Our five year old is media deprived. She is not allowed to use our computers. We go to great lengths to make sure the TV she watches is commercial-free. Everything she watches has to pass the our idiosyncratic family rating system -- Disney movies are too scary, the violence in Kim Possible, The Muppet Show, and Scooby Doo is fine. Home is a nice protected environment.
A few months ago our daughter went to a friend's house and had a transformative experience -- she spent a few hours playing on Barbie.com. For the next three days we talked about nothing but Barbie.com. I heard about the games, about the paper-doll dress-ups, the toys, the rockstars. While there's nothing I hate more than Pepto-Bismol-pink Barbie, really, I'm not all that upset. I remember going to my friends houses and making a beeline for MTV. I remember eating nothing but Cocoa Puffs and Captain Crunch three meals a day my first few weeks in college. She does need to be exposed to the real world somewhere, and a few hours of braincandy is not going to undermine our 24/7 home life.
What strikes me, in a bad way, is how powerful TV and the internet is. Since she'd had no exposure to any of this, she sucked it up like a sponge. My gentle prompting that Barbie.com has something to sell had little effect. So, fight fire with fire. I hit the internet, and found the makings of a course on media literacy for five year olds.
I suggest that you don't try to do this in one day -- both because kiddos have short attention spans and because they need time to think about their questions. Repetition is good -- I've shown this to her two or three time, seizing the chance when a friend is over. The second time I showed it to Alexander he gratified me by turning to me and saying "The Typhoon II isn't so cool, it only runs nine minutes before the batteries run out".
HBO has a great series from the 1990's called "Buy Me That" which is surprisingly undated. Available on YouTube is a 3 minute video on the reality of commercials: Buy Me That: Helping Kids Understand Toy Ads, Typhoon II
Next onto fast food commercials:
There's a wonderful food stylist video on YouTube -- she's a bit like Donna Reed as she puts cardboard in your hamburger, straight pins in the lettuce and Styrofoam in the french fries. I like to follow this up with the musical montage of real vs. fake. Encourage the kids to yell out "Real!" vs. "Fake!" as the images are shown.
Now I need a segment on product placements in movies, kid eye-level marketing in grocery stores and brand-orientated web sites. Suggestions anyone?
(for local parents in Socorro I have the full VHS tape which has:
- Typhoon II episode (toy doesn't work as shown)
- How the GI Joe Battle Copter ad was made
- Product placements in movies and video games
- Kids Clubs
- How special effects make everything sound better on TV
- Does buying everything make you a bigger fan?
- Do Nike shoes make you jump higher or run faster?
- How much Corn Flakes do you have to eat to collect all 15 3D baseball cards?
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Kristy, this is cool. I'm totally into media literacy for little kids too. Sometimes I think we've totally brainwashed our kids to think ads are evil, which wasn't quite my intention. But from a very early age, we talked a lot about what ads are and how to recognize them so that they often very dismissively say things like, "That is an ad. They want you to buy that." I'm sort of waiting for it to backfire on us somehow.
ReplyDeleteI don't know that my kids have seen that many things with product placement. Sometimes the TV show itself is a line of products, of course.
The thing I can't stand is how integrated ads are on websites geared toward kids. I only let mine use ad-free websites that don't link outside their own content as a result. Just a couple of weeks ago, they wanted to go to somewhere like nickjr.com (they must have seen an ad on tv!) and I said no because it was too ad heavy and difficult to navigate - so we went to look at it and played a can you find the ad game. If it weren't for a little label (the kids can't read so it wasn't until the end of doing this that they caught onto the label) I myself would never have even known what was "ad" and what was content. Then we talked about how, really, the whole thing is an ad for you to watch the tv shows. And, bless his little media savvy heart, P said, "And there are more ads on the tv."