1. We don鈥檛 buy anything that鈥檚 advertised on Saturday morning TV, a rule I鈥檇 override for birthdays and Christmas. Otherwise, nope.
2. If you pester or nag me in the store, we go to the car. If you persist, we go home. Game over. It took twice for each child to get the message.
3. We don鈥檛 buy cereals with sugar as one of the first two ingredients. This sentenced my children to a life of Cheerios, Shredded Wheat and Wheat Chex 鈥� as they would tell anyone who鈥檇 listen.

And that was that.

But that was Before. Before an entire multi-billion-dollar industry developed for the explicit purpose of getting kids to pester and nag their parents to buy absolutely everything. Before an entire children鈥檚 media ecosystem grew up as a venue for advertising and marketing to kids more than for educating or entertaining them. Before digital technologies made it possible to swamp children in advertising more sophisticated, invasive, manipulative and devious than any of us could possibly have imagined. Before every parent trying to do the right thing became David trying to say no to a Goliath so pervasive and entrenched in every moment of their child鈥檚 life that it is rendered practically invisible.

In her excellent book, “Who鈥檚 Raising the Kids: Big Tech, Big Business, and the Lives of Children,” Dr. Susan Linn brings this insidious behemoth to the foreground and underscores it with bright red lines. She maps the current landscape of children鈥檚 marketing and advertising through deep research and the eyes of an insider who鈥檚 been involved for decades in children鈥檚 media. A ventriloquist and entertainer, Linn worked with Fred Rogers, first as a guest with her Audrey Duck puppet on “Mister Rogers鈥� Neighborhood,” and later with his production company creating video programs. Linn, a psychologist and expert on creative play and the impact of commercial marketing on children, was founding director of Campaign for a Commercial-Free Childhood (now called Fairplay). She is a research associate at Boston Children鈥檚 Hospital and lecturer on psychiatry at Harvard Medical School. She is also a mother and grandmother and writes that her activism is as deeply rooted in that personal perspective as in her professional experience.

Since Linn began working in the late 1990s to stop corporations from targeting children, the situation has gone from bad to unbelievable 鈥� a progression launched in the 1980s with the deregulation of children鈥檚 television. It became legal then for companies to create programming whose sole purpose was selling children toys鈥攁nd they took to it with gusto. Consider, for instance, the 1994 marketing conference in London called 鈥淧ester Power: How to Reach Kids,鈥� or the 1998 marketing research study on 鈥淭he Nag Factor,鈥� written not to help parents cope with children鈥檚 nagging or reduce it responsibly, but to provide corporations more tools to support kids in becoming successful naggers.

Advertising Immersion

With the advent of smartphones and tablets, most children are in front of a screen whenever and wherever they go, despite growing evidence that excessive screen time is harmful to children鈥檚 鈥� especially young children鈥檚 鈥� health and development. They are inundated by ads in every game they play, every store they enter, every video they view. In-app purchases urge kids to buy cool new gear for their avatars and to upgrade, upgrade, upgrade, fomenting envy and shame for kids who can鈥檛 keep up, and turning every game session into a battle of wills with parents who may not be able to afford the constant financial demands or who simply resent the incessant pressure to pay up.

As Linn describes in her chapter, 鈥淏randed Learning,鈥� school is no respite from this constant barrage. In their classrooms, 鈥渇ree鈥� tablets are an opportunity for companies to instill lifetime brand loyalty, and clever teaching materials promote Disney properties or fossil fuel companies鈥� hype along with their lessons on nature. The list is endless; this chapter will blow your mind with the many and varied ways corporations insert themselves into the hearts and minds of our kids in educational settings.

Advertising sells values and attitudes right along with the products it hawks to children, and those values are often antithetical to healthy family relationships or even the old-fashioned idea of good citizenship, Linn writes. Children are constantly sold on the belief that competition is king and the things will make us happy, when research suggests that the opposite is true: More materialistic children are unhappier than their less acquisitive peers.

In the chapter, 鈥淏ias for Sale,鈥� Linn shows how prejudice, bias, stereotyping, and social stigma are baked into many games, virtual worlds, social networks and even in the search engines we rely on throughout the day. A study in the journal ACM Queue from the Association of Computing Machinery showed that ads implying that someone had been arrested were more likely to appear in searches for 鈥淏lack-sounding names,鈥� such as 鈥淟atanya Sweeney.鈥� While a search for 鈥淜ristin Lindquist鈥� turned up neutral ads.

People believe Google searches turn up fair and unbiased information 鈥� statistically, younger users believe this more 鈥� when the fact is that racism is embedded in the algorithms and inflicts harm on children as well as adults. Imagine the effect on a child who googles her name and finds it associated with criminality. A watchdog group reported in 2020 that the tool Google uses to help companies decide what search terms they should link their ads to was linking the phrases 鈥淏lack girls,鈥� 鈥淎sian girls,鈥� and 鈥淟atina girls鈥� to pornographic search terms. It isn鈥檛 a stretch to imagine how hatefully these biases play out on children.

No Legal Obligation

In the current U.S. regulatory landscape, the tech companies that create and own these algorithms have no legal obligation to share how or why their search results are selected. These algorithms are written by humans whose biases influence their creations, Linn writes. These employees don鈥檛 work for institutions whose mission is to serve the public interest, but for tech companies whose primary goal is to maximize profits. 鈥淛ust as Facebook isn鈥檛 a public square, Google isn鈥檛 a public library,鈥� she writes.

Linn is not anti-technology 鈥� she just wants it to assume its proper place in our lives and the lives of our children. Her goal isn鈥檛 to make parents feel guilty about failing to cope perfectly with the tsunami of carefully targeted temptations every child encounters every day, but instead to help anyone who cares about children understand the 鈥渢oxic, digitized, commercialized culture鈥� so many children wake up to in every day.

This culture鈥檚 impact extends beyond individual well-being to the well-being of our larger society. The solution doesn鈥檛 rest in individual parents, she writes, but in working together to push back against the monetization of American childhood. Her 鈥淩esistance Parenting鈥� chapter offers excellent suggestions for how to introduce tech to young children and how to manage their use of technology into their teen years. Most importantly, she emphasizes that this isn鈥檛 a battle that can be fought on an individual level but something we must embrace as a society. Powerful forces are invested in manipulating children for profit, but they are not all powerful. Parent groups, communities and fed-up friends have formed advocacy groups, undertaken educational campaigns and even, in the case of Minnesota鈥檚 Digital Well-Being Bill, gotten a state legislature to provide $1 million to promote resources, education and a leadership program to support young people鈥檚 balanced use of devices.

The situation isn鈥檛 hopeless, and no one is helpless, though it will take concerted effort to create the social change needed to put technology in its proper place.

“Who鈥檚 Raising the Kids?” is the perfect place to start 鈥� a research-based primer in what鈥檚 at stake, who the players are and how we got to this place. It鈥檚 truly a must-read for anyone who cares about the future of America鈥檚 kids.