Parents: Keep Fighting

I don’t mean fighting with your teens, of course. I mean keep up the good fight against the forces in our culture that you disagree with. We’ve been examining the overwhelming volume of consumer messages that try to teach your kids what’s important, what’s cool and what should be on the top of their list of “must-have’s. Let me be fully honest, here, though, because there aren’t simple answers and this isn’t a simplistic problem, as I learned first hand while writing this.

As I was writing this post, I thought I would begin by telling you about an interaction I overheard between several 10 or 11 year olds just yesterday as I was leaving my fitness club. They were discussing i-pods and the new i-touch, and one youngster claimed to all who were listening: “I’m keeping my i-pod and I’m getting an i-touch too.” My instant reaction was a judgmental one [shame on me], thinking how indulged these kids were. As I began to write this post, however, I decided to learn more about the i-touch…and before I even completed the product video I found that I want one too! What an immensely cool device!

So, none of this is cut and dried. Are we adults part of the solution, or part of the problem? I’m not really sure all the time…and the more I explore the various ways we can approach this discussion about materialism, I see complexities, and nuances. I’m reminded that there isn’t one right way to raise our kids, and there are a zillion ways that will work for us. What’s most important is to talk… the key to your success in parenting teenagers is communication. We can’t un-do our culture, we must work within it. We can’t unplug, we can’t keep our kids from seeing the billboards and ads and commercials and the messages that they are barraged with…. So we must teach them to be discriminating. They must learn to discern and judge for themselves through their core set of values. And they will only do this successfully when we have maintained the positive and supportive relationships with them that help us keep the doors of communication open.

Ok; I’ll get off my soapbox.

Have you heard of the term “age compression?” This is when marketers take advantage of a child’s natural developmental urge to be older and more mature than they actually are. You see this in many ways, as kids’ requests for gadgets go upscale… From a Wall St Journal post:
“Kids want what most adults consider electronics. Today, the toy industry competes with Nintendo, Sony, Microsoft, and Apple. (My 11-year-old son asked for an iPhone this Christmas. My 15-year-old? A MacBook.) It’s called ‘‘age compression,’’ when children reach for items used by older kids or adults. From a recent study: Children start playing with computers at 5 1/2, CDs and DVDs at 6, music players at 8. The presents under the tree are way more expensive. And to be clear, my son’s not getting an iPhone before I do.”

One of the most obvious examples of age compression is in the marketing of young teens’ fashion. Diane Levin and Jean Kilbourne, co-authors of So Sexy So Soon: The New Sexualized Childhood and What Parents Can Do to Protect Their Kids” say “… commercial culture has far more to do with trivializing and objectifying sex than with promoting it, more to do with consuming than with connecting. The problem is not that sex is portrayed in the media is sinful, but that it is synthetic and cynical. The exploitation of our children’s sexuality is in many ways designed to promote consumerism, not just in childhood but throughout their lives.” Listen to the authors’ interview on the Today Show:

Keep fighting. Never give up your mission to share and teach your values to your kids. And here’s a good piece of advice from Abigail Van Buren:
“If you want your children to turn out well, spend twice as much time with them and half as much money.”