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So it was reading time with my 3 year old daughter the other night; she went rummaging through our large stack of kids books and found the "Cheerios Counting Book", a lovely piece of advertising that involves various animals playing with Cheerios cereal, encouraging your kids to count the Cheerios, 1-10.
So me (being myself) changed the story slightly. It went kinda like this:
daughter: "Daddy, what's that monkey doing?"
me: "He's trying to sell you Cheerios"
daughter:"What's that (seal) doing?"
me: "He's putting chemicals and insect parts in the cheerios."
daughter: "What's that puppy doing?"
me: "He's putting all the money in the bank so General Mills Executives can buy Mansions in Florida."
daughter: "what's the penguin doing ?"
me: "teaching you to always bug you parents to buy Cheerios when we go to the store, and to throw a giant fit on floor of the store if we don't."
If you were a good daddy you'd be growing your own "organic" oats and making your own cereal for your children. You greedy capitalist! I ought to call Child Protective Services!
Gee whiz, I wonder how the Cheerios book came into the possession of the three-year-old to start with? Could the parents have had a role in that?
Oh no, I'm sure the evil capitalists brainwashed the child into stealing money from poor, working class people to pay for the book herself. See, if the government would only provide free reading material (sterilized of capitalist propaganda) to the people, this never would have happened.
Grow your own grains, mill them and make your own Cheerios for $10 a box.
Or, you can pay the evil company $4 for the box and get angry over the 50 cents of profit they made, the people they employed, the retirement pensions they paid dividends to and the taxes paid throughout the process that pay for your firemen, snowplows, parks etc.
Then you can plop down in front of your TV and cheer for your favorite athlete who makes 3x as much for running around with a ball as the CEO of the company that sold you the cereal.
Its not the profit that makes them "evil", but rather the fact that they find so many ways to advertise their junk food to kids. Food advertising for kids should end, at this point its just promoting obesity.
Its not the profit that makes them "evil", but rather the fact that they find so many ways to advertise their junk food to kids. Food advertising for kids should end, at this point its just promoting obesity.
Cheerios are junk food?
Kids do the grocery shopping and get to choose where the family eats as well as how much exercise they get etc etc etc? I'm not 100% sure but I think the dynamic here is the parents.
However, here in the US of Blame it's not OUR fault that we feed our kids piles of crap and let them play xbox all day instead of getting out and exercising....it's the fault of <insert name here of whomever we have an axe to grind on>.
My liberal hippy professor parents used to feed me this crap. And I don't mean the Cheerios. They used to "teach" me all about those giant evil corporations when I was a kid. Then I grew to realize it was just blame and indoctrination and I resented it.
Its not the profit that makes them "evil", but rather the fact that they find so many ways to advertise their junk food to kids. Food advertising for kids should end, at this point its just promoting obesity.
Or, another alternative is that parents can take responsibility for educating their children on the negative affects of advertising and how they should deal with it.
When my kids see ads (or telemarketers call), we talk about what the company is trying to sell, what traits/needs they are trying to appeal to, and how the company is trying to get our money. We do this without vilifying or blaming the corporation.
Though blaming and banning things like bad ads, bad media, bad food, bad toys, bad books would make parenting so much easier than taking the time to educate children on how to make the right choices.
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