'Bye buy childhood': reclaiming childhood from commercialisation

Are you concerned about 9 year olds wearing padded bras and thongs or buying pole dancing kits? About children spending six hours a day in front of screens looking at websites such as Miss Bimbo, Little Hooliganz and Britchicks? Mothers’ Union is and we want to do something about it.

We believe that children should be valued as children and not targeted as adult consumers. Childhood has become a marketing opportunity worth £99 billion in the UK and £350 million is spent in the UK each year on persuading children to consume.

Manipulative techniques such as pester power, peer-to-peer marketing and brand ambassador incentives exploit children’s natural credulity and use them as a conduit to the household purse.

The materialism and debt that this encourages has long-term negative effects on children’s physical, mental and emotional wellbeing, on their educational development, basic values and relationships with families and peers. The use of sexualised content to sell to children and the imposition of sexuality on children to market goods under the age of 16 are particularly abhorrent.

We commissioned an opinion poll of 1,004 UK parents and interviewed more than 1,000 of our own volunteers and the results speak for themselves. Seventy per cent of parents agree that media content and advertising seen by children can be harmful to them. In particular, parents feel that media content and advertising makes children more sexually aware at a younger age than they would have been otherwise, and that it makes them feel that they have to act older than they really want to.

Eighty per cent of parents are concerned that films and video games with sexualised and violent themes are too accessible to children and that the 9pm watershed is not adhered to. Parents believe that responsibility for media content and advertising that children are exposed to lies with regulatory bodies, along with media companies, government and parents themselves, but that for films and video games in particular regulatory bodies do not do enough to protect children.

Whilst the debate is moving further towards action, particularly with the coalition Government promising to ‘crack down on the irresponsible advertising and marketing, especially to children’ and ‘take steps to tackle the commercialisation and sexualisation of childhood’ , this cannot be achieved through any one single measure.

Rather, it requires families to reflect on their consumer habits and take positive action; civil society, academics and NGOs to continue raising awareness and press for change; industry to manufacture, market and sell responsibly; regulators to be more effective and governments to intercede where they can, especially in protecting children from the ‘sex sells’ approach.

Mothers’ Union believes that children should not defined by their image, consumption or ownership and that our general family values should not be based purely on products or purchases. As an international Christian organisation, we believe that loving, stable relationships are paramount and that these relationships are nurtured through our faith in God.

If we are to help shape and support the next generation, it is vital that we do not promote false promises of happiness, and of a happiness that is financially conditional. Nor should we disempower our children by making them passive recipients of a global market with which they cannot at times say ‘no’.

We have therefore launched our byebuychildhood Campaign with a Report, Campaign cards to target the government, industry and retailers, and produced a byebuychildhood ethical shopping test for individuals.

Our pledge is to:
• Challenge children, their parents, guardians and wider family to think about their consumer habits.
• Empower families to address the influence of commercialisation within the home.
• Engage with the commercial world and take positive action to challenge instances of inappropriate marketing or selling.
• Hold the UK Government accountable on their coalition’s Programme for Government pledges to address the commercialisation and sexualisation of children
• Raise awareness amongst other political representatives across the UK and Ireland.

For further information please go to www.byebuychildhood.org and join us in campaigning responsibly.

Fleur Dorrell, is Head of Faith & Policy at the Mothers’ Union

References

1. Ed Mayo and Agnes Nairn, Consumer Kids: How Big Business Is Grooming Our Children for Profit. Constable, 2009.
2. David Piachaud, Freedom to be a Child: Commercial Pressures on Children. Centre for Analysis of Social Exclusion, July 2007. (ref taken from Advertising statistics Yearbook, Advertising Association)
3. The Coalition: our programme for government. Cabinet Office, May 2010.
4. Anything that breaks existing regulations or codes of conduct; anything that imposes sexuality on children under 16 or suggests a child’s worth is based on their sex appeal.
5. Mothers’ Union has 4 million members across 81 countries. Our members in both the UK and Republic of Ireland are part of our Bye Buy Childhood campaign.