Bush's War on Children

Washington is awash these days with avowals of concern for children, especially on the Republican side. Whatever the issue, it's really about the kids they say. President Bush referred to children 11 times in a single speech -- on tax cuts no less. In a speech on federal money for churches -- excuse us, "faith based initiatives" -- the count was up to 35 (not counting "kids" and the like.)

"The values of our children must be a priority of our nation," Bush said in a budget speech in March. But exactly what values was the President referring to? He gave the impression it was the traditional ones of hard work, abstemiousness and the rest. But look more closely at the administration, and a different meaning emerges.

Whenever an issue pits kids against corporate agendas and big money in Bush's Washington, it is the kids who lose. And that means pretty much all the time. Corporate leaders in the U.S. are bent on reducing children to free-floating appetites for stuff, and the new crowd in Washington is cheering them on -- often because it's the same people. Speechifying about "values" notwithstanding, no previous administration has so embodied the aggressive commercialism that has parents feeling under siege.

If the administration really was serious about standing up for kids, it would go at this commercialism like a shark at blood. It is a direct assault on everything Republicans claim to hold dear. It subverts both the sanctity of the home and the authority of parents; and it turns the entire culture into a nemesis for parents rather than a support for them. Corporations approach kids not as potential moral beings, but as bundles of inchoate desire whose inclinations to self gratification are to be stoked and magnified -- the amorality of the Sixties in corporate drag.

But since the perps wear suits, the administration calls it the American Way. Kids are the new frontier of corporate marketing, the "big-spending superstars in the consumer constellation,'' as James U. McNeal, president of McNeal & Kids Youth Marketing Consultants, puts it. To claim this frontier the corporations have a simple strategy: they seek to interpose themselves between parents and child, and to enlist the child as an agent in prying money from mom and dad. That's why they choose venues that parents might not notice, such as Saturday morning TV; or that take parents by surprise, such as ads at the start of kiddie videos, and product placements within them.

Once the advertisers have the kids' attention, they work to turn them into insufferable nags; and they enlist the most sophisticated wiles of market researchers to that end. Western Initiative Media, a market research firm, put out a study called "The Nag Factor," on how ad-driven nagging can boost sales. Here's how Selling to Kids newsletter explained Western's results to advertisers: "If kids nag with a sense of urgency or persuasion rather than with whiny persistence, they're more likely to get what they want."

Such nagging wouldn't be necessary of course if parents wanted their kids to have the stuff in question. But it's almost always junk food and junk entertainment -- which is why the corporations seek to sidestep the parents and speak directly to the kids. Taken together it amounts to open war on parental authority, and a recipe for family strife. In the psychodrama of kiddie advertising, parents become the cash cows and potential enemies, while corporations become the child's indulgent friend.

One would expect an administration dedicated to traditional family values to rise up in arms against such domestic subversion. Instead President Bush has declared a unilateral disarmament, and in fact has put the subverters in charge.

Consider the tobacco industry, which for decades has engaged in a thinly-disguised recruitment drive among the nation's kids. (It has to -- no other industry kills off its existing customers so fast.) From the Marlboro Man to Joe Camel to ad-laced promotional giveaways, the drive has continued despite warnings from the Surgeon General, the American Medical Association (AMA), and more lawsuits than most of us can count. The tobacco industry has actually increased its spending on ads since the landmark 1998 tobacco settlement. Not coincidentally another 3,000 kids start smoking every day in the US -- and about a third of them will die from illnesses related to this smoking.