I watched a cartoon of a famous toon super hero with my kids for about half an hour. At the end of this ordeal, my daughter told me the take home message she caught and that blew my lid.
1.Its perfectly OK to eat a high calorie sweet and whack someone.
2.Every other person is a witch/ zombie/ rakshas or some kind of an alien waiting to kill everyone in the disguise of your loved one.
3.You get lovely cheeks with a cream in 1 week.
That was it. It sent the Mother Alarm in my head ringing.
I watched with them another few episodes of similar inane stuff which used Krishna as its pitch man. I mean which mother would not want her kids to listen to the cute makkhan chor Krishna and his adventures. But the same witch/zombie combo descended there too.
I doubt if there are any parents who haven’t even once turned to TV for a few minutes of relief from yelling instructions and running after toddlers. But if you look up from your smart phone and see the steady buffet of stuff it feeds the children, you’ll know. One hour of this and our children are branded like a Grand Prix car.
The same “high-calorie-eating-saviour-of-the-world” is used as a highway into children’s minds by movie publicity experts who are done with the routine 2 minute song and dance jig in a line up of upcoming movies.So now you have a brainwashed child who wants to watch a meaning less movie because it is heavily recommended by the all-knowing / sarvagunasampanna cartoon character. This was something we could have done without and Like we parents don`t have regular tantrums to manage.
A well researched article by Perri Klass M.D in The New york times highlighted a study by Thomas Robinson, a professor of pediatrics at Stanford University and Lucile Packard Children’s Hospital who observed – ” even a 30-second exposure to a novel product, one that you’ve never seen before, changes their preferences for brand.
They also warned that up to the age of 7 or 8, children are thought to be unable to understand the nature of advertising — developmentally, they can’t identify the underlying persuasive intent. http://well.blogs.nytimes.com/2013/02/11/how-advertising-targets-our-children/
This is what scares me.
And here we have an array of artificially sweetened/ coloured refined foods heavily advertised to this gullible set of kids intently looking at the screen , waiting for their cartoon to resume after a short break.Biscuits , juices, noodles and the like are still lesser of the evils.
My blood boils when these fairness creams choose Cartoon Network and the like to promote their products. Unconsciously my tots mind is registering that fair is better than dark, Your skin color can impede your career and life.And that is something I cannot accept.
I want my children to have an opinion of their own based on what their heart and intellect tells them not a byproduct of someone`s clever marketing.
But at the same time advertising and this in your face promotion is here to stay. Children will watch cartoons. But how do we shield them from such stuff.
1. Cut down on-screen time
2. Help them understand the hidden messages behind the marketing.
3. Listen to what they feel about a particular ad/issue and correct them gently .
4. Refrain from falling into these marketing traps ourselves. (It is pretty useless to lecture kids on anti racism and slathering fair and beautiful cream our faces without fail everyday for 4 weeks).
5. Read books. Read Books and read books.
Remember , All that’s animated is not innocent!
KochiCoo 