Eco Child’s Play

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Sometimes I think I’m like most parents: I want my kids to have a childhood, a real childhood. I don’t expect it to be pain-free — who among us got that? — but I believe it can also be filled with wonder and joy and laughter.

There are plenty of other times, however, that I feel like I’m not like any other parent I know. We restrict television to some carefully-chosen videos. My kids have never walked through the door of a McDonald’s, and they still have no idea what a Happy Meal is. They don’t use the computer. I regularly weed out the many Disney princess products that are given as gifts, crossing my fingers that my daughter won’t notice a toy’s sudden absence (she usually doesn’t).

What’s my problem? other parents sometimes ask. What’s the big deal?

To me, the big deal is this: there’s just something that feels wrong marketing products — most of them bad for kids — to children who are too young to understand what an advertisement is. There’s something offensive about turning a child into a consumer.

That’s why I was excited when I got an email from a fellow parent inviting me to participate in Healthy Children, Healthy Planet, a 7-part class series from the Northwest Earth Institute.

Healthy Children, Healthy Planet is designed as a reading and discussion group that examines the pervasive effects of advertising, media, and how our consumer culture can influence a child’s view of the world. Along the way, it promises to discover ways to create meaningful family times and healthful environments for children, to explore ways to develop a child’s connection to nature, and to foster creativity.

Every participant is given a workbook with readings and some questions to think about. Then, each week, we come together and talk. It sounds kind of Koombayah, but the truth is, the readings are insightful and thought-provoking — like whether or not parents deserve a Parental Bill of Rights to protect their kids from commercial influences, and how we, as parents, can stop modeling consumerism to our kids (because yeah, most of us do).— and our first week’s discussion was grounded and practical.

Here is the best thing about the program, though — the very, very best thing: When you do it, you will find others like yourself. You’ll find that others are wrestling with some of the same pressures — from a 12-year-old child begging for a cell phone, to a 5-year old that begs for candy in her lunchbox so she can be “like all the other kids,” to the discomfort we feel when we see little girls embracing doe-eyed, blatantly sexual Bratz dolls.

You’ll start to be aware of certain trends, too: movies that invariably show parents as fools and children as the wise ones (a message that surely undermines a parent’s authority). Or the expectation that children should be separated from parents nearly all the time — whether it’s through large finished basements filled with toys and utterly distinct from the “adult” places in the home, or through the endless stream dance classes and swimming lessons and science school and soccer practices that keep us from meaningful family time.

For the first time, perhaps, you’ll start to see some of your own struggles not as conflict between you and your child, but as a larger fight. And you won’t feel nearly as alone.

If Week One was any indication, it’s going to be a fantastic program. The Northwest Earth Institute offers other discussion guides, as well — Voluntary Simplicity, Choices for Sustainable Living, Exploring Deep Ecology, Discovering a Sense of Place, Globalization and Its Critics, Global Warming: Changing CO2urse. All courses are designed for small groups.