Recently, Nickelodeon and Disney have taken a stand against childhood obesity. Nickelodeon stopped broadcasting for three hours on a weekend to encourage kids to go outside and play. The kids were allowed, however, to change the channel. Disney plans to release a line of cartoon character-themed fruits and vegetables and market them to children.
According to Minnesota child labor laws, a child under the age of thirteen may not be employed except as a model, an actress, a youth program referee, paper carrier or an agricultural worker and most of those job require parental consent. They still, however, have to do chores.
Where are these children getting the money to buy junk food and expensive televisions with cable channels that broadcast cartoons all day? Is little Timmy out in the soybean field with a corn knife chopping at a patch of lambsquarter? Unless you grow a cash crop, probably not.
Let's take a look at the kid ecosystem: Parents are the sun. They are the source off all life and all energy in the child's ecosystem. The energy the parents radiate on the children can be measured in dollars. Now, there will be two types of things the dollars provided by the parents radiate upon. There will be those things that exist in the ecosystem that do not take dollars away from the child's dollar input and the things that do.
The child cannot receive dollars without the parents. They cannot buy candy or sod-ey (sic) pop. They can only sit on their thumbs and watch television or use their imaginations in a meadow or something dumb like that. Either way the child cannot obtain fattening agents in the environment without the parental dollar-input.
The television on the other hand exists in the kid ecosystem without direct cash input from the child. It did take direct cash input by the parents to make the TV flourish in the living-room biome.
Really clunky metaphors aside, a kid can't get very far without the help of the parent. These corporations aren't really doing anything for the kids. They just want to try and make an honest buck off parents like they have done since time immemorial.
Don't let the wizards of Madison Avenue get to you through your kids. They don't really need an allowance. After all, isn't the word allow in allowance. Doesn't that mean that it is a sum of money you allow your kids to have. Zero allowance is still, by definition, an allowance.
On a personal note, I'm not a parent, and I talk big about standing firm with kids. If I were a dad, my kids would be the first on the block to own an M1 Abrams military tank. So, there is that.
If you want to talk to someone who knows what they are talking about, talk to a family psychiatrist or a pediatrician. To find one near you, click here.
