Childhood is the stage after infancy. In this stage, children reach this stage after completing the process of development from infancy.This stage is the stage of personality and character formation of the students, so many psychologists consider this stage to be a formative stage as well.This stage occurs at the age of 6 to 12 years. Under this, the growing stage has been divided into two parts, that is, the stage of 6-9 years is divided as pre-childhood and the age years of 9-12 as post-childhood.
De-structuration and destruction of childhood
In the United States, children spend more time in front of screens than in any other activity besides sleeping. Preschool children spend about 32 hours a week in front of screens. Including multitasking, children ages 8 – 18 spend average of 4 ½ hours per day watching television, 1½ hours using computers, and more than an hour playing video games—more than 7 hours a day.
Large corporate conglomerates now successfully introduce screen time into the lives of an audience that is getting younger by owning television and radio stations, websites, and film studios.
Studies suggest that early screen use can be habit-forming and is negatively associated with cognitive development, regular sleep patterns, and language acquisition. When screens dominate children’s lives—regardless of content—they are a threat, not an enhancement, to creativity, play, and make-believe. The more time children have to nurture and develop their own interpretations of media content, the more likely they are to move beyond the electronic script they’ve viewed. But if children are constantly in front of screens, when do they have time to explore and develop any thoughts, feelings, and ideas that media content might engender? The more babies and toddlers engage with screens, the less time they spend in creative play and interacting with parents.
Commercialization of Childhood
The marketing environment in which kids are growing up today is significantly different from that experienced by their parents as children. The expanding market for factory-made goods changed the world of child’s play. Children grew up playing with folk toys of the conventional form – dolls, balls, carved animals, wheels – or discarded objects, such as sticks or rags, that could be converted into entertainment. The focus of play was social connection rather than the bonding with objects.
These days, the village raising our children has been transformed by the unprecedented convergence of sophisticated, increasingly miniaturised screen technology and unfettered commercialism. As a result, children are bombarded from morning to night by messages designed—not to make their lives better—but for the sole purpose of selling something.
Commercialization of childhood is a process by which children “are being turned into consumers almost from birth, and by adolescence, their social worlds are almost totally constructed around cool commodities, brand names, and the latest trendiest commercial music, films and lingo.”
SOCIALIZATION – Changing the streams
Socialisation is critical to healthy development, and ensuring children’s right to play is an essential building block toward a sustainable world. Socialisation, in fact, is an important part of your child’s development overall — with social milestones helping a child to “manage personal feelings, understand others’ feelings and needs, and interact in a respectful and acceptable way.”
The ability to socialise creatively is central to our capacity to experiment, to act rather than react, and to differentiate ourselves from our environment. It is how children wrestle with life and make it meaningful. Spirituality, and advances in science and art, are all rooted in socialisation. It promotes attributes essential to a democratic populace, such as curiosity, reasoning, empathy, sharing, cooperation, and a sense of competence—a belief that we can make a difference in the world. Constructive problem-solving, divergent thinking, and the capacity for self-regulation are all developed through socialisation.
The intensity and impact of advertising to children are described in the Commercialization of Childhood report. It reveals a horde of branding and marketing geniuses who spend billions year on directly marketing to youngsters in order to sell them items and prepare them for a lifetime of consumerism.
They are coming up with ever more clever ways to manipulate parents and families, infiltrate children’s environments, and take advantage of kids’ emotional weaknesses in order to make money.
A Case for “Structured Resocialization”
According to the report, children struggle to keep up with the images of how they should behave, how they should appear, and what they should own and consume. This leads to rising rates of stress, depression,low self-esteem, discontent about body image and eating disorders, sexualization, youth violence, family stress, underage drinking and underage tobacco use in children as well as record-high rates of health issues like obesity.
Today, more than ever, children need the time, space, tools, and silence essential for developing their capacities for curiosity, creativity, self-reflection, and meaningful engagement in the world. But when consumerism and materialistic values dominate society, creative play is no longer valued.
Children have a fundamental right to reside in settings that support their intellectual, emotional, and social development. Without being hampered by greed, they have the right to develop and their parents have the right to raise them. Health care practitioners can be powerful champions for limiting marketers’ access to children while also assisting parents in monitoring and limiting their children’s exposure to corporate marketers.
A marketing-driven, media-saturated culture that has a significant detrimental impact on many facets of children’s lives rules the village where we raise our children. It is naive to believe that limiting ourselves to our offices, classrooms, or health facilities will be sufficient to mitigate the effects of marketing to children. To reform policy and halt the economic exploitation of children, experts who care about children’s health and wellbeing must work with parents and social activists.