Commercial Free Holiday Season in the South Bay

Modular wooden building blocks designed to develop mathematical skills

With the Holiday Season in full flower as the countdown to Christmas day gets closer, the big box stores are getting more chaotic and retailers and marketers are hitting parents and kids hard. The media is the message and the message is, “give kids the hottest toys of the season.”

But the Boston-based Campaign for a Commercial-Free Childhood, a 40,000 member national coalition of health care professionals, educators, advocacy groups and parents, warns that more isn’t more when it comes to giving heavily advertised toys.

“Children are taught through advertising that if they don’t get a particular toy, this holiday season will be a failure and they should nag for the gifts they’ve been told are the must haves of the season”, says CCFC’s Josh Golin. “It becomes easy for holidays to become all about nagging and having the perfect toy and the true meaning of the holidays just gets lost”.

CCFC warns that heavily marketed toys are advertisements for a range of other products. “A Shrek or Dora toy advertises movies, clothes, and the unhealthy foods these characters help promote”, says Golin. “There are 40,000 Disney Princess items, so when you give a Disney Princess toy, you’re advertising their other 39,999 products to a child who’s told to ‘collect them all’. Rather than giving children the impression that this gift is enough, your feeding into the commercial pressure put on children that they always have to have more.”

Local Independent toy storeowners say they have more satisfying alternatives.

“Our toys aren’t limited to what a corporation decides is important or will lead to more sales,” says Stacy Stafford Scott, owner of San Jose’s Treehouse in the Glen, “they feed children’s imaginations and they’re made of non toxic materials that aren’t going to hurt children. Take little plank blocks, two year olds like to pour them, older children build with them and because adults love them, they’re playing with their children, which all increase the child’s development opportunities. Toys like these have no limits.”

For sixteen years, Julia Chen at the PlayStore on University Avenue in Palo Alto has been educating her customers about the value of play but she says it’s becoming harder. “Parents come into the store bombarded by marketing messages about how to raise a smart child and resume building instead of thinking about how to raise a person. There’s so much advertising,” says Chen, “it’s really hard for them to filter out all that misinformation.”

“Play is the experience of generating ideas critically and creatively, and solving problems. Our toys inspire the question, ‘what do I want to do with this?’ instead of ‘what am I supposed to do with this?’ The ideas for play should come from the children, so we sell well-made open-ended toys that children can play with for many years.”

“People think that simple toys are too young for their advanced child so we always remind parents that the complexity comes from the child, not the toy. If the toy is complex and seems interesting to the adult, the toy designer had a lot of fun designing it but that didn’t leave very much room for your child to be creative and come up with his or her own ideas.”

“In my store we don’t have anything that has batteries and that’s on purpose”, says Stafford Scott of Treehouse in the Glen. “If it has a battery, the toy is doing everything and the child is learning how to push a button. We’re brainwashed to believe that certain toys are good for our children because we’re being told this by marketers.”

Golin says parents are getting a double whammy. “One pressure is coming from the kids for the must-have hot toy of the season, and the other pressure is the marketing that’s going directly to the parents saying ‘this is the leap frog product that you have to get so your child can go to Stanford or Harvard or wherever’”, says Golin, “which the research shows just isn’t true.”

The documentary “Race to Nowhere” is about the pressure put on students to excel academically by loading up their schedules with homework and extracurricular activities that new research says doesn’t make a difference. CCFC says research debunks similar myths about the role of educational toys in child development.

“Parents have been sold a bill of goods that educational toys and videos like Baby Einstein and Brainy Baby are going to help their kids get ahead and make them smarter, so one of our featured campaigns has been challenging the marketing of these products”, says Golin. “In fact, we were instrumental in getting Baby Einstein to give refunds because they were falsely and deceptively marketing these products.”

While national and international public health organizations like the American Academy of Pediatrics, World Health Organization and the American Psychological Association have called for restrictions on marketing to children, the blitz goes on like never before.

In 1983 companies spent about $100 million annually marketing to children in the United States, now they spend more than $17 billion a year freely targeting children using television programming, movies, school promotions, video games, phone apps, school busses, the internet and fast food wrappers while the paraphernalia of childhood is emblazoned with licensed characters and logos.

Reagan-era deregulation championed by toy and cereal manufacturers, and broadcasters who wanted more advertising revenue, eliminated special protections that were in place and the FTC’s authority to limit advertising to children, making marketing to children less regulated in the U.S. than it is in any other western democracy.

“The good news is there’s a tremendous push back against this and it’s not just left wing anti-corporate types, it’s also free market conservatives who absolutely believe that children deserve special protections”, says Golin,” so we’re seeing more parents organizing and taking advertisers out of their children’s schools and really questioning what we’re doing to children when we just throw them into the marketplace.”

To reduce nagging about gift getting and to raise more commercial free children, the CCFC recommends reducing the time children spend watching television and playing with computers, video games and phones. “One of the easiest ways to do this is for parents to take screens out of their children’s bedrooms”, advises Golin. “Preschoolers spend on average four and a half hours a day with screen media and it’s a lot more for older kids.”

“We have a holiday guide on our website, www.commercialfreechildhood.org, that has tips on activities that you can do with your children to focus on the meaning of the holidays”, says Golin, “to make it more of a family and community event instead of a shopping frenzy.”