Previously, I wrote about Day 1 of the media literacy conference at Pratt Institute in my posts Media Conversations Part I and Media Conversations Part II. This installment concerns the screening of the film Consuming Kids.

Consuming Kids, subtitled "The Commercialization of Childhood," is a must-see film put out by the Media Education Foundation documenting the pervasiveness of marketing to children. Here's the description from the film's website:

Consuming Kids throws desperately needed light on the practices of a relentless multi-billion dollar marketing machine that now sells kids and their parents everything from junk food and violent video games to bogus educational products and the family car. Drawing on the insights of health care professionals, children's advocates, and industry insiders, the film focuses on the explosive growth of child marketing in the wake of deregulation, showing how youth marketers have used the latest advances in psychology, anthropology, and neuroscience to transform American children into one of the most powerful and profitable consumer demographics in the world. Consuming Kids pushes back against the wholesale commercialization of childhood, raising urgent questions about the ethics of children's marketing and its impact on the health and well-being of kids.

The film documents the history of the deregulation of children's marketing, bringing us to where we are today. Most countries still have laws against pervasive marketing to children. Bowing to corporate pressure, the U.S. government began dismantling such regulations in the 70's, and killed them altogether during the Reagan years.

According to the film, while children account for something like $40 billion in direct sales of children's products, they influence $700 billion in overall sales to adults. The upshot is that marketers know that the real money is in finding out how to get kids to influence their parents' overall purchasing decisions and habits, not just their purchases of kids' products.

With these goals and the absence of regulation, it's hardly surprising that corporations employ an army of psychologists, sociologists, scientists, marketers, childhood development experts, etc., to train kids in nagging, to study the eye movements of three year olds sitting in from of the TV, to discover what shapes and images appeal to a three year old as opposed to a five year old, and so on - basically, to dissect the childhood psyche to find out how to turn kids into lifelong, brand-loyal consumers. The movie also discusses the invention of the category "tween" as an enormous marketing ploy, and hits on many other angles of the issue such as gender-based marketing differentiation, violence, product placement, and more.

What we do about this is up to each of us individually. At the very least, I think it's worth noting that there are people out there looking to take possession of the eyes, ears, hearts, minds, and souls of our kids. No, not in an "Excellent, Smithers!" Mr. Burns rubbing hands with maniacal glint in eye backroom conspiracy theory sort of way:

Just average corporate Joes and Josephines looking to make a buck or trillion. Which in the long run is probably scarier in the Hannah Arendt "banality of evil" sense.

In his intro to the movie, David Walczyk asked something like "what truth is a scientist recording the eye movements of a three year old looking to find?" Good question... ]]>