The Parents' Bill of Rights

The Parents' Bill of Rights: Helping Moms and Dads Fight Commercialism

By Jonathan Rowe and Gary Ruskin
Mothering Magazine

Paul Kurnit is the president of KidShop, an advertising firm that specializes in marketing to children, and he has plans for our kids.

“Kid business has become big business,” Kurnit says. To make it even bigger, he preaches what he calls “surround marketing” saturation advertising that captures kids at every possible moment.

"You've got to reach kids throughout the day, in school, as they’re shopping at the mall, or at the movies,” says Carol Herman, a senior vice president at Grey Advertising. “You’ve got to become part of the fabric of their lives.”

This is what parents today are up against corporate advertisers who seek to entwine themselves with children’s lives. By most measures, they are succeeding. Each week, the typical American child takes in some 38 hours (yes, a full work week) of commercial media, with its endless ads and come-ons. And that’s not counting the ads that commandeer their attention from billboards and the Internet, the omnipresent brand logos, and the advertising that increasingly fills the schools.

The merchandise pushers have invaded the commons of childhood, the free open spaces of imagination and play, and turned it into a free-fire zone of commercial importuning. In some quarters, this appalling situation is seen as success. “There have never been more ways in the culture to support marketing towards kids,” enthuses Kidscreen, a publication for ad firms and corporations that target kids. (That there’s a market for such a publication is revealing.)

Corporate advertisers have contrived to wedge themselves into the space between parents and their children.  They enlist the best psychologists and market researchers money can buy to lure kids to products and values many of us don’t approve of and even abhor. Parents find themselves in a grim daily battle to keep these forces at bay.

On their own, parents cannot contend with the nation’s largest corporations and their weapons of mass childhood seduction. It’s time Washington stood up for parents. It’s time for politicians to recognize that raising children is the most important task of our society.

It’s time, in other words, for a Parents’ Bill of Rights.

Check it out, and learn what it's doing to make a positive difference in our kid's lives.