$1.6 billion (in food ads) served

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

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

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

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

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.