Media Minds

NIEER to my heart

2008-09-03T13:12:00.000-07:00

Happiness. I just read the July/August issue of the National Institute for Early Education Research, which not only includes a great article on whether new media may help children, it also includes a pull-out box with the "Three C's" that I highlight in my book: content, context and the individual child. The three C's are based on peer-reviewed research of how young children are affected by screen media. I found that by asking themselves questions around those guideposts -- what is on the screen? is it offering opportunities for conversation later? is my child engaged or scared? -- parents can come to easier and smarter conclusions about when to turn on the tube.

Materialism, child development and the Nintendo DS

2008-08-26T05:32:00.000-07:00

It is easy to bemoan materialism -- the wanting and needing of more stuff -- and when adults see children exhibiting signs of it, they can't help but disapprove. Look at all these spoiled kids, the old folks cry, nagging for cell phones and iPods and the Nintendo DS. What a shame, the thinking goes, that they can't simply be happy with a swing in the backyard.

But what if a child's desire for stuff is rooted in something deeper? I just came across an article published six months ago in the Journal of Consumer Research that has made me wonder. The piece, written by Lan Nguyen Chaplin at the UIUC and Deborah Roedder John at the University of Minnesota, says that materialism can be explained by a child's sense of self-esteem. The lower the self-esteem, the more the kid wants stuff. Age and stage of child development play a big role too. In early adolescence -- those awful pimple-pocked years of middle school -- children want to see their peers look up to them. When they've got new stuff to show off, they get that hit of fame, shortlived though it may be.

Why am I dwelling on this at the moment? Because I'm in the middle of writing a chapter about mobile technology and children, and after interviewing nearly two dozen pre-teens this summer, it has become fascinating to see how they use their electronic devices (the Nintendo DS is a particular favorite) to broadcast their identities, cement their friendships and dig deeply into worlds of intrigue or performance (Pokemon, The Jonas Brothers) that they connect with emotionally.

What I hadn't quite grasped until read Chaplin and John's article, though, is how much their attachment to their electronic devices fits in a continuum of child development. As a grown-up who still admits to my own need for stuff, I can see where they are coming from.

Now if only someone would write an article helping me situate theories of child development within the thicket of Pokemon.

Questioning the French approach to banning TV for kids under 3

2008-08-21T08:22:00.000-07:00

According to the A.P. this morning, the French government has just barred French TV channels from broadcasting programs that are aimed at children under 3 years old.

The story also reports that French cable operators that offer foreign channels with programs for babies must "broadcast warning messages to parents. The messages will read: 'Watching television can slow the development of children under 3, even when it involves channels aimed specifically at them.'"

I'm fascinated and troubled by this development. In research for my book, Into the Minds of Babes, I found that with Sesame Street, for example, some of the strongest examples of learning occurred with children between age 2 and 3, particularly in children from low-income backgrounds.

And while the jury is still out on exactly how much children under 2 can pick up and gain from TV, I did find serious research from developmental psychologists who use video to train children on new vocabulary as part of their larger endeavors to figure out exactly how children learn best. A few of those studies have found that in the few months before age 2, some children show signs of learning words from video programming if it includes repetition and social interaction intended to help them grasp what the words mean. A University of Connecticut study that used doctored versions of Teletubbies is one example.

We want children to grow up in rich language-based environments. That means having parents read to them, point out new objects, label and describe what they observe, and then give their children -- even in their first year -- a chance to communicate or talk back. Agreed, TV is not ideal for such exchanges and some parents rely on it as a babysitter far too much. But that doesn't mean that video programs can't spark new conversation, inspire grown-ups to talk to their babies about new things or, as was the case in our family, let us get our giggles, wiggles and new words out while we danced along with characters we saw on the TV set.

Do you agree? Has France has gone too far?

Elmo, Chris Brown and YouTube

2008-08-19T13:58:00.001-07:00

Elmo and Chris Brown have me smiling along with Sara Mead of the New America Foundation, who highlights their video collaboration from a recent episode of Sesame Street. It's on YouTube here, but Mead provides helpful context in the Early Ed Watch blog about the pro-literacy message and how desperately low-income kids may need it.

Plus, get a load of Elmo's harmonizing. Lovin' it.

Children's lit crit and eureka moments

2008-08-18T06:01:00.000-07:00

If you're like me, the New Yorkers stack up week after week, a silent reminder of how fast the cultural waters rush past when you have kids. But I did get a chance to comb through a few of them last week. That happily led me to Jill Lepore's July 21st article about Stuart Little and the history of children's book reviewing, which didn't even exist until after the turn of the 20th century. It's an interesting comment on how our society has sharpened its vision of what entertains young children and what is "good for them" at the same time.

Also worth a read: Jonah Lehrer's piece about how and why those eureka moments come when you're most relaxed. (I've got his Proust book by my bedside, and I'm looking forward to cracking it open after 1) finishing Great Expectations for book club and 2) clearing my plate of The Omnivore's Dilemma.)

Speaking of ideas and our constant talk of them (or should I call it our constant hand-wringing about not having enough time to really make use of them), don't miss this cartoon by Barbara Smaller, either. It's just so U.S. of A.

$1.6 billion (in food ads) served

2008-07-30T06:25:00.000-07:00

Food and media companies spent about $1.6 billion marketing sodas, fast foods, cereals, and other foods to children in 2006, according to a Federal Trade Commission report on food marketing to children released yesterday. (See The Washington Post's coverage here, The New York Times' here, and The Wall Street Journal's here.)

“We call on both industries to deploy their talents to promote healthier choices for children and adolescents," said William E. Kovacic, commission chairman.

The report did note, however, that advertising campaigns seemed to tilt in a healthier direction since 2005, when the FTC sponsored a workshop on food marketing and the Institutes of Medicine published a report heavy with research-based evidence on the connections between marketing and childhood obesity.

For parents following along, the age of 12 got a lot of play in yesterday's report. Food companies were urged to set nutritional guidelines in marketing to children younger than 12.

From the standpoint of child development, I'd love to dig further into what happens in children's brains after the age of 12 that makes them less vulnerable to advertising. Some earlier research has shown that it's around age 7 or 8 that children start to understand "persuasive intent" -- though even that is in dispute in some quarters. For example, advertisers want to argue that kids are getting savvier and savvier these days, while child advocates say that's an unfounded excuse, not based in cognitive research, for pushing commercials on younger and younger kids.

Anyone out there know of recent child-development research on when, cognitively speaking, children will be best able to navigate the sea of media messages out there? Of course, I can't help but note that even adult humans (yes, that would include me too) have a hard time recognizing when their minds are being molded.

[For some of my older posts on this subject, see Kids say 'yum' to
Mickey D's (Aug. 14 2007) and At Forum on Food
Marketing and Kids, Participants Left Hungry for New Approaches (Mar.
28, 2007).]

Read Motoko Rich on e-Reading

2008-07-28T07:13:00.000-07:00

The "most blogged" story in the Times today is "Online, R U Really Reading?" by Motoko Rich, whose beat is books and publishing. Combine that piece with the Nicholas Carr's "Is Google Making Us Stoopid" in The Atlantic Monthly and you've got two great trampolines for launching deeper debates on how hyperlinks and digitization may be changing the way we think.

What I wonder is whether kids today can be given the tools and incentives to do both: learn to read linearly and deeply a la the "old-fashioned" book while also gaining mastery over the link-to-link, be-aware world of the Web. As a parent, that's what I want for my girls. I want it all. And I want them to want it all too.

Photo privacy and exposure on Facebook

2008-07-28T07:05:00.000-07:00

I've been writing a lot lately about little kids -- anyone in elementary school or younger. So it was fun to stretch back to my days of reporting on college life as I worked on this weekend's story about Facebook in the New York Times' Education Life supplement. Today's students may be more blasé about privacy than generations' past, but that doesn't mean they aren't figuring out their own ways of drawing lines between what is acceptable for the world to see and what isn't.

When playtime is affected by background TV

2008-07-21T10:50:00.001-07:00

If you've dipped into my book, Into the Minds of Babes, you know that chapter 4 drills down to look at the impact of background media, focusing mostly on TV but also weaving in some research on how infants learn language when they are having to filter out background noise of all kinds. I've also blogged about background TV for On Parenting on WashingtonPost.com.

Last week, the journal Child Development published a report on one of the studies I saw in action in Amherst, Mass. The crux of the report, written by Marie Evans Schmidt and colleagues, is that toddlers bop from one toy to another when they are playing in a room with a television showing Jeopardy. When the TV isn't on, their play is more focused and less distracted.

I've argued that background TV hasn't gotten enough attention in the general media compared to the heated dialogue on baby videos. But with this report finally out in official, peer-reviewed form, maybe we'll start to see more stories on the subject. Tara Parker-Pope of The New York Times wrote about it last week on Well, which, by the way, is one well-written blog on health and wellness, as did Reuters UK and USA Today. (And many thanks to Rae Pica, for excerpting some of my writing in her report on the study.)

A new Sesame Street -- online

2008-07-15T12:17:00.000-07:00

Open Sesame! On August 11th. That's the date, according to Elizabeth Jensen in today's New York Times, that Sesame Workshop's goes live with its new Web site, http://www.sesamestreet.org/. Gary E. Knell, president and CEO at Sesame Workshop, wants traffic on the site to double in the next year or two.

To do that, I wonder if Sesame may have to pull off a new trick: Bring in some older children or attract more parents of children who are too young to have good control of the computer mouse. Most people, and kids, associate the Sesame brand with toddlers and preschoolers up to age 5. In my own experience, as mother and interviewer, after age 5 many children see Sesame as too young for them. Yet it is only in the late 3s and 4s that children are of the age to navigate around on Web sites easily by themselves. With that slim population segment - the 3 to 5 year olds -- the site may need visitors from different age groups to make a jump in traffic.

Maybe Sesame is expecting its streaming video clips to attract the younger and older. As Grover tells me in the current site's beta video area, there will be hundreds and hundreds of clips to watch, all searchable by keyword. "Or click one of your Sesame Street friends to see a list of their clips," Grover says, angling for himself to be selected.

Mediasnackers

2008-06-26T10:46:00.000-07:00

I just found Mediasnackers, a site for videocasts about children and new media that claims to be "topped full of yummy-youth-media-shots of tasty interviews, insights or event coverage." I like the content, and want to learn more about who created it and why. So far this is all I know: it's based in the United Kingdom and was founded by a guy named DK.

But already I'm a fan of its manifesto, part of which pushes its staff to "play constantly—with words, ideas, technology, platforms, structures and others. It's the best way to learn."

Writing about YouTube and kids for Parents' Choice

2008-06-17T08:10:00.001-07:00

Could YouTube lead to virtual field trips for young kids today? Maybe -- but if my experience is any indication, Moms and Dads sometimes need to close that browser window pretty darn quick. Here's a story I wrote for Parents' Choice this month that highlights the pitfalls and offers suggestions on more kid-friendly video outlets.

An excerpt:
"... we were clicking through other video clips, asking questions and talking about what we saw. We had taken a virtual field trip -- a mini excursion that lasted 15 minutes, cost nothing, and could be embarked upon as soon as curiosity struck.

But as I soon learned, YouTube field trips require adult chaperones..." Read more.

Reviews of NickJr.com, MyNoggin.com and PBSKids.org

2008-06-17T07:47:00.000-07:00

The June issue of The Childrens' Technology Review, edited by Warren Buckleitner, includes reviews of three of the most popular Web sites for preschoolers -- NickJr.com, MyNoggin.com and PBSKids.org.

If you are a parent trying to avoid banner ads and "free" trials that eventually end up on your credit card, these reviews are worth a read. MyNoggin, a $10/month subscription site, gets high marks for design and usability. PBSKids, which is free, fares well too. As Buckleitner noted about the pages within PBSKids.org, "you get the feeling that the people who designed these sites were more interested in learning than selling."

NickJr.com, on the other hand, is criticized for its advertising clutter and its "confusing mashup of inter-linking brands and services" that don't always lead children to the free games they come looking for.

In fact, Buckleitner has been writing up a storm on this topic lately. In a recent report for Consumer Reports' Web Watch, he shone a spotlight on many trouble spots in online Web sites for young children. (The report comes with a series of YouTube videos that are poignant and eye-opening.) And in a story for The New York Times last week, he offered suggestions on how to find digital toys and Web sites that match a child's stage of cognitive and motor development. Not everyone will agree with everything he recommends, but I'm happy to see him raise the bar for discourse on what makes sense for kids online. Go Warren!

Simulating "bugs in the walls"

2008-06-13T16:39:00.000-07:00

This past spring, in a few classrooms around Chicago, bugs were crawling through the walls. Students couldn't hear the critters, but they could see them on display screens posted around the rooms that provided a visual example of what was burrowing around in the sheetrock. With field guides in hand, these students tracked these bugs -- counting how many existed in each wall, taking notes of which ones laid eggs, and coming back after lunchtime or P.E. to see how the population had grown when they were gone.

If you happen to send your kids to the Chicago public schools, you might be relieved to hear that these bugs weren't real. They were a learning tool -- a simulation system designed by computer science and education researchers at the University of Illinois at Chicago. Peter Malcolm, a graduate student (right, Peter?) at UIC presented a talk at IDC 08 about these "embedded phenomena" (You can read a little more on Tom Moher's page too.) The embeddedness extends beyond the little display screens around the room. It also refers to tiny nodes attached to the walls; students would use a stethoscope to press against the nodes and see zoomed-in pictures of the "bugs" in those particular places on the wall.

This combination of real and simulated material -- of display screens, field guides, and "pretend" populations to track -- led students to become incredibly animated about the work they were doing. "In the seventh grade class, one kid got so invested in his population," Malcolm said, "that he asked his teacher if he could come into to enter a measurement" on a day the school was closed.

There isn't much on the Web yet about WallCology, as it is called, except an academic paper , masters thesis and some other documents. But I suspect that I'm not the only one who will find these wall bugs to be a fascinating example of how technology could be used to turn kids on to learning.

Quilts, computers and kids learning math

2008-06-13T14:24:00.000-07:00

Triangles, squares, symmetry, fractions: Put together a quilt, and you are marinading yourself in mathematics.

So what would happen if you could get children to create "quilts" using computer graphics on a screen?

That is the research question that has propelled K.K. Lamberty in the computer science department at the University of Minnesota at Morris. In a presentation at IDC 08, Lamberty described her studies of how 4th and 5th grade students respond to a software program called DigiQuilt. Teachers in these classrooms challenge the students to, say, create a design for a quilt square using only one line of symmetry. Lamberty has recorded over 500 hours of video showing students grappling with those kinds of math challenges, while making some beautiful, colorful and creative designs in the process.

So did it work to teach math? Lamberty doesn't have data on test scores or mathematical abilities, but her early assessment is that at the very least children were engaged with the projects, talking to each other about the designs they were creating and helping each other over hurdles in understanding geometry and fractions. Call me a sucker for color and shape, but it sure looked like fun.

A toymaker-ivory tower mashup

2008-06-12T19:34:00.000-07:00

A mission of IDC 2008 at Northwestern is to foment conversations between designers of children's electronic media and the academics who test how children might respond to them.

One example spotlighted this morning was the Fisher-Price "Play Is Learning Council" that, for two years, brought childhood experts and media researchers together with designers to ensure that new toys fit a child's needs and stage of development.

"We would show them toys and they were not shy about tearing them apart," said Kathleen Alfano, director of child research at Fisher-Price.

Seemingly brilliant designs don't always hold up when tested with real kids. Scott Traylor, founder of the research company 360Kid, showed how tricky it can be to create a stylus-type application for young children who don't yet have perfect motor control in their hands. And Erik Strommen, founder of the tech-toy consultancy Playful Efforts, amused the audience with stories of how young kids couldn't resist pressing the TV-screen belly of an interactive Tinky Winky prototype when asked to wake it up.

Just what is "Interaction Design for Children"?

2008-06-12T19:03:00.000-07:00

Today I'm here in Evanston, Ill., where Northwestern University is hosting an international conference for about 150 people who work in a field called "interaction design for children."

Just what does that mean? I wondered myself, and I'm not 100 percent sure even today. But from what I gather, it's an approach to designing a product (software program, toy, whatever) that gives high value to the way a user will interact with it.

As designer, consultant and entrepreneur Nathan Shedoff once wrote, interaction design can go by other names too, like information design, instructional design, or "just plain common sense."

This conference -- Interaction Design for Children 2008 -- puts the emphasis on how designers can create toys, software, games, Web sites and tools for children that take into account their motor skills, their cognitive skills, their desires, their experiences, their potential for using it in ways that adults may not expect.

Justine Cassell, a Northwestern professor who is internationally known for her work on children and technology, is leading the conference. (I'm looking forward to picking her brain about new projects in her Center for Technology & Social Behavior.)

A note on me and full disclosure

2008-06-12T18:14:00.000-07:00

As a reporter, I believe it's important to try to avoid entanglements and stay relatively independent. But given my freelance budget, I've also got to accept payments for much of my travel and speaking. So I'll do my best to be transparent about which organizations are paying my way when I attend conferences. Last month, I blogged about the Joan Ganz Cooney symposium after having moderated a panel there on literacy technologies. In that case, the Cooney center paid for my travel and hotel. The NAEYC institute that I just blogged about was on my dime. The next conference (IDC '08, which I'll start writing about tonight) is at Northwestern. I've been invited to facilitate a panel about "screen cultures," and IDC '08 is sponsoring my travel, lodging and a small honorarium.

Subverting superheroes

2008-06-11T07:37:00.000-07:00

Superheroes often swoop into the conversation when preschool educators talk about the impact of the media. Children latch onto the imagery of Batman (if they aren't too scared by it), pretend to be Superman, jump and kick their way into the roles of Power Rangers. For many teachers (and parents), this is problematic. Suddenly the playground is a screaming zone of chasing and pulling, and sometimes kicking and wrestling too. Coping with the aggression can wear on the most stalwart teacher.

One of the sessions yesterday at the NAEYC Institute focused on how the Joyce M. Huggins Early Education Center at Cal State-Fresno moved from banning superhero play to a qualified embrace of it. The point was not to immerse children in mass media imagery. Instead, through the use of fairy tales and other story telling techniques, the kids were encouraged to create their own superheroes (like "Night Man" and "Underwater Girl"), draw them, create paper mache models of them and build story books. "We were repositioning mass media images for literacy development," said Sharon Arias, a teacher at the center.

Educators listening intently to Arias. But they had questions: How did parents feel about the new emphasis on superheroes? (Arias said they came around to like it, but acknowledged that there were reports of more night wakings and "being scared.") How did teachers handle moments of aggression? (By showing students how to pretend to be aggressive, instead of actually pulling a jacket or hurting someone.)

I sensed a skepticisim in the room. And I admit that I too, having written a chapter in my book on how 2- and 3-year -old children respond to fearful, aggressive imagery, came away with a lot of questions. But the output of the children couldn't be disputed: home-made books, stories and artwork showed a grasp of story-telling that seemed rare among children this young.

Speaking of superheroes, I should mention that Diane Levin (see my post from yesterday) and Susan Linn of the Campaign for Commercial-Free Childhood (who was with me on the panel about technology and play) raised some provocative points about the marketing of PG-13 movies to toddlers and preschoolers.

One of Levin's examples was The Incredible Hulk, coming to theaters this summer and aimed at adolescents. She showed a slide with a photo of "The Incredible Hulk Smash Hands," a toy from a few years ago that is labeled as being recommended for children 5 and up.

Computer use in Reggio Emilia preschools

2008-06-10T08:37:00.001-07:00

A hot new approach to preschool education is called the Reggio Emilia method, in which children exert control over their learning while teachers guide and document much of what they see, touch and explore.

In a session here at the NAEYC Institute, attendees were shown how Reggio schools use technology. Dee Stegelin of Clemson University and Lenna Young of the TRI-County Technical Institute hosted the session, providing lists of technology that are used, and often necessary, to the Reggio approach. Digital cameras, for example, are essential. And computers, they said, should be in the classroom -- not in laboratories down the hall.

"Computers are used a lot in Reggio schools," Stegelin said. Examples given included the use of KidPix software and word processing systems to give children a way to document and easily distribute stories of what they have seen and heard.

"Use your words": Giving parents language to talk about media

2008-06-10T08:23:00.000-07:00

Diane Levin, an author and professor of early childhood education at Wheelock College in Boston, gave a 2-hour talk here this morning about media's influence on children. She focused on the bad: too much violence, too much commercialism, too much sex. But the end of her session struck me as useful -- not just for early childhood educators, but for parents too. She gave examples of how to talk to kids about what they are seeing and hearing.

"This is very different than just saying 'No'," Levin said.

In one example, she showed a dialogue between a teacher and her elementary school children (kindergarteners, I think) about whether toy guns should be allowed to be created in one of the hands-on crafts centers. She suggested that teachers ground the conversation in safety -- "We want to feel safe" -- and then asking children questions like: 'Do you like it when your friends point a gun at you? What should you do?' and enabling children to voice their ideas about what to say when a friend pretends to shoot.

Levin has a new book, So Sexy So Soon, coming out in August from Random House.

What do cartoons have to do with learning to read?

2008-06-10T05:21:00.000-07:00

A lot, if you follow the arguments made by representatives for PBS. who gave a presentation at the NAEYC Institute yesterday.

Super Why! and Word World, two new TV shows for children ages 4 to 6, are part of a national five-year research project investigating whether targeted media can help young kids learn to read.

"We want to tap into the powers of characters that are so beloved on PBS," said Jayne W. James, executive director of the Ready to Learn program for the Corporation of Public Broadcasting. Leaders of the program stress, however, that this is not about simply getting kids to fall in love with Princess Presto (a SuperWhy character with a magic spelling wand and a bouncy pink dress). "The shows don't evolve from a cute idea," James said. "They are grounded in research."

The shows are also making their way across platforms, onto the Web and into iPods, and the research project includes a study of how -- and if -- that makes a difference. Audience members got a peek at one part of this yesterday: Jen Rodriguez of PBS showed the beta version of PBS Kids Island, a free carnival-like world where children can play literacy games on the computer.

I've been interested in the Ready to Learn program for several years and will be waiting with baited breath for the results of the current studies. Alas, solid data won't be out for many more years, but I'll be keeping my eyes open for tidbits.

Focusing on creative playtime (and using video to do it)

2008-06-09T14:56:00.000-07:00

There's something delightful about watching young children immerse themselves in make-believe worlds, and although there are no kids here at this NAEYC institute in New Orleans, there have been several opportunities to watch videos of kids playing "pretend."

This morning in a session organized by the Alliance for Childhood, I gave a talk called "Video Screens and Cardboard Boxes," in which I showed a home video of my girls playing with two big boxes and some oversized pieces of chalk -- all of which was inspired by their watching of Pinky Dinky Doo on Noggin. (One of my points was that we need to be more specific in talking about technology: Let's look more closely at what content and forms of technology inspire versus stifle creative play.)

An hour later, video clips were the highlight of a presentation by Deborah Leong of the Metropolitan State College of Denver and Elena Bodrova of Mid-Continent Research for Education and Learning. They started by zooming in on theories of how children's play evolves, first with simple props but then graduating to moments of role-play and "invisible" friends. These are levels of play that can be hard to grasp when you read about them on paper, but that become perfectly understandable when you see the kids playing.

The larger point of Leong and Bodrova's talk, however, was to recommend the use of video and photographs as a way of giving preschoolers "virtual field trips." Their research, they said, has shown that today's children need some guidance on how to play pretend. In their experience, adults in children's lives often say they are too busy to bring their children along on shopping outings or let them get involved in preparing dinner.

This is why, they said, teachers have to step in. "Teachers have to teach play intentionally," Leong said.

They suggest showing children videos of people interacting in various settings -- such as bakeries where cashiers talk to customers or medical offices where doctors treat patients. (They described real-life field trips too, but pointed out that they aren't always possible.) These videos, they said, give children new ideas for play, leading them to re-enact what they saw -- with and without guidance from nearby preschool teachers.

By the end of the session, a representative for the Fred Rogers Institute was chatting with Leong about how to use old clips of Mister Rogers' field trips to bring more videos into her preschool curriculum. (Anyone remember that field trip episode of Mister Rogers at the crayon factory?)

Early childhood educators talk tech

2008-06-08T15:49:00.000-07:00

Picture a preschool teacher, and someone on the cutting edge of technology may not be the first image to come to mind. But this year, the professional development institute for the National Association for the Education of Young Children is focused on children and technology -- and part of it is a recognition that computers, software and interactive games are aimed at children before they hit kindergarten. I'll be blogging from the NAEYC institute over the next couple of days in New Orleans. I suspect that much of the conversation will be about teacher preparation, like how educators might be able to use some new tracking and assessment tools. But I'll zoom in on the sessions that focus on how new media technology is being used among children in preschool and early elementary grades.

I'll also have my own two cents to throw into the pot, with a presentation I'm giving bright and early tomorrow morning about technology and child's play. Don't be shy about posting what you think.

The Post's obesity series: Touching on video games and food marketing

2008-05-21T11:12:00.001-07:00

I've been impressed with The Washington Post's weeklong series on childhood obesity, which has covered multiple different angles on this topic with great graphics and video too. A story titled "Two Worlds, One problem" by Annie Gowen explored how obesity is an epidemic in both the suburban environment (where kids seem to have so many options for activity and still grow fatter) and the inner cities (where safety is a concern for outdoor play.) Gowen told the story of parents in Centrevile, Va., who were trying to tackle their son's growing waistline using different tactics. Some of them involved media: "Now McDonnell also locks up the Nintendo video game system," she wrote, "and has parental controls on the television.

Exploring another element of media's impact was Vicky Rideout, a vice president for the Kaiser Family Foundation, who answered questions for the Post's online chat today. The foundation has published several studies on the influence of media and marketing on child health using well-designed surveys and focus groups. Rideout's talk today focused on how and if the marketing of high-fat, high-sugar foods may be implicated in children's unhealthy habits. This is a topic to which I devoted a chapter in my book as well. (I devoted several pages, for example, to the saga of the Disney Princess "Fruit Snacks" and my girls' unshakable desire for them.) During my work on the book, I was surprised to discover that current science points to junk-food advertising, instead of sedentary lifestyle, as the most plausible reason for the link between childhood obesity and TV watching.