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Tag Archives: children
Fight Against Childhood Obesity in Schools
Childhood obesity came up in our class discussions many times. This is probably because it is good example for many discourses we have studied. It is popular topic in media; the growing wave of obesity awareness creates social panic. That is the same concept of over-stressing, exhagerating and presenting old issue as new danger, that we touched upon in Marry Beth Whitehead case and panic around surrogacy. Educating parents about healthy food choices and demanding from them to feed their children expensive healthy meals perfectly fits into concept of fit/unfit parents. Who gets to decide which family is fit and what BMI index is gradient of healthy child is illustration of Foucault’s concept of power, that is hidden and operates through information and creation of discourses in society. Choice of the standard family, that others should measure up to, that eat organic, exercise and encourage “healthy” habits in children, is a recreation of middle and upper class ideology.
The 4029tv video about Arkansas school’s fight against childhood obesity is a perfect illustration of Carolyn Vander Schee article and good showcase of discourses listed above.
I especially enjoyed how they through statistics and celebrity name (Michele Obama) in the beginning to show the importance of the issue. And loved how statistics showed that although obesity rate in that particular school has fallen, it remained the same throughout the state, which was right away used to shift the blame from schools on parents. Only in the very end of the video school nurse acknowledge that many parents can’t afford to buy healthy food, but those are not featured in the video. Instead we get woman from majority group showing example of how she tries hard to get her kids active.
1 baby – 8 Mothers
I came upon an article of January of this year. Since we discussed home economics in class, I thought this might apply. Unlike the Amy Sue Bix article, whose focus was on the equipment program under home economics, this relates more to the branch of child development. This article came from ABC news and it is called “Practice Babies’: 1 Orphan Raised by 8 Mothers”. In the time when home economics was becoming quite popular and many women were attending colleges who offered degrees in this field, Cornell University was one of them. Surprisingly enough Ivy League Cornell offered the Home Economics degree, tuition free for these women. In 1919 as the final project for graduation for these women they initiated a program called the “practice baby program”. This required 8 women, up to 12, to care for a baby in an apartment. Then after 6 weeks the baby would be passed on two another set of women for up to 2 years, when finally they would be adopted. For those 6 weeks they care for the child 24 hours a day/ 7 days a week, along with other household chores part of their curriculum. They mention that one of these women might put the baby down for a nap to be later picked up by another woman. These babies were offered by the welfare program (loaned by orphanages) for the benefit of “science”.
The babies were anonymous since they were infants, but they were all branded with the name Denny Domecon (surname: domestic economy). After leaving the child would have no contact with the multiple caregivers or vice versa. According to Keating, an archivist at Cornell:
“The program was an early testing-ground for consumer research, a “gateway for early education for a different group of women who were so well educated”
The program was later dropped in 1969 when new research pushed society into the benefits of having a primary caregiver. But that wasn’t before Life magazine ran an article in 1952 glorifying the program. The apartments were later used as day care center. I’ve included a video of one of these women caregivers who got their degree in Home Economics from Cornell in 1925. Also a picture of the article from Life (“The Making of a Home: Cornell Girls Study for Their Big Job.”) Both of these women are the same person.
Posted in Assignment 4
Tagged 1950s, 20th century, children, consumerism, home economics, household roles, motherhood, women
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Social Media and Conventional Interactions
In a New York Times article, the Boston Public Health Commission argues that changing your Facebook status to single before telling your ex-parent is not healthy. The fact that a whole convention was held on such topics seems ridiculous to me. The health commission argues that before posting a single status, ex-partners should come to an agreement to break up and stay informed. This is not a social media phenomenon, people have moved on to new partners or been over there old one before letting them know way before social media was invented. Social media is now just a visible extension. Anyway, how did they really come to the conclusion that breaking up in person is more “healthy” than doing over the internet. In person, there may be a chance for a physical altercation or less chance for one person to get their opinions out if they are not well spoken. Of course, there are pros and cons of the internet and social media specifically, but I am not sure the issues covered by the convention are those that deserve such attention. If parents and families foster environments of encouraged communication and interaction I believe there would be less impersonal interactions among peers. If parents spend all night on their blackberry and laptop, it sets an example for teens on how they should conduct their relationships with others.
Smoking Ads Aimed At Kids – Downside of Child Marketing
We have been watching a lot of videos and reading a lot of material regarding marketers targeting children. We heard a lot of different voices and opinions, but the general tone of the conversation in my opinion was that companies go overboard and take advantage of children, and also put parents in a very vulnerable and somewhat defenseless position, because they cannot always afford every item on the child’s list. The dolls with the very provocative outfits, the girls in the movies and the girls in the songs, talking about and acting out very serious adult sexual situations all have affects on little girls in a negative manner. We’ve all seen the eleven year old girl walking down the street in a mini – skirt tank top and high heels, completely inappropriate attire for a anyone let alone a prepubescent girl. Also all the movies and video games with all the violent images of shootings, stabbings, murders desensitize kids to violence, and condition kids (mainly boys) to think that that is how they are supposed to act and make them more predisposed to being violent themselves. It doesn’t end there, companies even go as far as marketing lethal products like tobacco to children. They will put cartoon characters on the cigarette displays, and associate characters that the kids are familiar with, with tobacco. They call this building brand loyalty. These kids don’t stand a chance, and then people wonder why they are smoking at twelve years old, because this crap has been pumped into their brain since they weren’t even old enough to understand what was being done to them. The clip I am showing is an extreme, but its really not as far fetched as people may think. 2 year old smokes 2 packs a day
children and consumption
From the beginning of the 1900’s marketers realized the potential to sell their products and services to children. The Children’s market became a very lucrative market for corporations in a very short period of time. The effect of this phenomenon is enormous. It has affected not only the children but changed society and with it changed the way family functions within.
From the moment the child is born, it is bombarded with commercials on a daily basis. Therefore, the child grows up consumed by it. As it is stated in the YouTube video, “we are creating super consumers”. Children grow up being consumed by brands and products that are reaching them anywhere and possible at any point of the day using multiple different channels. Big corporations spend a lot of time and resources in order to research and analyze children’s psychology. For example, children’s behavior that interactions with others, what they like to eat or what they want to wear and etc. This research helps them to target children and influence their consumption habits more precisely. Marketers that reach children from the infancy stage are trying to create brand loyalty for life and attach children emotionally to their brands.
In my opinion, this phenomenon is problematic for the children as well as society as a whole. US has no regulations for children’s commercials, therefore companies take advantage of the deregulation to their fullest extent. I believe parents should be involved in creating values and ideologies in their children’s lives and not corporations, by constantly pushing their brands on children. From my personal observations, the lack of time spent with the children and the guilt parents have due to time scarcity, influences the constants consumption of products and services that children demand from the parents. I believe by doing so and allowing children to have everything that they ask for, parents feel less guilty for not spending enough time with their children; therefore parents are as accountable as marketers in children’s consumerism. I believe, buying products and services doesn’t replace the lost time with the parents and children grow up feeling empty and lonely and the only way they know how to deal with it is, to consume more material things.
Hazards of Child Consumerism
In a marketing class I was taking, I learned about the term “clutter”. According to Wikipedia.com clutter means,
“the large volume of advertising messages that the average consumer is exposed to on a daily basis. This phenomenon results from a marketplace that is overcrowded with products leading to huge competition for customers.”
Think about the enormous amounts of marketing and advertising campaigns that you are bombarded with on a daily basis, it’s truly mind boggling, everywhere you go there are product placements. After reading Lisa Jacobson’s article on child consumers, I realized what a large role they place in this as well. Although the articles study only goes until 1940, its concept still applies today more so then ever, with the internet, with television, and all the magazines and books that children look through. Children have a much harder time distinguishing between their wants and needs, so if we see ten advertisements we may want all of them, but realize that we only need / can afford a few of them, children on the other hand feel that they would need all ten products. In the article Lisa talks about class distinction, and how children in the lower classes cannot get everything they want, which can lead events that are discussed in this clip: Children Consumers. It also talks about the problems that products can create between parent and child, when the child does not receive everything they desire, and begins to question/disobey their parent’s authority. It’s a slippery rope, because you cannot hide them from all of the advertisements, if you buy them everything they seek, they will become spoiled and wont learn the value of a hard dollar. On the other hand if you don’t it might create problems in your relationship. How do you find a viable compromise?
Consuming Kids
I found a documentary called Consuming Kids : The Commercialisation of Children. For sake of brevity I only watched and posted the first part (of seven). This documentary is directly related to the past few articles we have read in class. It includes a brief history of marketing and how kids are marketed too. It is not shocking at all to see that Ronald Reagan and the courts gave power to businesses and marketers rather than the FTC which represents the “people”. This has remained a common trend in politics and issues until this day. The money and influence of individuals is miniscule compared to the lobbying and funds distributed through large corporations. On the same token, parents and families should not be looking to the government for guidance in the media influencing their children. It is not pick and chose for every aspect the government should or should not regulate. If the people want America to be the consumer/capitalistic state that it is, we can not go crying to the government when it has unintended effects.
The amount of money that is pumped into the economy under the influence from children was truly amazing. Informative documentaries such as this one, should serve as a wake up call to parents and families to power they give to their kids and the amount and type of information they are exposed to. Although parents certainly cannot control everything their child sees and hears, they can help educate and influence the way their kids process information. Technology in the form of TV’s, the internet, and phones have had a profound influence on society today, but how the information they convey is interpreted and distributed is up to each person to decide.
Donor Insemination, a Difficult Decision.
I wasn’t really familiar with the topic of DI until taking this course and reading Katrina Hargreaves article on it. I came across some interesting clips, and also found out there was a major Hollywood film starring, Mark Ruffalo and Julianne Moore about this topic that was released just last year (2010), here is a preview:Film Preview.
The film is about a lesbian couple who choose to use DI to have children, when the children get old enough they decide to get in touch with the man who donated the sperm, technically their biological father and inform him that they are his children. The more time the children want to spend with the man, the more jealous their “mothers” become. Of course in Hollywood you can always expect the happy ending, everyone will get along and they will become one happy family, but that is not how it always turns out in real life.
Whether to tell the child about their biological parents is a very difficult decision. A lot of factors have to be taken into account, the psychological ramifications of such information, the biological parents interests or lack their of in the child’s life, the possible strain that telling the child will put into your relationship with them, and things of that nature. So many things can go wrong, the list is endless, this is why some couples feel it is better to just leave the child in the dark and have them continue to think that you are his birth parents, to avoid any confusion and the avalanche of emotions that come along with dropping such heavy information on the child. Personally I feel they have a right to know, but every couple has a right to approach it whichever way they deem fit.
Childhood Obesity and State Intervention
I was reading an article that was published on 7/14/11 in the Huffington Post, which talked about obesity in children and whether or not state intervention should take place against the parents of these kids. Apparently the article had been written by someone named David Katz who happens to be a director of medical research at Yale. The article seemed to be written in almost a condescending tone as if it was a doctor who knew more than the patient and made sure we were aware of that. The tone was not my only concern with the article but some of the content was about an airplane flight the author was in and his neighbor on the flight happened to be an overweight woman who was traveling with her overweight sister and two year old child. The doctor brings up the question of if a mother starts overfeeding her child to the point where it leads to health issues, then what’s the difference between that and if a mother gave her children narcotic drugs.
The comparison although taken to a bit of an extreme is still a very interesting one. This country still does have a health problem concerning children so shouldn’t we do ALL that we can to fix it? Then there comes the question of where do we draw the line, we’ll take children out of abusive homes because it will lead to an unhealthy future for them as adults so doesn’t it make sense that childhood diabetes and obesity leads to an unhealthy future therefore should we take those children away from their parents as well following that particular logic. Although this article is written with some bias it does bring up some interesting topics for discussion.
