Technologies of the Family

The article of NYTimes.com talks about most parents are in effort to pay for their children’s activities which can not guarantee their later success according to many experts.  They pay for their children to take music lessons, gymnastics, horseback riding, tutoring, and summer-long residential camps, etc.  In fact, they believe these experiences are not just for good grades, or are the key to the right college, but also are for the opportunities they give children.  Somehow, not offering children every possible opportunity makes parents feel that they are in bad parenting.  They believe that every child has a “hidden talent”, and they will fail their kids if they do not do everything possible to bring it to light.  So a lot of parents are exhausted by their own overparenting which takes up much of their money, time, and emotional energy.  However, there is no evidence that supports that sore of parental choices can be correlated at all with academic success according to Professor Levitt, a co-author of the New York Times blog Freakonomics.  Professor Levitt also says that being rushed from one event to the other is just not the way most kids want to live their lives. Moreover, Professor Doherty suggests that parents have to move away from the idea that if they do not start children early, they will not reach their full potential.

I think this article is interesting because it describes a very common parenting issue in our society.  Actually, I have known that a lot of my friends and relatives just like most parents think good parenting is to give their children everything possible.  They believe that a myriad of skills are very important to their kids’ future success.  One of their kids starts her drawing class when she is only 3 years old.  As a parent, I think that there is no single answer for the question of how we should do so we can help our kids get a better future.

The article of NYTimes.com talks about students of public middle and high school will be required to take sex-education classes beginning this school year for the first time in nearly two decades in New York City.  This new mandate is announced by the Bloomberg administration in order to improve the lives of black and Latino teenagers who are far more likely to have unplanned pregnancies and contract sexually transmitted diseases than the whites according to city statistics.  The administration wants to teach teenagers as young as 11 about safe sex in the hopes of reducing pregnancy, disease and dropouts.  It calls for schools to teach a semester of sex education in 6^th or 7^th grade, and again in 9^th or 10^th grade by using Health Smart and Reducing the Risk, out-of-box sets of lessons.  For those schools that have not been offering sex education, the department will offering training sessions before the start of the classes Sept.8.  In fact, students in the city have taken at least five class sessions of H.I.V. education each year from kindergarten through 12^th grade.  However, those classes only teach students about sex but not about preventing pregnancies.  In the new sex-education classes, teachers will describe how and why to use condoms in which are distributed for more than 20 years in high schools. 

I think it is relevant to our class because we talk about how the majority white powers think the minority people, like Afro-Americans have a different culture from them.  They think those Blacks are poor because they are too lazy to find a job.  At the same time, in order to improve their lives, those Blacks need to be taught with their contributive help.  Similarly, the article talks that the New York City’s administration mandates sex-education to teenagers in public schools to improve the lives of young minority men in the city.  How and why the administration can not just says to improve the lives of young men?

While watching “Maid in America” I really began to wonder about the so called “American Dream”. The main reason why people come from other countries is for the purpose of creating a better life for themselves and their family. They come here with the hope that they will be able to live happily in better conditions. However, in coming to America and reaching a better lifestyle they do not realize that they could easily loose sight of what is most important.

When watching Judith go back to Guatemala to see her daughters it really made me wonder why she ever left. Sure, everything might not have been as developed as in America but it was where she was happy with her family. I feel like in America we loose that sense of family in the materialistic value and importance we place on money and comfort. We choose work and making money over raising our kids and for what?

The American Dream is just that, it’s a dream. People aren’t satisfied with what they have so they seek something better for the future, but in the process their losing the present.  In the following article it analyzes a story about Nola Kambanda, who is an immigrant seeking to live the American Dream.  He instead ends up fighting for what little he can to help him feel happy but it’s not even a shadow of what he came looking for. He ends up alone and instead of rising with the hope he had placed in America he is overcome with just the need to survive in this country.

We’ve been discussing advertisement and its effect on children and through reading this article it really makes me wonder where advertisement will take the future generation. Every household owns a television and when parents don’t want to be bothered with their children they choose to preoccupy their children by putting them in front of the TV.  I was amazed by how many commercials a child watches in one sitting.

It doesn’t help that times are changing, the things we were sheltered from when we were kids are now being casually thrown into any advertisement that a child may see. There is no limit to what a child may be exposed to. It’s as if everybody chooses to look away and not see what kind of culture we’re creating. We familiarize them with things they shouldn’t even have to think about for another decade.

Many advertising agencies see how it could be harmful for children but not enough care to take responsibility for the effect they may be having on them. I was surprised to learn that some countries ban advertisement to children until they turn a certain age because they see it as harmful to children. The fact that children don’t fully understand what an advertisement is makes them such an easy target, it’s as if they are being taken advantage of. There’s not limit to what they could want. In a way, they are being taught who they should be by being shown that it’ll make them cool and popular. Children have vulnerable minds that advertisement agencies jump to take advantage of.

http://www.guardian.co.uk/media/2005/aug/15/pressandpublishing.genderissues

The link here shows just how much every company tries to aim its marketing to children because they recognize what a powerful market it is. There are a few retailers around the world that have begun to sell Playboy merchandise aimed at young children. And the products aren’t just limited to clothes, but also include pencil cases, notebooks, and pencils that these children are supposed to bring to school.

The article condemns the fact that pornography has become a mainstream topic, and people don’t take into consideration that it may be harmful to children later in life. This, of course, is true, and should be studied. However, the reason that this clicked with me is that advertisers are recognizing that children are a huge market and that they are more likely to be in charge of the buying decisions than the parents are.

Since there is a huge amount of media being bombarded at children, it is likely that they may encounter Playboy in many ways. For example, if an older sister is watching E!, the topic might be more sexual than a kid would encounter in media that she chooses to consume. Therefore, there is already brand recognition for the Playboy name in all ages. Marketers see this, and then take advantage of it.

Like Consuming Kids showed, Playboy is very likely using the latest psychology to convince children that their products are harmless fun and cool to own. Then, the children who are truly in charge of the purchases, convince their parents to buy them these sexualized products.