Paul Hanley writes in the Saskatoon Star Phoenix that “consumer culture saturates kids’ lives” and quotes Susan Linn of the Campaign for Commercial-Free Childhood:
"The ability to play creatively is central to the human capacity to experiment, to act rather than react, and to differentiate oneself from the environment. It is how children wrestle with life and make it meaningful. Spirituality and advances in science and art are all rooted in play. Play promotes attributes essential to a democratic populace, such as curiosity, reasoning, empathy, sharing, co-operation, and a sense of competence -- a belief that the individual can make a difference in the world. Constructive problem-solving, divergent thinking, and the capacity for self-regulation are all developed through creative play.”
Hanley adds “this type of free play is being eroded in our commercialized, consumer culture. One
international survey found that only 27 per cent of children currently engage in imaginative play, running around outside, playing dress-up, building forts. What do they do instead? Watch TV, play video games, surf the Net. Spending 40 hours a week in front of a screen is not unusual, it's typical.”
As is often the case in articles adopting this point of view, Québec is mentioned as having the most stringent rules in the world about marketing to children.
I’m personally in favour of ensuring kids get more free play and less screen time. But I’m less inclined to believe those who claim that new media is corrupting our children.
Here’s an historical look at what some have said about the corruptors of the past (from an article by Tom Standage entitled The Culture War published in the April 2006 issue of Wired Magazine)
Novels
"The free access which many young people have to romances, novels, and plays has poisoned the mind and corrupted the morals of many a promising youth; and prevented others from improving their minds in useful knowledge. Parents take care to feed their children with wholesome diet; and yet how unconcerned about the provision for the mind, whether they are furnished with salutary food, or with trash, chaff, or poison?"
- Reverend Enos Hitchcock, Memoirs of the Bloomsgrove Family, 1790
The Waltz
"The indecent foreign dance called the Waltz was introduced ... at the English Court on Friday last ... It is quite sufficient to cast one's eyes on the voluptuous intertwining of the limbs, and close compressure of the bodies ... to see that it is far indeed removed from the modest reserve which has hitherto been considered distinctive of English females. So long as this obscene display was confined to prostitutes and adulteresses, we did not think it deserving of notice; but now that it is ... forced on the respectable classes of society by the evil example of their superiors, we feel it a duty to warn every parent against exposing his daughter to so fatal a contagion."
- The Times of London, 1816
Movies
"This new form of entertainment has gone far to blast maidenhood ... Depraved adults with candies and pennies beguile children with the inevitable result. The Society has prosecuted many for leading girls astray through these picture shows, but GOD alone knows how many are leading dissolute lives begun at the 'moving pictures.'"
- The Annual Report of the New York Society for the Prevention of Cruelty to Children, 1909
The Telephone
"Does the telephone make men more active or more lazy? Does [it] break up home life and the old practice of visiting friends?"
- Survey conducted by the Knights of Columbus Adult Education Committee, San Francisco Bay Area, 1926
Comic Books
"Many adults think that the crimes described in comic books are so far removed from the child's life that for children they are merely something imaginative or fantastic. But we have found this to be a great error. Comic books and life are connected. A bank robbery is easily translated into the rifling of a candy store. Delinquencies formerly restricted to adults are increasingly committed by young people and children ... All child drug addicts, and all children drawn into the narcotics traffic as messengers, with whom we have had contact, were inveterate comic-book readers This kind of thing is not good mental nourishment for children!"
- Fredric Wertham, Seduction of the Innocent, 1954
Rock and Roll
"The effect of rock and roll on young people, is to turn them into devil worshippers; to stimulate self-expression through sex; to provoke lawlessness; impair nervous stability and destroy the sanctity of marriage. It is an evil influence on the youth of our country."
- Minister Albert Carter, 1956
Videogames
"The disturbing material in Grand Theft Auto and other games like it is stealing the innocence of our children and it's making the difficult job of being a parent even harder ... I believe that the ability of our children to access pornographic and outrageously violent material on video games rated for adults is spiraling out of control."
- US senator Hillary Rodham Clinton, 2005
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