Two articles on childrearing
May. 30th, 2007 10:07 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
conuly
One criticiziing kid's menus
Don’t Point That Menu at My Child, Please
By DAVID KAMP
IT seems like such a wonderful concept when you encounter it for the first time as a parent. You go to a restaurant as a family, are seated and given menus, and the waitress cheerfully turns to your children and exclaims, “And these are for you!” Their own special menus — kids’ menus! Sometimes these are little laminated things, peewee facsimiles of what Mom and Dad are holding. Sometimes these are placemats that not only tell you what foods are available but also contain mazes and word-search puzzles.
No matter what, the menu offers chicken fingers with French fries. And typically, as you go down the list, macaroni and cheese, a hot dog, a hamburger, grilled cheese and some kind of pizza.
Early in my tenure as a parent, I thought children’s menus were the greatest thing, a quantum leap forward in the human condition. We didn’t have them when I was a child, at least not at restaurants where adults would be happy to dine. (There were always “family” restaurants in the Friendly’s-HoJo’s idiom that offered junior sundaes and burgers.) I was thrilled that someone had come up with this innovation, that civilization had advanced to the point where children at good restaurants were now immediately placated with children’s food, so we adults could plunge worry-free into our adult business of drinking alcohol and eating things with tentacles.
For restaurateurs there are advantages, too. Marc Murphy, the chef and an owner of Landmarc in TriBeCa (and its new sister operation in the Time Warner Center), says doing a children’s menu has helped the bottom line at his bistro, which is known for its neighborhood clientele and value-priced wines.
“It totally drives that early seating for us,” he said. “The kids eat what they eat, and with our wine program, the parents can have fun.” Landmarc serves up the requisite greatest hits — the fingers, the burger, the grilled cheese — and throws in some curveballs, like “green eggs and ham,” flavored and colored with pesto sauce.
As for me, my outlook on children’s menus started to change at some point — probably around the 102nd or 103rd time my children ordered chicken fingers with French fries. Even if the chicken fingers were good ones, made from real breast meat rather than pulverized and remolded chik-a-bits, I was disturbed by their ubiquity and their hold on my kids, who are 11 and 8 years old.
I noticed that accommodationist chefs were making chicken fingers available in Italian, Chinese and Japanese restaurants, where chicken fingers aren’t even culinarily justifiable. I perceived that my children’s chicken-finger meals outside the home were informing their eating habits inside the home, where they were getting more finicky. I heard from other parents that they were experiencing the same thing.
In short, I came to the realization that America is in the grips of a nefarious chicken-finger pandemic, in which a blandly tasty foodstuff has somehow become the de facto official nibble of our young.
For all the fretfulness I’m obligated to express over the health implications of this pandemic — chicken fingers are often fried, and are often accompanied by fries — I’m much more rankled by its palate-deadening potential. Far from being an advance, I’ve concluded, the standard children’s menu is regressive, encouraging children (and their misguided parents) to believe that there is a rigidly delineated “kids’ cuisine” that exists entirely apart from grown-up cuisine.
I grew up eating what my parents ate, at home and at restaurants. Sometimes, the experience could be revelatory, as when I tried fish chowder for the first time on a trip to Boston, or when my mother attempted Julia Child’s Soupe au Pistou.
Other times, dinner was merely dinner, not transcendent but comfortingly routine. And then there were those bummer meals that I just didn’t care for, like stuffed cabbage, but that I endured because my parents offered no other choice. It was all experiential grist for the mill, and it made me — like millions of other Americans of my generation who were raised the same way — a fairly adventurous eater with a built-in sense of dietary balance.
It pains me that many children now grow up eating little besides golden-brown logs of kid food, especially in a time when the quality, variety and availability of good ingredients is better than ever.
We accept that it’s bad not to read to young children lest it affect their “wiring,” and that it’s bad to let them slack off on exercise lest their muscles not develop, but we’re kind of lazy on the palate front. And really, discovering new foods and flavors is one of the most delightful experiences that childhood can offer. Personally, I far preferred it to reading and exercising.
There’s no single seismic jolt that created the adult-child food divide, but we can’t underestimate the influence of the McDonald’s Corporation’s introductions, in 1979 and 1983, respectively, of the Happy Meal and Chicken McNuggets. The instant popularity of these products signaled that there was a ton of money to be made in marketing foods explicitly to kids (even at fast-food restaurants, where kids were already psyched to be).
Since then, the food industry has developed a whole new segment predicated on what the nutritionist Marion Nestle, in her book “What to Eat,” calls the “ ‘kids are only supposed to eat kids’ food’ strategy.”
Ms. Nestle notes that ConAgra manufactures a product line called Kid Cuisine: prepackaged meals in compartmented, TV-dinner-style trays. If you visit the company’s Web site, you’ll find that all 14 Kid Cuisine meals are beige-yellow-ocher in color — a grim hallmark of the genre — and 5 of them are built around an entree in the breaded-chicken-nubbin family.
Realistically, there’s nothing to be gained by pining for that halcyon world where kids weren’t constantly being hustled; the genie is out of the bottle. But if we’re stuck with the children’s menu, there’s no reason it can’t be improved upon and made less of a sop to cosseted little fried-food addicts. And it’s encouraging that some important players in the hospitality industry, like the Walt Disney Company and the Ritz-Carlton Hotel Company, are taking action on this front.
Both companies were motivated primarily by the new national concern over poor nutrition and childhood obesity, but each has produced a response that also addresses the dead-palate issue. Effective last fall, Disney stopped serving French fries automatically with kids’ entrees at its theme parks, “providing equal choice of fries, baby carrots, or grapes, not really pushing one or the other,” said Mary Niven, the vice president of food and beverage operations at Disneyland in Anaheim, Calif.
Ms. Niven is leading her company’s “Well-Balanced Foods Initiative,” which also entails experimenting with new meals outside of the chicken-finger paradigm, such as arroz con pollo, the traditional Latin American dish of chicken and rice, and a baked chicken leg in an Asian-style citrus marinade, served with rice noodles.
Likewise, Ritz-Carlton launched a “Healthy Kids” program for children four years ago. The program not only de-emphasizes fried foods but also gives its chefs a freer hand to create their own kids’ menus. Vivian Deuschl, the vice president for public relations at Ritz-Carlton, who oversees the program, said it was set up in response to changing customer tastes.
A 20-year veteran of the company, Ms. Deuschl said that kids’ menus “started out on a limited basis in the ’80s and picked up in the ’90s as our demographics started to shift, especially at our resorts. We were getting more families, usually ones where both parents worked, so they didn’t want to leave their kids behind on vacation.”
At first, these guests were only too happy to indulge their children with a nonstop fingers-and-fries diet while on vacation. But in the last few years, Ms. Deuschl said: “We sensed a lot of tension. Parents were ordering things off the adult menu for their kids: crab cakes, pastas, stir-fries of vegetables.”
Perhaps no chef has taken the mission more to heart than Tony Miller of Latitude 41, the restaurant of the Renaissance Columbus in Ohio. (Renaissance, like Ritz-Carlton, falls under the Marriott International corporate umbrella.) “We do not have a chicken finger in this restaurant,” Mr. Miller said. The father of a 4-year-old girl, he constructed his “Fun Menu” to appeal to children without pandering to them.
“It features zero fried foods on it,” he said. “We do grilled organic chicken teriyaki, a seared fillet of whatever fish is in season, and a four-once fillet of natural beef with smashed potatoes. I have not received a single negative reaction from adults or kids. Not one. The kids say ‘Man, that’s the best steak I’ve ever eaten!’ ”
Mr. Miller is also shrewd in recognizing that parents are after not dumbed-down or deflavorized food for their kids, but rather smaller portions and prices. At the rates he’s charging — from $5 for the teriyaki to $8 for the small fillet, including beverage — he’s in the ballpark with lots of diners and chain places.
Marc Murphy, the Landmarc chef, said that it’s simply a matter of “not making a big deal of out of it” when it comes to your kids’ food preferences.
His own 3-year-old daughter usually skips the children’s menu at his restaurant, he said, and “eats the linguine alla vongole, with baby clams, when we run it on Fridays.” But it’s harder as your children get older and more exposed to the wider world; that’s when the pandemic claims them. In my family, it’s been a matter of getting back to that simple idea — the kids eat what the parents eat — and cutting off those little fingers.
And one criticizing television-for-toddlers
The littlest shoppers
Will buying educational toys make your kid a genius -- or just leave you broke? Author Susan Gregory Thomas cuts through the baby-business babble.
By Helaine Olen
May. 30, 2007 | Baby Einstein videos, infant gym classes, talking toys that teach phonics: Every year more and more American parents snap up the latest kid-centric luxuries, convinced they can provide their children with a head start on everything from education to socialization. But are the secrets of good parenting really on sale at Toys "R" Us? Not according to journalist Susan Gregory Thomas. In her new book, "Buy, Buy Baby: How Consumer Culture Manipulates Parents and Harms Young Minds," Thomas contends that rather than enriching young minds, companies like Baby Einstein and Nickelodeon have become lifestyle brands for chic toddlers and have turned little ones into restless shoppers long before they understand the concept of buying. Eager marketers plaster familiar faces like Bob the Builder and Elmo on everything from books to blocks to Band-Aids in an effort to goose the bottom line. Even the train table in the Barnes & Noble children's department is a marketing ploy, placed there by the company peddling Thomas the Tank Engine toys.
Thomas is not the first to point out that much of the booming baby business -- a market she says is now worth $20 billion annually -- is a bunch of bogus hocus-pocus designed to separate parents from their cash. Last year, the child advocacy group Campaign for a Commercial-Free Childhood filed a complaint with the Federal Trade Commission alleging that the claims made by Baby Einstein's marketers amounted to false and deceptive advertising. More recently, the Education Sector, a well-respected research organization, released a report calling most so-called educational toys a crock.
But where Thomas' book excels is in her dissection of the ways in which the marketing juggernaut ultimately affects us all. Toddlers without a television in their home still recognize Elmo. Marketing firms with innocent-sounding names like the Geppetto Group specialize in pitching products to kids and teens. Even politicians such as Sen. Hillary Clinton and President Bush have fallen for aspects of the consumerist toddler zeitgeist. In fact, they might be said to bookend the business: Clinton helped launch the craze in the mid-1990s when she began citing studies on the important role the first three years of life play in child development. And Bush gave Baby Einstein the ultimate product placement, mentioning it and creator Julie Aigner-Clark in his 2007 State of the Union address.
Salon caught up with Thomas in New York, where she discussed the origins of the baby buying boom, how marketers prey on Generation X parenting practices and why -- and how -- moms and dads should fight back.
When did the "baby business" boom, as we know it today, begin?
Well, in 1994, the Carnegie Corp. published a report called "Starting Points." It was an investigation of new neurological research about how infant minds grow. It pointed out that you're never more open than you are in the first three years -- that's when you learn the foundations of physical activity, emotional security and cognitive development. The report got the attention of Hillary Clinton and actor Rob Reiner, and they put together a White House Council meeting in 1997 on the importance of the first three years. The aim was to put political pressure on Congress for federal support for early childcare. But the lasting legacy of this conference was not federal funding for early childcare. It was the "baby genius" zeitgeist.
Right around the same time as the White House conference, another, more specious study came out about what was called "the Mozart effect." It suggested that college-age kids would score marginally better on intelligence tests if they were played a certain section of a certain sonata by Mozart.
Julie Aigner-Clark, a very canny mother of a toddler, took note of that study. And she put together what we now know as the Baby Einstein empire, and Baby Mozart was the first video she developed. She based a lot of her ideas for stimulating the infant brain on this strange conflation of cultural trends: that babies were active geniuses and you really had to stimulate them adequately before they turned 3, otherwise they would never get into college, and the idea you would sort of be made smarter in math and spatial reasoning if you listened to Mozart.
But you write that there is no evidence that educational videos and the like do anything for infants and toddlers. So how do Baby Einstein and other similar companies convince parents otherwise?
Noam Chomsky said it best when he said the consumer economy takes our concerns, commodifies them and sells them back to us. If you look at the marketing rubric of, for example, Baby Einstein, what they talk about is enhancing a baby's natural curiosity. But what's so fascinating about it is that there is absolutely no research that undergirds those statements. There just isn't any. It's all marketing.
The book describes a number of companies that specialize in marketing materials to children, including Scholastic, the publisher of the beloved Harry Potter series. What is their strategy?
One of the things Scholastic started doing was to develop preschool curricula for media conglomerates. Disney, for example, is one of its biggest customers. Scholastic will develop a whole curriculum around a television show and have posters and activities and all kinds of things that preschool teachers can use. Disney pays Scholastic to develop it and offers it to the schools for free.
By and large, teachers and places are thrilled to have the free stuff. They'll hang the posters on the wall and they'll save the videos for a rainy day. It has a ripple effect because parents see that their child is watching Scholastic-approved videos in school, and they buy the idea that it must be educationally appropriate and vetted by the experts.
Many of the marketing firms you spoke with denied that they targeted their products to children under 3 -- but admitted that a lot of kids that age still watch the videos. Is that a cop-out?
It's disingenuous at the very best to say we don't test children, we don't conduct focus groups under the age of 3, or we know that they're watching in record numbers but we can't control that. But that's basically their line.
Even "Sesame Beginnings" products came under fire from a lot of commercial watchdog groups when the company came out with a DVD that said it was for 6-month-olds through adults.
Wait a minute. What's wrong with "Sesame Street"?
Well, when we -- today's parents -- were watching "Sesame Street" as children, we were 4 and 5 years old. That is the target age for "Sesame Street." But what we do now is put infants and toddlers in front of "Sesame Street." Infants and toddlers are almost a completely different species from 4- and 5-year-olds. It turns out that an 18-month-old toddler has as much in common, cognitively speaking, with a 4-year-old as a 15-year-old girl does with a 75-year-old man.
It's complicated for an infant or toddler to process television. When they are put in front of the television, the only thing they seem to be getting out of it in a verifiable way is character recognition. That's why you see babies and toddlers so thrilled when they're at the supermarket and they recognize Elmo. But still, it wears what the marketing industry calls an "educational patina."
What is so awful about character recognition?
The problem is that the great social values that Elmo and the characters on "Sesame Street" teach are lost on children under the age of 3. They get solely a flat, one-dimensional character recognition. And the only other times that children are going to encounter the character are when a company is trying to sell the kid something. You don't see Elmo running around your park. You see Elmo when he's in diapers, when he's on juice boxes, when he's on Band-Aids and when he's on toothbrushes.
But toys have been around a long time. How are these things any different from Shirley Temple dolls and Davy Crockett hats?
Those were never marketed to infants and toddlers. The other difference is that parents in the '50s were much more involved with their children's consumption of media. The family gathered around to listen to the radio or watch "The Mickey Mouse Club." They were gatekeepers.
You also say that this merchandise may hold a generational appeal for today's young parents. Can you explain what you mean by that?
Generation X-ers were often latchkey kids. For example, I often came home before my mom did and turned on the television. And in the '80s, marketers -- together with television production studios -- came up with television shows that were basically commercials. You know, "Sesame Street" aired its first show in 1969 and its characters were really meant to be the village that raised American children. We have a soft spot in our hearts for these characters. So for many Generation X-ers, their happy memories of childhood are inextricably linked with consumer culture.
But a number of groups are countering those consumerist messages -- most notably the American Academy of Pediatrics, which says without apology that there should be no television for children under 2. Why aren't parents listening?
Today's parents want to be as involved with our children's lives as possible. That means more breast-feeding, attachment parenting and volunteering at the school. But everyone needs a break, and instead of just letting kids freak out or complain or whine or cry, Generation X thinks it is OK for them to spend that time in front of the television. Even the naysayers say, "I know that it's not making him into a genius, but at least I can take a shower." And this is really the first generation of parents for whom taking a shower has become a high-stakes proposition.
You have two kids. Did your research change how you parented them?
Absolutely. My daughter -- at age 3 -- came home from school talking about how certain girls at school weren't allowed to play something called the Princess Game unless they had come to school wearing a dress with the colors of a particular Disney princess. It was shocking to me that Disney had penetrated at that level. We hadn't shown her any of the Disney movies.
I said, "OK, if this is what's going on in school we'll get into it." We just did our own study of Cinderella. We went to the bookstore and the library, and it turned out that almost every culture in the world has its own Cinderella story. So we got out "Cendrillon," which was a Caribbean Cinderella story, and "Adelita," which was Mexican, and a Chinese one. Then we got the Disney Cinderella book, then we got the traditional Brothers Grimm. Then we started asking her, How come we don't see Cendrillon on Band-Aids? How come Adelita isn't on any toothbrushes? Then when we went to the grocery store, I'd ask, "Why would they put SpongeBob on that macaroni and cheese? Does SpongeBob have anything to do with that?" We began to talk about how characters are used to try to sell stuff.
Is that a conversation all parents should be having? Or is there something to be said for just leaving kids alone?
Life itself is very stimulating -- children don't need a lot of this extra stuff. Just being with your parents and getting to relax and hang out, or even just sort of sitting in the bouncy seat and watching your mom type on the keyboard as she does her work, or going to the market, or just taking a nap and cuddling, is all the stimulation a baby needs.
Today, Jenn was home, and she wanted to sleep in. This seriously messed with our morning routine, especially considering a huge portion of our morning is spent jumping on her bed. So, as a kindness to her, I trekked the kids downstairs for half an hour of TV. Right before, Ana explained to her mom that she wasn't playing the "silly game" (Your eyes are purple, Ana!) but the "No game". And then, because Jenn was confused, she elaborated - '"Do you want to help us?" "NO!" "Great!" "Oh, MAN!"'
I do so love the no game. It makes so many tedious activities less so.
Though I think that one of the reasons That Program is so objectionable is the simple length of the pauses. Forget the inanity of the questions, they don't need to wait 20 minutes before moving on. This is why I intend to NEVER SEE THAT SOUL SUCKING THING AGAIN UNLESS EVERY LAST ONE OF US IS PUKING UP BLOOD. Just so you know.
Don’t Point That Menu at My Child, Please
By DAVID KAMP
IT seems like such a wonderful concept when you encounter it for the first time as a parent. You go to a restaurant as a family, are seated and given menus, and the waitress cheerfully turns to your children and exclaims, “And these are for you!” Their own special menus — kids’ menus! Sometimes these are little laminated things, peewee facsimiles of what Mom and Dad are holding. Sometimes these are placemats that not only tell you what foods are available but also contain mazes and word-search puzzles.
No matter what, the menu offers chicken fingers with French fries. And typically, as you go down the list, macaroni and cheese, a hot dog, a hamburger, grilled cheese and some kind of pizza.
Early in my tenure as a parent, I thought children’s menus were the greatest thing, a quantum leap forward in the human condition. We didn’t have them when I was a child, at least not at restaurants where adults would be happy to dine. (There were always “family” restaurants in the Friendly’s-HoJo’s idiom that offered junior sundaes and burgers.) I was thrilled that someone had come up with this innovation, that civilization had advanced to the point where children at good restaurants were now immediately placated with children’s food, so we adults could plunge worry-free into our adult business of drinking alcohol and eating things with tentacles.
For restaurateurs there are advantages, too. Marc Murphy, the chef and an owner of Landmarc in TriBeCa (and its new sister operation in the Time Warner Center), says doing a children’s menu has helped the bottom line at his bistro, which is known for its neighborhood clientele and value-priced wines.
“It totally drives that early seating for us,” he said. “The kids eat what they eat, and with our wine program, the parents can have fun.” Landmarc serves up the requisite greatest hits — the fingers, the burger, the grilled cheese — and throws in some curveballs, like “green eggs and ham,” flavored and colored with pesto sauce.
As for me, my outlook on children’s menus started to change at some point — probably around the 102nd or 103rd time my children ordered chicken fingers with French fries. Even if the chicken fingers were good ones, made from real breast meat rather than pulverized and remolded chik-a-bits, I was disturbed by their ubiquity and their hold on my kids, who are 11 and 8 years old.
I noticed that accommodationist chefs were making chicken fingers available in Italian, Chinese and Japanese restaurants, where chicken fingers aren’t even culinarily justifiable. I perceived that my children’s chicken-finger meals outside the home were informing their eating habits inside the home, where they were getting more finicky. I heard from other parents that they were experiencing the same thing.
In short, I came to the realization that America is in the grips of a nefarious chicken-finger pandemic, in which a blandly tasty foodstuff has somehow become the de facto official nibble of our young.
For all the fretfulness I’m obligated to express over the health implications of this pandemic — chicken fingers are often fried, and are often accompanied by fries — I’m much more rankled by its palate-deadening potential. Far from being an advance, I’ve concluded, the standard children’s menu is regressive, encouraging children (and their misguided parents) to believe that there is a rigidly delineated “kids’ cuisine” that exists entirely apart from grown-up cuisine.
I grew up eating what my parents ate, at home and at restaurants. Sometimes, the experience could be revelatory, as when I tried fish chowder for the first time on a trip to Boston, or when my mother attempted Julia Child’s Soupe au Pistou.
Other times, dinner was merely dinner, not transcendent but comfortingly routine. And then there were those bummer meals that I just didn’t care for, like stuffed cabbage, but that I endured because my parents offered no other choice. It was all experiential grist for the mill, and it made me — like millions of other Americans of my generation who were raised the same way — a fairly adventurous eater with a built-in sense of dietary balance.
It pains me that many children now grow up eating little besides golden-brown logs of kid food, especially in a time when the quality, variety and availability of good ingredients is better than ever.
We accept that it’s bad not to read to young children lest it affect their “wiring,” and that it’s bad to let them slack off on exercise lest their muscles not develop, but we’re kind of lazy on the palate front. And really, discovering new foods and flavors is one of the most delightful experiences that childhood can offer. Personally, I far preferred it to reading and exercising.
There’s no single seismic jolt that created the adult-child food divide, but we can’t underestimate the influence of the McDonald’s Corporation’s introductions, in 1979 and 1983, respectively, of the Happy Meal and Chicken McNuggets. The instant popularity of these products signaled that there was a ton of money to be made in marketing foods explicitly to kids (even at fast-food restaurants, where kids were already psyched to be).
Since then, the food industry has developed a whole new segment predicated on what the nutritionist Marion Nestle, in her book “What to Eat,” calls the “ ‘kids are only supposed to eat kids’ food’ strategy.”
Ms. Nestle notes that ConAgra manufactures a product line called Kid Cuisine: prepackaged meals in compartmented, TV-dinner-style trays. If you visit the company’s Web site, you’ll find that all 14 Kid Cuisine meals are beige-yellow-ocher in color — a grim hallmark of the genre — and 5 of them are built around an entree in the breaded-chicken-nubbin family.
Realistically, there’s nothing to be gained by pining for that halcyon world where kids weren’t constantly being hustled; the genie is out of the bottle. But if we’re stuck with the children’s menu, there’s no reason it can’t be improved upon and made less of a sop to cosseted little fried-food addicts. And it’s encouraging that some important players in the hospitality industry, like the Walt Disney Company and the Ritz-Carlton Hotel Company, are taking action on this front.
Both companies were motivated primarily by the new national concern over poor nutrition and childhood obesity, but each has produced a response that also addresses the dead-palate issue. Effective last fall, Disney stopped serving French fries automatically with kids’ entrees at its theme parks, “providing equal choice of fries, baby carrots, or grapes, not really pushing one or the other,” said Mary Niven, the vice president of food and beverage operations at Disneyland in Anaheim, Calif.
Ms. Niven is leading her company’s “Well-Balanced Foods Initiative,” which also entails experimenting with new meals outside of the chicken-finger paradigm, such as arroz con pollo, the traditional Latin American dish of chicken and rice, and a baked chicken leg in an Asian-style citrus marinade, served with rice noodles.
Likewise, Ritz-Carlton launched a “Healthy Kids” program for children four years ago. The program not only de-emphasizes fried foods but also gives its chefs a freer hand to create their own kids’ menus. Vivian Deuschl, the vice president for public relations at Ritz-Carlton, who oversees the program, said it was set up in response to changing customer tastes.
A 20-year veteran of the company, Ms. Deuschl said that kids’ menus “started out on a limited basis in the ’80s and picked up in the ’90s as our demographics started to shift, especially at our resorts. We were getting more families, usually ones where both parents worked, so they didn’t want to leave their kids behind on vacation.”
At first, these guests were only too happy to indulge their children with a nonstop fingers-and-fries diet while on vacation. But in the last few years, Ms. Deuschl said: “We sensed a lot of tension. Parents were ordering things off the adult menu for their kids: crab cakes, pastas, stir-fries of vegetables.”
Perhaps no chef has taken the mission more to heart than Tony Miller of Latitude 41, the restaurant of the Renaissance Columbus in Ohio. (Renaissance, like Ritz-Carlton, falls under the Marriott International corporate umbrella.) “We do not have a chicken finger in this restaurant,” Mr. Miller said. The father of a 4-year-old girl, he constructed his “Fun Menu” to appeal to children without pandering to them.
“It features zero fried foods on it,” he said. “We do grilled organic chicken teriyaki, a seared fillet of whatever fish is in season, and a four-once fillet of natural beef with smashed potatoes. I have not received a single negative reaction from adults or kids. Not one. The kids say ‘Man, that’s the best steak I’ve ever eaten!’ ”
Mr. Miller is also shrewd in recognizing that parents are after not dumbed-down or deflavorized food for their kids, but rather smaller portions and prices. At the rates he’s charging — from $5 for the teriyaki to $8 for the small fillet, including beverage — he’s in the ballpark with lots of diners and chain places.
Marc Murphy, the Landmarc chef, said that it’s simply a matter of “not making a big deal of out of it” when it comes to your kids’ food preferences.
His own 3-year-old daughter usually skips the children’s menu at his restaurant, he said, and “eats the linguine alla vongole, with baby clams, when we run it on Fridays.” But it’s harder as your children get older and more exposed to the wider world; that’s when the pandemic claims them. In my family, it’s been a matter of getting back to that simple idea — the kids eat what the parents eat — and cutting off those little fingers.
And one criticizing television-for-toddlers
The littlest shoppers
Will buying educational toys make your kid a genius -- or just leave you broke? Author Susan Gregory Thomas cuts through the baby-business babble.
By Helaine Olen
May. 30, 2007 | Baby Einstein videos, infant gym classes, talking toys that teach phonics: Every year more and more American parents snap up the latest kid-centric luxuries, convinced they can provide their children with a head start on everything from education to socialization. But are the secrets of good parenting really on sale at Toys "R" Us? Not according to journalist Susan Gregory Thomas. In her new book, "Buy, Buy Baby: How Consumer Culture Manipulates Parents and Harms Young Minds," Thomas contends that rather than enriching young minds, companies like Baby Einstein and Nickelodeon have become lifestyle brands for chic toddlers and have turned little ones into restless shoppers long before they understand the concept of buying. Eager marketers plaster familiar faces like Bob the Builder and Elmo on everything from books to blocks to Band-Aids in an effort to goose the bottom line. Even the train table in the Barnes & Noble children's department is a marketing ploy, placed there by the company peddling Thomas the Tank Engine toys.
Thomas is not the first to point out that much of the booming baby business -- a market she says is now worth $20 billion annually -- is a bunch of bogus hocus-pocus designed to separate parents from their cash. Last year, the child advocacy group Campaign for a Commercial-Free Childhood filed a complaint with the Federal Trade Commission alleging that the claims made by Baby Einstein's marketers amounted to false and deceptive advertising. More recently, the Education Sector, a well-respected research organization, released a report calling most so-called educational toys a crock.
But where Thomas' book excels is in her dissection of the ways in which the marketing juggernaut ultimately affects us all. Toddlers without a television in their home still recognize Elmo. Marketing firms with innocent-sounding names like the Geppetto Group specialize in pitching products to kids and teens. Even politicians such as Sen. Hillary Clinton and President Bush have fallen for aspects of the consumerist toddler zeitgeist. In fact, they might be said to bookend the business: Clinton helped launch the craze in the mid-1990s when she began citing studies on the important role the first three years of life play in child development. And Bush gave Baby Einstein the ultimate product placement, mentioning it and creator Julie Aigner-Clark in his 2007 State of the Union address.
Salon caught up with Thomas in New York, where she discussed the origins of the baby buying boom, how marketers prey on Generation X parenting practices and why -- and how -- moms and dads should fight back.
When did the "baby business" boom, as we know it today, begin?
Well, in 1994, the Carnegie Corp. published a report called "Starting Points." It was an investigation of new neurological research about how infant minds grow. It pointed out that you're never more open than you are in the first three years -- that's when you learn the foundations of physical activity, emotional security and cognitive development. The report got the attention of Hillary Clinton and actor Rob Reiner, and they put together a White House Council meeting in 1997 on the importance of the first three years. The aim was to put political pressure on Congress for federal support for early childcare. But the lasting legacy of this conference was not federal funding for early childcare. It was the "baby genius" zeitgeist.
Right around the same time as the White House conference, another, more specious study came out about what was called "the Mozart effect." It suggested that college-age kids would score marginally better on intelligence tests if they were played a certain section of a certain sonata by Mozart.
Julie Aigner-Clark, a very canny mother of a toddler, took note of that study. And she put together what we now know as the Baby Einstein empire, and Baby Mozart was the first video she developed. She based a lot of her ideas for stimulating the infant brain on this strange conflation of cultural trends: that babies were active geniuses and you really had to stimulate them adequately before they turned 3, otherwise they would never get into college, and the idea you would sort of be made smarter in math and spatial reasoning if you listened to Mozart.
But you write that there is no evidence that educational videos and the like do anything for infants and toddlers. So how do Baby Einstein and other similar companies convince parents otherwise?
Noam Chomsky said it best when he said the consumer economy takes our concerns, commodifies them and sells them back to us. If you look at the marketing rubric of, for example, Baby Einstein, what they talk about is enhancing a baby's natural curiosity. But what's so fascinating about it is that there is absolutely no research that undergirds those statements. There just isn't any. It's all marketing.
The book describes a number of companies that specialize in marketing materials to children, including Scholastic, the publisher of the beloved Harry Potter series. What is their strategy?
One of the things Scholastic started doing was to develop preschool curricula for media conglomerates. Disney, for example, is one of its biggest customers. Scholastic will develop a whole curriculum around a television show and have posters and activities and all kinds of things that preschool teachers can use. Disney pays Scholastic to develop it and offers it to the schools for free.
By and large, teachers and places are thrilled to have the free stuff. They'll hang the posters on the wall and they'll save the videos for a rainy day. It has a ripple effect because parents see that their child is watching Scholastic-approved videos in school, and they buy the idea that it must be educationally appropriate and vetted by the experts.
Many of the marketing firms you spoke with denied that they targeted their products to children under 3 -- but admitted that a lot of kids that age still watch the videos. Is that a cop-out?
It's disingenuous at the very best to say we don't test children, we don't conduct focus groups under the age of 3, or we know that they're watching in record numbers but we can't control that. But that's basically their line.
Even "Sesame Beginnings" products came under fire from a lot of commercial watchdog groups when the company came out with a DVD that said it was for 6-month-olds through adults.
Wait a minute. What's wrong with "Sesame Street"?
Well, when we -- today's parents -- were watching "Sesame Street" as children, we were 4 and 5 years old. That is the target age for "Sesame Street." But what we do now is put infants and toddlers in front of "Sesame Street." Infants and toddlers are almost a completely different species from 4- and 5-year-olds. It turns out that an 18-month-old toddler has as much in common, cognitively speaking, with a 4-year-old as a 15-year-old girl does with a 75-year-old man.
It's complicated for an infant or toddler to process television. When they are put in front of the television, the only thing they seem to be getting out of it in a verifiable way is character recognition. That's why you see babies and toddlers so thrilled when they're at the supermarket and they recognize Elmo. But still, it wears what the marketing industry calls an "educational patina."
What is so awful about character recognition?
The problem is that the great social values that Elmo and the characters on "Sesame Street" teach are lost on children under the age of 3. They get solely a flat, one-dimensional character recognition. And the only other times that children are going to encounter the character are when a company is trying to sell the kid something. You don't see Elmo running around your park. You see Elmo when he's in diapers, when he's on juice boxes, when he's on Band-Aids and when he's on toothbrushes.
But toys have been around a long time. How are these things any different from Shirley Temple dolls and Davy Crockett hats?
Those were never marketed to infants and toddlers. The other difference is that parents in the '50s were much more involved with their children's consumption of media. The family gathered around to listen to the radio or watch "The Mickey Mouse Club." They were gatekeepers.
You also say that this merchandise may hold a generational appeal for today's young parents. Can you explain what you mean by that?
Generation X-ers were often latchkey kids. For example, I often came home before my mom did and turned on the television. And in the '80s, marketers -- together with television production studios -- came up with television shows that were basically commercials. You know, "Sesame Street" aired its first show in 1969 and its characters were really meant to be the village that raised American children. We have a soft spot in our hearts for these characters. So for many Generation X-ers, their happy memories of childhood are inextricably linked with consumer culture.
But a number of groups are countering those consumerist messages -- most notably the American Academy of Pediatrics, which says without apology that there should be no television for children under 2. Why aren't parents listening?
Today's parents want to be as involved with our children's lives as possible. That means more breast-feeding, attachment parenting and volunteering at the school. But everyone needs a break, and instead of just letting kids freak out or complain or whine or cry, Generation X thinks it is OK for them to spend that time in front of the television. Even the naysayers say, "I know that it's not making him into a genius, but at least I can take a shower." And this is really the first generation of parents for whom taking a shower has become a high-stakes proposition.
You have two kids. Did your research change how you parented them?
Absolutely. My daughter -- at age 3 -- came home from school talking about how certain girls at school weren't allowed to play something called the Princess Game unless they had come to school wearing a dress with the colors of a particular Disney princess. It was shocking to me that Disney had penetrated at that level. We hadn't shown her any of the Disney movies.
I said, "OK, if this is what's going on in school we'll get into it." We just did our own study of Cinderella. We went to the bookstore and the library, and it turned out that almost every culture in the world has its own Cinderella story. So we got out "Cendrillon," which was a Caribbean Cinderella story, and "Adelita," which was Mexican, and a Chinese one. Then we got the Disney Cinderella book, then we got the traditional Brothers Grimm. Then we started asking her, How come we don't see Cendrillon on Band-Aids? How come Adelita isn't on any toothbrushes? Then when we went to the grocery store, I'd ask, "Why would they put SpongeBob on that macaroni and cheese? Does SpongeBob have anything to do with that?" We began to talk about how characters are used to try to sell stuff.
Is that a conversation all parents should be having? Or is there something to be said for just leaving kids alone?
Life itself is very stimulating -- children don't need a lot of this extra stuff. Just being with your parents and getting to relax and hang out, or even just sort of sitting in the bouncy seat and watching your mom type on the keyboard as she does her work, or going to the market, or just taking a nap and cuddling, is all the stimulation a baby needs.
Today, Jenn was home, and she wanted to sleep in. This seriously messed with our morning routine, especially considering a huge portion of our morning is spent jumping on her bed. So, as a kindness to her, I trekked the kids downstairs for half an hour of TV. Right before, Ana explained to her mom that she wasn't playing the "silly game" (Your eyes are purple, Ana!) but the "No game". And then, because Jenn was confused, she elaborated - '"Do you want to help us?" "NO!" "Great!" "Oh, MAN!"'
I do so love the no game. It makes so many tedious activities less so.
Though I think that one of the reasons That Program is so objectionable is the simple length of the pauses. Forget the inanity of the questions, they don't need to wait 20 minutes before moving on. This is why I intend to NEVER SEE THAT SOUL SUCKING THING AGAIN UNLESS EVERY LAST ONE OF US IS PUKING UP BLOOD. Just so you know.
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Date: 2007-05-31 02:41 am (UTC)I mean the kid wipes sauce off his pasta. That's really excessive.
But K ate everything, and F sometimes does.
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Date: 2007-05-31 05:10 am (UTC)And that's just wrong, man.
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Date: 2007-05-31 02:50 am (UTC)At my church office, the secretary takes care of her almost-three-year-old grandson. I started working there just before he turned one. She keeps the TV on ALL DAY LONG. (It's PBS, but still.) I really don't want the padawan to be exposed to all that TV.
On the plus side, though, the grandson will be going to preschool next fall, and maybe I can convince her to turn the TV off. I don't want to offend her, but neither do I want the padawan subjected to a constant barrage of TV. Sometimes I wish I possessed your frankness!
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Date: 2007-05-31 05:14 am (UTC)It's not a cure-all. But people who know and like me at least are used to it, so they don't seem to get *too* offended.
However, if you want a sure-fire way to tell her to turn it off around your own kid without being too offensive, I find that people have a lot of success in saying "It's my first, I'm really paranoid, you know how it is". Given his circumstances, if you don't mind pulling the line out, you can even use "It's my first, and especially given his history, I'm really a bit of a worrier when it comes to things like this, you remember what it's like!", but really, I wouldn't, I myself don't consider that appropriate discussion for people you're not all that close with, and it just leads to gossip.
In short: Blaming your valid concerns on overprotective parenting instead of them always seems to work wonders. If they do roll their eyes. That's what I'm told by people who use this line and variants thereof, anyway!
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Date: 2007-05-31 01:22 pm (UTC)Although the boy is almost three years old, and has the vocabulary and speech ability of a one year old. That's within the extreme range of "normal" development, and isn't necessarily due to all the TV, but still....
no subject
Date: 2007-05-31 02:16 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2007-05-31 03:22 am (UTC)That said, I was a very orally defensive child as well--still am, to an extent. But that's when you (as a caretaker) say "ok, you don't have to eat everything, but try something. If you don't like it, you can make yourself a sandwich later/there are (healthy) snacks in the car so you don't starve (if we're going to be out the rest of the day).
no subject
Date: 2007-05-31 05:15 am (UTC)no subject
Date: 2007-05-31 03:29 am (UTC)no subject
Date: 2007-05-31 02:41 am (UTC)I mean the kid wipes sauce off his pasta. That's really excessive.
But K ate everything, and F sometimes does.
no subject
Date: 2007-05-31 05:10 am (UTC)And that's just wrong, man.
no subject
Date: 2007-05-31 02:50 am (UTC)At my church office, the secretary takes care of her almost-three-year-old grandson. I started working there just before he turned one. She keeps the TV on ALL DAY LONG. (It's PBS, but still.) I really don't want the padawan to be exposed to all that TV.
On the plus side, though, the grandson will be going to preschool next fall, and maybe I can convince her to turn the TV off. I don't want to offend her, but neither do I want the padawan subjected to a constant barrage of TV. Sometimes I wish I possessed your frankness!
no subject
Date: 2007-05-31 05:14 am (UTC)It's not a cure-all. But people who know and like me at least are used to it, so they don't seem to get *too* offended.
However, if you want a sure-fire way to tell her to turn it off around your own kid without being too offensive, I find that people have a lot of success in saying "It's my first, I'm really paranoid, you know how it is". Given his circumstances, if you don't mind pulling the line out, you can even use "It's my first, and especially given his history, I'm really a bit of a worrier when it comes to things like this, you remember what it's like!", but really, I wouldn't, I myself don't consider that appropriate discussion for people you're not all that close with, and it just leads to gossip.
In short: Blaming your valid concerns on overprotective parenting instead of them always seems to work wonders. If they do roll their eyes. That's what I'm told by people who use this line and variants thereof, anyway!
no subject
Date: 2007-05-31 01:22 pm (UTC)Although the boy is almost three years old, and has the vocabulary and speech ability of a one year old. That's within the extreme range of "normal" development, and isn't necessarily due to all the TV, but still....
no subject
Date: 2007-05-31 02:16 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2007-05-31 03:22 am (UTC)That said, I was a very orally defensive child as well--still am, to an extent. But that's when you (as a caretaker) say "ok, you don't have to eat everything, but try something. If you don't like it, you can make yourself a sandwich later/there are (healthy) snacks in the car so you don't starve (if we're going to be out the rest of the day).
no subject
Date: 2007-05-31 05:15 am (UTC)no subject
Date: 2007-05-31 03:29 am (UTC)