Toys, Marketing, and Materialism

Yesterday we took a family trip to Target for diapers and other toddler-necessities. The boys were in fantastically good moods, giggling and squawking and singing songs. (It turns out that Old MacDonald has branched out from traditional farm animals, and now includes dinosaurs, school buses, and babies on his farm. Someone really ought to investigate MacDonald for his impact on rising global food prices.)

Once we stumbled into the toy section, the boys took an interest -- Sam in a pirate ship, and Caleb in a toy cell phone with Elmo on it. The toys were inexpensive, and they were very polite with the cashier, handing over their boxes to be scanned and saying "Thank You" when their toys were returned.

Everything changed when we got in the car. They wanted the toys out of the boxes ("Out!"), they wanted each other's toy ("Mine!"), they cried and threw things and lost all composure and capabilities. By the time we got home, Sam in particular was beyond consolation, nearly hyperventilating from frustration. And all for a little bit of plastic (and a truly obscene amount of packaging) that in two days will be less interesting to them that a pen and a piece of paper or the salad spinner in the kitchen or the plastic cups in the bathtub.


While we were in the adoption process, I read Susan Linn's Consuming Kids: Protecting Our Children from the Onslaught of Marketing & Advertising. It was a worthwhile book, even if I don't follow all of it's recommendations -- like the American Pediatrics Association, Linn advises against television (or any "screen time") for children under the age of two, but twins (as well as long winters and multiple ear infections) made this difficult advice to follow. I do -- as a Dad -- try to limit the boys' exposure to advertisements and to programs or products that might attempt to capture or replace their own curiousities and creativity, at least to an extent that I can.

Advertising is kind of a straw man in the arguement, though. With the commercial-free kid-focused cable channels we watch, ads are easy enough to avoid. What's more difficult to avoid -- and perhaps more sinister an invasion -- are the other ways that marketers use to sneak products and product-awareness into the minds of children. I noticed at Target that all of the kids DVDs were on the lowest shelves, exactly where they'd be seen by small folks, and the packaging in the toy section seemed to stick only to bold blues, summery greens, and bubble-gum pinks. And even without the ability to read, one can instantly discern the "adult" breakfast cereals from those meant to be attractive to kids.

I'm also kind of bitingly aware that the toys that Sam and Caleb picked out -- and then fought over -- were based on two of the handful of TV programs they watch, namely Sesame Street and The Backyardigans. I'm generally on-board with the educational mission of both of those shows, but one has to wonder at what point the shows become ersatz advertisements for the toys.

I don't totally know where my aversion to markeing comes from, but in an act of atonement for the trip into the toy aisles that turned a really great afternoon into a really difficult evening, I've been looking at the website for the Campaign for a Commercial-Free Childhood, a non-profit organization directed by Linn. In one of their fact sheets, "Materialism and Family Stress," I came across these sentences and realized why it is I care about this:

One of the central premises of marketing is that buying things will make us happy. There is a growing body of evidence, however, that the opposite is true: that the pressure to spend and consume actually makes people less happy.

I want to raise happy kids.