10 year old girl responds to sexualized media and marketing: GIrls these days

Posted on May 18, 2012 by

As I was working with some tween girls to develop critical media literacy, we decided to make our own media to share our thoughts on sexualized media and marketing. I wanted to share one of the products with you. One 10-year-old girl made this Powerpoint slide show. She used media and marketing photos that she found online, and then added her own commentary. This is a fun, simple activity that you can do with the kids in your life to help them think about the images that they are seeing everyday.

Remember, the key to these media literacy activities that build a child’s critical skills is to make it fun, allow the child to actively process and comment on what they’re seeing, and then create their own product to express their thoughts about it. Think about ways you might use the programs that you may have on your own home computer to open up conversations with your kids and allow them to create their own work. This girl’s parting words: Consider this, and thank you for your time.

Girls these days

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On Mother’s Day: The Beauty and Challenge Of Mothering

Posted on May 13, 2012 by

Ah, Mother’s Day. Some argue that it’s just a day created by marketers to get more sales while others see it as a sentimental favorite. Whatever your views, today is a great time to think about the beauty, strength, and challenge of motherhood.

The sexualization of women and children in the media is one of the things that challenges mothers for a couple of reasons. The first is that mothers themselves, as females, are very strongly impacted by the sexualized images and stories that the media tells. With the advent of the “Cougar” and “Hot Mom” personas in the last few years, mothers feel more pressure than ever to meet the media’s standards of beauty. Even women who don’t buy into the beauty myths still feel their pressure. One friend of mine said, “It’s hard for us to teach our daughters not to think that their appearance is all that matters when we’re struggling with that ourselves.”

From features such as “The Hottest Moms over 40” to the never-ending “Hot after baby” stories in magazines ranging from OK! to online sites, mothers feel the pressure to meet unrealistic ideals. This article from Popeater does its best to question the reality of these post baby reveals, which are usually filled with diet and exercise tips. Ok! ran a story about Kourtney Kardashian’s post baby weight loss with a cover photo that had her photo- shopped into oblivion. This was pointed out in this article on Huffpost Entertainment, and you can clearly see how unrealistic the photo-shopped image is next to the real image of her.

But being a new mom isn’t all about losing those baby pounds as fast as you can, and being a mom over 40 isn’t all about trying to stay sexy. Yes, we all want to be healthy and strong. But being a mother is about WAY more than how we look. Instead, motherhood is about the joy and fear of holding your new baby for the first time and wondering how on earth you’re going to do this. It’s about taking care of sick children when they wake up at 3 am, soothing bumps, bruises, and broken hearts. Motherhood is teaching your children to believe in and stand up for themselves, and giving them opportunities for wild success and gentle failure so that they can grow to be strong and independent. And motherhood is not about perfection. No mother is perfect; in fact, we all mess up everyday. But most mothers are doing their best to love their children and to help them become strong, competent adults.

Today I can’t help but think of my own mother who dreamed of being a medical doctor, but instead became the mother of 5 children by the time she was 28 years old. I remember when I was in Kindergarten and my mom went back to college. She was determined to finish, and eventually earned her degree and two graduate degrees, all while raising us, loving my dad, and working most of the time that I can remember. Was she perfect? Heck no, but neither am I as a mom. But what my mom did was, she believed in us. She supported us in any endeavor, and she pushed us when we needed it. And, I’m so thankful to know beyond a shadow of a doubt that she loves us with all of her heart.

These are the things that I want to be as a mother: caring, loving, supportive, encouraging, and so many more. Frankly, sexy and hot are not on my list of motherhood requirements. A woman who loves her family and gives her heart to them will be beautiful. Mothering is often an extension of who one becomes through the relationship with our child’s father, and I hope fervently that being sexy in that relationship is an important part of our lives. But, it is not everything that we are. Our appearance and our sex appeal are so far away from solely defining the strong, funny, caring, feisty, determined, loving mothers that I know.

Let’s let go of this pressure to be perfect and look perfect. Here is what I have to say to you: YOU WILL NEVER BE OR LOOK PERFECT, and that is okay. Instead of seeking that, seek to be the best you that you can become, for that is when you will find peace within yourself and your own mothering. Marianne Williamson has a well-known quote that says,

“Our deepest fear is not that we are inadequate. Our deepest fear is that we are powerful beyond measure. It is our light, not our darkness, that most frightens us….Your playing small doesn’t serve the world. There’s nothing enlightened about shrinking so that other people won’t feel insecure around you. We are all meant to shine, as children do…. And as we let our own light shine, we unconsciously give other people permission to do the same. As we are liberated from our own fear, our presence automatically liberates others.”

I know that not all of us had mothers who taught us this message, and we won’t teach it to our own children everyday. But I challenge all of us, on this day of thinking about caregivers, to remember that caring for others involves caring for ourselves. To do that, we must focus on our own authenticity, instead of shallow, surface things. Don’t be afraid to shine, to let your true and glorious self come forward. It is only through the daring adventure of becoming oneself that one begins to change the world. As Joan of Arc would say, do not be afraid, you were born to do this!

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Put the technology down and connect with your life

Posted on May 11, 2012 by

Last week I was in beautiful Malibu, California at the Pepperdine Lecture Series. I attended a talk by a colleague of mine, Brady Bryce, who talked about how to live in this increasingly connected world. I was struck by both the opportunities and the challenges that connectedness represents. In this article from Hands Free Mama, Rachel Stafford talks about how we can miss a childhood by spending so much time with our mobile devices.

This article really hit home for me, as I’m sure it does for many of us struggling to learn to balance the continual ability to connect with information and people far away, and yet remain present in the moment. Rachel Stafford says, “the distractions of the modern age have taken an undeserved priority over the people who matter in your life.” We’re starting to be like those people on the movie Wall E, riding along in our automated armchairs, staring at the screen in front of us instead of talking to the person next to us. I was with my 7th grade daughter and her friends the other day, and one girl spent the entire time texting other people. She was sitting with two friends, completely ignoring them in order to communicate with people who weren’t there. As my friend Holly Tumpkin says, “Ouch.”

With mother’s day around the corner, I am contemplating what it means to be a mother in this day and age. I have more choices and options than my own mother did thirty years ago when she was raising my siblings and me. But, I also have more distractions. I want to be present with my children, to enjoy the moments of their childhood. It is going so quickly. My oldest daughter will be 13 soon, and it seems like yesterday when she was a toddler, dashing through the house pushing the “walker” and running pell mell into walls and furniture. Her childhood is racing by, and I want to enjoy it with her. I don’t want to look back and regret the things I missed because I was busy checking Facebook or Twitter. When my 8-year-old tells me that I need to pay attention to her and put the iPhone down, I need to start listening. Because the times we have together really matter, they are the moments and minutes of their little lives, their childhood that they’ll look back on one day. And I don’t want them looking back and remembering me with a screen in front of my face. And, I don’t want them growing up and missing out on developing social skills about how to connect with real life people face to face.

Here are some ideas on how to put the technology down and connect with your life:

• Set technology limits: I am not an emergency room doctor or an obstetrician. I’m a professor. There are generally no calls or emails about work that must be responded to immediately. We all need to set limits on how we use our technology. Set cut off times in your day for reading and responding to work related emails and phone calls. You may even need to set certain days aside to be “no email” days. That may sound difficult, but we functioned without email for years and work got done in a timely manner. Give yourself time to just be, rather than always having to do. Unless something urgent is coming up, don’t check email right before going to bed or right after waking up. Give yourself at least 1 hour before bed and after waking to be technology free.
• Make face-to-face time count: When you’re with your friends, children, spouse, etc., put the mobile device away and be with the people in the room. One of my favorite high school teachers used to say, “Be where you are when you’re there.” As a kid, I didn’t really understand what she meant. But in the age of mobile devices, I’m beginning to understand the point. We must take the opportunity to connect with the people in our lives face to face, to enjoy the moments of our lives without distraction.
• Control your technology, don’t let it control you: This is closely related to the first point. Because the device is always with us, the distraction is always available. We think, “I can just check email one more time, I can just send one more message.” Let it go. It will be there tomorrow. We must learn to use technology wisely rather than letting it control the way we function. Be thoughtful; plan your use and your free time from technology.
• Enjoy your life in the moment: One reason I love to jog is because in that moment, there is nothing else I can do. I set aside 30 minutes three times a week to just be alone, doing nothing but running. Our minds, bodies, and spirits need this down time to rest and rejuvenate. During the winter I started jogging on a treadmill and I found myself watching TV and checking my email while running. Guess what happened? I lost the peace of mind that I had been getting from the jog. Give yourself time to just be in the moment, experiencing what you’re doing, whether it’s watching your child play, going for a run, gardening, or what have you. Just be.

One of the great challenges of our new age is learning to balance the benefits and drawbacks of such accessibility. I urge you to examine where you are when it comes to technology use. Take control, and use it to wisely and thoughtfully. This is your time, this your child’s life, spend it well.

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Learning to Flourish

Posted on May 10, 2012 by

“I am fundamentally an optimist. Whether that comes from nature or nurture, I cannot say. Part of being optimistic is keeping one’s head pointed toward the sun, one’s feet moving forward. There were many dark moments when my faith in humanity was sorely tested, but I would not and could not give myself up to despair. That way lays defeat and death.”

― Nelson Mandela, Long Walk to Freedom: Autobiography of Nelson Mandela

 

As I’m writing about the communities in a child’s life that have a positive influence on them, I’ve been reading Flourish: A visionary new understanding of happiness and well-being by Dr. Martin E.P. Seligman. Seligman is the founder of the field of Positive Psychology, which has transformed my field. Historically, psychology has focused on understanding and treating maladaptive behaviors. Positive Psychology turns that around and asks, what makes people flourish? And what does it mean to achieve emotional well-being?

 

Seligman talks about the importance of identifying one’s strengths and style of living and then using that knowledge to move toward success. As I’ve been thinking about that, I realized something about myself. I truly love and believe in the power of people, as a whole and individually. I believe that we have the power to choose to live our lives with purpose and meaning, to live for something other than our own pleasure. In fact, in order to truly achieve emotional well-being, we must find meaning in our lives. Experiencing positive emotions through pleasure isn’t enough. Instead, we must combine positive emotion with engagement, healthy relationships, finding meaning, and experiencing a sense of accomplishment. When we do these things, we will begin to experience well-being, we will flourish.

 

I know, I know, that sounds so pie in the sky, right? Aren’t we just here for our own pleasure and to heck with the rest of you? I know some people who truly believe that, who scoff at Dr. Seligman, and me and others who believe that we are more than that. But here’s the thing, Martin Seligman is nothing if not a rigorous researcher and scientist of the human mind. He has conducted some of the most well designed research to study well-being, and these are his conclusions. It’s very hard to argue with the data that he has that tells us that to truly achieve emotional well-being, we must look beyond pleasure.

 

Are you ready to do that? Are you ready to see yourself as more? Are you ready to flourish? It’s not easy, especially if you’ve found yourself entrenched in a cycle of negativity. Maybe you’ve struggled with clinical depression or anxiety, and listen; you will still have to work on those issues. You will still need professional help to continue the work that you are doing. But there is a way forward. And it’s a way that helps you learn to identify and use your strengths.

 

Dr. Seligman has developed a website to help people who are seeking well-being. It’s called Authentic Happiness. If you’d like to learn more about this exciting movement, check it out. There are tons of resources to help you learn to flourish.

 

I’m going to be writing more about flourishing and what I’m learning about it myself. Stay tuned and we’ll explore this idea together. In the end, this is what I mean by being a world changer. When we believe that we can change the world, that we have power to make a difference, we will, as Nelson Mandela says, keep our heads pointed toward the sun and keep moving forward. We will move forward, into finding our best selves, into well-being, into making this world a better place.

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Are Princesses Really so Bad?!

Posted on May 4, 2012 by

If you read the review or information about the book Cinderella Ate my Daughter, you may be wondering, are princesses really that bad? Are they evil? Is it wrong to let my child play with anything princess related? People also struggle with this issue when it comes to Barbie dolls.I think these are questions that many people struggle with who are attempting to critically evaluate the messages that media sends.

I’ve read and talked to a lot of people with a lot of different ideas about this issue, some of them fairly militant. So, let me say right now that you may not agree with me on this, and that other experts on children’s media may not agree with me.

The first thing I would say about both Disney Princess and Barbie play is that they do tend to be limiting to a child’s imagination. With their scripted story lines along with the pervasive nature of the toys that are sold, little girls who play with these toys may feel that there is definitely a right and a wrong way to play. Dr. Susan Linn, who speaks and writes a lot about this, talks in her chapter A Royal Juggernaut in the book The Sexualization of Childhood about how her experience as a play therapist has changed due to the extreme commercial marketing of Princesses. She provides many examples of how the little girls with whom she works often seem locked into Disney Princess scripts when they play anything that has to do with royalty. Try to give a Princess a name other than Ariel, Cinderella, Aurora and so forth and you’re in for a fight! Try to deviate from the scripts provided by the movies or TV shows, and they dig in their heels. This kind of scripted play isn’t healthy because it doesn’t allow children to actively use their imagination and to imagine and play outcomes and stories that are different from those they’ve seen before.

The other component of Disney Princess culture that Dr. Linn finds disturbing is the lack of exploration of self within this type of scripted play. Her experience and research has demonstrated that little girls who are locked into the Princess script find it difficult to deviate from the formula as it depicts females. Their stories seem to get stuck in what Disney has offered, rather than being able to make up their own stories, provide new solutions and conquer new difficulties. When constantly following a known script, this same kind of self-exploration doesn’t happen.

And, of course, it’s easy to see that females are quite often depicted as in need of rescuing, with goodness being equated with thinness and beauty, and as scantily clad. There have been some deviations from this idea with some of the princess stories, but the overwhelming story seems to remain the same. So is all lost when it comes to the Disney Princesses? If you loved these stories as a child, must you abandon them now in order to save your daughter from corruption?

In my opinion, the princesses and Barbie might be able to play a part in a healthy childhood experience given a few caveats. First of all, if your child is going to be playing with these toys, encourage them to go off script. When you play with them, push them to make a character do something that she would never do in the original story, introduce new characters and plot twists, or even change character names.

Take every opportunity to openly evaluate the stories that you see or hear around these characters and offer alternative actions. Was that really the best thing to do? I think I might have done this…what about you? Talk directly about issues that bother you, such as how thin the characters are or the fact that they fall in love at the drop of a hat. One of the funniest moments I’ve had as a mother was critiquing the movie Snow White with my oldest daughter when she was 7 or 8 years old. We talked about how Snow White fell in love with a man she met once and then rode off with him at the end. Was that realistic? She didn’t even know anything about him except that she liked his singing voice! What if people did that in real life? My daughter summed up her thoughts on the movie by saying, “You know, Snow White wasn’t very smart, was she? She takes food from a stranger then rides off with someone she doesn’t even know!”

The last thing you want to do is provide your child with lots of different stories and different play opportunities. My daughter loved princesses when she was about 4 but she also loved ancient Egypt and dinosaurs, and she played with all of those toys and themes, sometimes all at once! Providing your child with a lot of different alternatives for story lines and creative play allows them to use their imaginations and explore both themselves and the world around them. Letting them become drenched in Princess Culture doesn’t provide them with those same kinds of opportunities.

Having three daughters, one now in middle school, I take the long view. I think, in moderation and with thoughtfulness, princesses and Barbie can likely play a part in their childhood, just as they did in mine. This does take some planning on the part of parents, though. With the heavy marketing and commercialization of both of these brands, it’s easy for little girls to become consumed and overwhelmed by them. In my opinion, moderation, as in all things, is the key.

Olfman, S. (Ed) The Sexualization of Childhood (2009). Praeger: Westport, CT.

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Fight the Power: Children and Adolescents as Consumer Activists

Posted on April 30, 2012 by

From the Archives: A year ago, we talked about some consumer victories. This year, we could add the productive conversation between SPARK Summit and LEGO about their new Friends line and J.C. Penney pulling their t-shirt that said, “I’m too pretty to do homework so my brother does it for me.” Can you think of other incidents of consumers pushing back on unhealthy messages and getting a company to respond in a socially responsible way?

Sometimes when we think about media and marketing that targets children and adolescents through sexualized, unhealthy images and narratives, it’s hard not to get discouraged. We may feel that no matter what we do, these same old companies are going to keep using these same old inappropriate strategies to target kids.

I’d like to share some consumer victories with you, along with some ideas for how children and adolescents themselves can become consumer activists and world changers. In a recent post, Push Up Bikini Tops for Kids?, I talked about a push-up top being marketed to young adolescents. Many writers and children’s rights activists believed that it was inappropriate, and condemned this marketing of sexuality to young girls. The company has apparently bowed to the weight of pressure and removed the “push up” label from all bikini tops and then removed the product itself from their website.

In the post Speaking Truth to Target, I tell the story of my friend Marcia, who was offended by the message being sent by a t-shirt in the toy section of her local Target store. She took the initiative to talk to store employees, the manager, and followed up with a phone call. In her own opinion, she didn’t do that much, but she did what she could. She was later informed that the t-shirt had been pulled nationally because so many costumers had complained.

In the article Misogynist T-Shirt Removed Thanks to Online Activism! : Ms Magazine Blog, the author shares the news that a t-shirt picturing a woman with tape over her mouth and the phrase “Enjoy the Silence” was removed from stores after university students saw it and started a petition to complain against the message that it was sending. We can add the conversation between SPARK Summit and LEGO to this list, as well as J.C. Penney’s response to consumer pressure to pull a t-shirt for girls that had an unhealthy message.

All of these stories testify to the fact that consumer pressure can impact inappropriate marketing schemes. In past posts, I’ve encouraged you to think about actions that we as consumers can take to fight against this type of marketing from letter writing to the brand, talking to the managers of stores, online and offline petitions, and so forth.

Amy Jussel of Shaping Youth gives some more exciting suggestions on ways to respond to negative media campaigns in her post Shaping Youth » Using Media With Mindfulness. One that is fun and creative is brand jamming, which, Jussel explains “use advocacy sites that band together en masse to create a larger collective “umpf!” by making mock campaigns to make fun of ridiculous marketing practices. I know some tweens and teens who would love to participate in this kind of response! We can join groups such as this blog and related sites to stand together against specific advertising campaigns. Jussel describes her own favorite, “our own ‘counter-marketing’ practices where we ‘flip the outrage.’” Educating consumers about the process of marketing and using media to do it by exposing the careful and ugly marketing strategies that target underage children. She states, “Let’s just say that the more you educate consumers about the PROCESS and use media to do it, the more they’re forearmed with invisible cloaks and shields in the battle for kids hearts and minds.”

Practical strategies for doing this include showing adolescents how marketing works. Amy of Shaping Youth gives a specific example of walking some teen-agers through how one liquor company was targeting kids using famous hip hop artists and candy colored alcoholic drinks. Once these young people understood the way that the company was targeting them, they got angry, and then they can start using social media to share their outrage with their peers and hopefully keep the unethical company from profiting from such outrageous marketing tactics.One strategy that advertisers have used quite a bit recently is that of baiting outrage, where they put out a particularly provocative product and then wait to get media attention from consumer anger, think of the padded bikini top for young children that I referenced above.

Adolescents themselves can make great advocates because, as shown in this study (In adolescence, the power to resist blooms in the brain) they are at a particular stage of development when their power to resist peer pressure is growing. Many adolescents are hungry to make a difference in the world, to be world changers. By harnessing that energy and helping them learn to be critical media consumers, we can lend them a hand in standing up against these marketing campaigns that are cynically targeting them. Using social media and word of mouth, adolescents and caring adults can work together to fight for their rights and advocate against companies that put a bulls-eye on their childhood.

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Sexualization of Children: A Person’s a Person, No Matter How Small

Posted on April 28, 2012 by
Happy Birthday Dr. Seuss

Image by davemc500hats via Flickr

“Unless someone like you cares a whole awful lot, nothing is going to get better. It’s not.” 
— Dr. Seuss (The Lorax)

As the mother of three children and a professional educator who’s worked with children for many years, I am a Dr. Seuss fan. The truths that consistently frame his work are illuminating, both in large and small ways. Sometimes I feel like Horton the elephant from Horton Hears a Who, calling out to people that yes, the commercialized sexualization of children does matter.

Why? At the heart of it, the sexualization of children is a discounting of a child’s individuality and humanity. These children are treated as sexual jokes by their parents and the adults in their lives. From the little girl taught to gyrate suggestively for a pageant while adults look on and laugh at her to the little girls tarted up for lingerie spread or magazine ads in an attempt to sell products, these girls are not being respected as human beings. They are being treated as objects.

Let me tell you something, children are people. They have feelings and they are forming their identities. Having worked with children for many years, I have a very deep respect for the depth of their pain and their joy, for their innocence and ability to see the world from a different perspective. These are beautiful, transient moments that vanish with experience and age. As adults, we should provide children with the time to learn, to grow, to create and experiment rather than forcing them into little boxes that confine them to limited ideas of what they should do, feel, and look like. We should provide them with room to stretch their wings, to try new things, to find their niche, rather than prescribing the role that they must play.

It is easy to feel powerless in the face of the relentless commercialization of sexualized media. But we are not powerless. When we stand together, when we raise our voices, there will be change. Without us, nothing changes. As we take a stand, things will get better. We have seen this time and again with issues of social justice, from the suffrage movement and the civil rights movement to the fight for child labor laws. When enough people decide that enough is enough and decide to fight for change, change does occur. And remember, as Horton said, “A person’s a person, no matter how small.” Children deserve to be treated with respect, to be allowed to be children rather than treated as objects for amusement. They deserve better than that.

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