic to...
View ArticleToying with the Happy Meal: Is McDonald’s evading the law?
While most media outlets dubbed it the "Happy Meal toy ban," the ordinance passed in San Francisco last year didn't ban anything. The law just placed a few reasonable nutrition guidelines (a maximum of...
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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...
View ArticleCongress 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...
View ArticleWhere 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...
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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...
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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...
View ArticleScreen-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...
View ArticleConfessions of a Screen Addict About to Go Cold Turkey (almost) in...
The truth: There I was, Director of Campaign for a Commercial-Free Childhood, champion of limiting children’s screen time, playing Angry Birds on the subway.The justification: There I was, Director of...
View ArticleMy Failed Screen-Free Week
I failed miserably at Screen-Free Week. Alright, maybe not miserably. Here is the context: my husband Neal and I are home caring for our very new baby, Wes. He is our first child and the love of our...
View ArticleAbout That App Gap: Children, Technology, and the Digital Divide
"Technology-handling skills" and "the app gap" are catch phrases among early childhood educators these days. Low-income kids, the argument goes, are disadvantaged by inadequate exposure to tablets and...
View ArticleFacebook-for-Kids Won't Keep Kids off Facebook
Let's get one thing straight. The notion that instituting parental controls for Facebook's underage users or creating a kid-friendly version will keep pre-teens off of the regular—or unrestricted—site...
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Just before the family meal
This post was written by Mary Rothschild, Director of Healthy Media Choices, a non-profit that works with parents and teachers of children birth to age eight toward unique strategies for intentional...
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