While I realize that advertisers aren’t specifically targeting my child above all other children, I wonder if somewhere in the ad world someone isn’t cackling like the Joker at parents who think they can shield their little ones from commercial TV. Unless you are rearing your offspring in RLDS compound in B.C. (because apparently U.S. officials have grown some cohones of late and are enforcing law down that way), odds are good that at some point your child will watch television the way God intended for it to be watched – and that is chuck full of enticing advertisements.
Over our last holiday in the States, my husband and I took advantage of the fact that our little girl prefers to stay with her grandparents over us and we snuck off for a few days to honeymoon our brains out. She meanwhile played and ate and watched uber-amounts of TV with abandon at my folks’. Like the last time she slipped her leash (or we dropped it – semantics here), she indulged in all the cartoons she is not allowed to watch at home. Most of them are on the Cartoon Network and they are not inherently evil. They remind me quite a bit of the old Bugs Bunny stuff I watched at her age which was back in the day before they’d been sanitized and made over to the uptight standards of the PC. So much of it was over my head that I am fairly certain I suffered no lasting damage, and I can see that same type of adult humor in some of the shows Katy likes to watch with her cousins when we are not around. Some of the stuff is even kind of clever and watchable like Foster’s Home for Imaginary Friends and The Grim Adventures of Billy and Mandy. It even has old stuff I haven’t seen since I was wee like The Perils of Penelope Pitstop and Magilla Gorilla. And of course it has the classics including the original Justice League and Scooby Doo. Does it seem as though I might have watched too much TV as a child? I did. But I think if fueled my imagination more than it damaged it and I can see in Katy’s imaginary play that she is right as rain herself.
So why do Rob and I object to commercial television? It’s the commercial part, of course. Whenever we have visited my folks, Katy comes home with a list of things that we need though we don’t seem to have suffered much without prior to her discovery of our new needs. Last fall it was cereal.
“Some people buy those kinds of cereals, Mama,” she said as we walked through the breakfast aisle at Safeway.
“Which cereals?”
With a sweeping gesture “All the sugar ones that are bad for you.”
“I see and how do you know this?”
“I saw it at Grandma’s house.”
“Well, some people do but we don’t buy food just because we saw it on TV.”
This elicited quite the chuckle from an older woman who was pushing her cart by us during our exchange. Obviously a mom who thought I was taking the high ground without checking for back-up. But we don’t buy food because of commercials and Katy is well-versed in this now. Her last visit at Grandma’s also stirred up an urgent need for a game that consisted of a butterflies being projected into the air and caught by large nets and a Disney princess doll whose skirt changed color with a magic wand. The first was never discussed beyond “Hmm that’s interesting” and the latter was put on the Christmas list (this was in October) for further discussions with Santa.
This last trip found us lacking a Swifer for mopping the kitchen, some sort of fake cheese food called Cheese Me’s (as nearly as I can understand her) and something that she convinced herself she needs quite desperately – a Turtle tooth-tooth.
“Brushing is boring, Mom, but not with the Turtle tooth-tooth. It plays music that goes up through your teeth and into your brain.”
“That can’t be a good thing,” was my husband’s first, last and only comment.
After a week of listening to Katy describe the delight of owning a tooth-tooth every night when she was forced to brush her teeth the “boring” way, I decided to google the darn thing. To my horror, it exists. It is an electric toothbrush that plays a single pop tune for two minutes and was designed by some well-intentioned (childless) dentist somewhere to get kids (and adults) to brush their teeth for the recommended two minutes of time it takes to throughly clean plaque and over crusted matter from our mouth. I played the commercial for my husband and he was appalled. More so when he saw that one of the songs was by Kiss and that Paul Stanley and Gene Simmons actually appeared in the web-based ad for their own tooth-tooth.
“What fat hairy bastards they are now,” Rob was shocked.
Whenever Katy talks about the tooth-tooth (it’s really called a Turbo Tooth Tunes), she lights up and dances about in glee. Though we have gotten her to agree that music being transported to her brain (the commercial actually shows this transfer of melody in a manner that causes me a bit of alarm) is probably not the healthiest thing for someone – she still wants a tooth-tooth. And I guess if the worst thing that results from her holidays with my folks, and their still quite liberal views of children and TV watching, is tooth brush lust – then we are pretty lucky parents.
anniegirl1138 
Hey Uncle Keith!
Yeah, hurtful stereotypes. Did you ever see that Popeye cartoon from WWII, when good ole Popeye the Sailor Man was out fighting the “Nips”? That was a classic.
Someone should be archiving those cartoons, preserved in their original glory, for all posterity. The anthropological value would have to be in the priceless realm.
You are so right about cartoons. I love the old Warner Brothers cartoons, before they had been purged of violence and possibly hurtful stereotypes.
My dad worked sixty hours a week when I was a kid and aside from Walter Cronkite – could have cared less about watching tv. I watched soap operas with my mom – Search for Tomorrow, As the World Turns, Guiding Light, General Hospital, and the Edge of Night. (remember they were only 30 minutes long back then). My friend across the street had cable. One of the first in the neighborhood to get it (we were last as my dad didn’t cave in until the year I went away to college). They got WGN out of Chicago and something out of Madison plus, I think, an Atlanta station. There was the Saturday morning stuff but there was also Captain Kangaroo in the morning which once we started getting the PBS station was followed by Seasame Street. We also had a kid’s show in the afternoon on a station out of Cedar Rapids. It was the Dr. Max Show. Kind of a Captain Kangaroo with cartoons. Then there was the night time stuff as my dad didn’t give much of a damn about tv and mom just was glad we were quiet.
I watched a ton of tv. Three networks, PBS and a local UHF. When I was a preteen and teen I took to shunning the sun and would watch PBS runs of all these sitcoms. Between books, scribbling stories and tv it was no wonder I was fat.
We so rarely watch tv now that we’d have to look up shows to see what was on or what they are about. Thank goodness we are internet junkies or we’d have no insight into (pop) culture at all.
I had no idea commercials were that persuasive; at this point in my life, “commercial” is just another word for “potty/snack break.”
You couldn’t have watched that much TV as a kid; we only had 3 networks, plus whatever we could get in on the UHF channel. Saturday mornings and “Lost in Space” at 4:30 was all we could get in upper Michigan. Any other time, my dad controlled the TV.