“I live in Vancouver, British Columbia, one of the most beautiful cities in the world,” UBC Law professor Joel Bakan writes in his new book Childhood Under Siege: How Big Business Targets Children. “Surrounded by mountains and ocean, the city is a paradise of beaches and gardens, parks and yoga studios; a hub of green ideas, progressive politics, and entertainment industry glitter...But there is a dark underside to my hometown”.
In case there was any doubt, Bakan’s affinity for the city was again demonstrated by his decision to officially release the book on October 1st to a packed audience in Woodward’s second lecture hall. Presented by the Vancouver Institute, his roughly hour and a half talk touched on several important points raised in the book, and was united by the question: “what did neoliberalism do to children and childhood?”
To those familiar with Bakan’s work, his willingness to tackle broad areas of economic, political and social concern will be nothing new. Seven years after his luminary book and documentary film The Corporation established him as one of the leading critics of corporate power and influence, Bakan has released what can be seen as a sequel of sorts to his earlier project, exploring many of the same concerns through the lens of a topic often overlooked in contemporary activist circles. Living in a city like Vancouver, where issues surrounding poverty and homelessness are rightly given their fair share of attention, it can be easy to lose sight of the concerns surrounding those equally vulnerable to the ill-effects of corporate power, particularly when such power is manifested in the forms of entertainment, science, education, and the material goods around us.
Indeed, although children and childhood are hardly marginal or invisible concerns, it has long been asserted, counter to the traditional values of collective concern and responsibility towards the young, that the role of raising children should rest solely upon the shoulders of parents and its (chronically underfunded) supporting institutions like schools and daycares. Society at large, in other words, should mind its own business. As Bakan points out in the book, what we’ve seen evolve is a rift between our civic traditions, and the laissez-faire, utilitarian attitude promoted by big business, particularly ascendant since the early 1980s.
While we live in a country where the group still comes slightly ahead of the individual, we are often told that parents should be “free to choose” how their children are raised, and that through consumer choice, the market will decide how this is best done. While the slogan “free to choose” on its own may not seem particularly malignant, when combined with the corporate values of “free to market to” and “free to profit from,” the results can be highly damaging, as corporations proceed to promote behaviours and attitudes more amenable to their bottom lines than to the welfare of their young and impressionable audiences. One of the main points Bakan asks us to consider is the extent to which corporations exert a direct influence over the conditions under which those formally free choices of parents are made: while a parent may do his or her utmost to avoid fast-food for example, they are less able to control their child’s desire for it.
Particularly engaging on this point is his discussion on the “central curriculum of childhood,” which offers a novel way of conceptualizing the role corporations play in children’s daily lives. Were a middle- or high-school to subject its students to an average of eight hours of commercial media a day (ten if we count the simultaneous use of different media), with much of it featuring violent content and promoting consumerism, egoism and the sexualization of girls and women, parents would be outraged. And yet this is how the average American adolescent spends his or her time, immersed in an education of an entirely different, but no less significant sort.
In his book Bakan discusses five issues relating to chaildhood and big business: the emergence of a “kid marketing industry,” increased prescription and use of psychotropic drugs, exposure to harmful chemicals in commercial goods, the employment of child labour, and the infiltration of business into education. In devoting two chapters to each topic (aside child labour, which is given one), Bakan does remarkably well, in the relatively short length of 175 pages, to present the pertinent points of his arguments and to really hammer home his message in a clear and succinct way. Scattered with engaging anecdotes, the writing succeeds in both maintaining the reader’s interest through the thick of the content, and in humanizing the harmful effects of the issues he describes. Bakan’s book equally avoids the inclination to “sensationalize” the subject matter, a pitfall he could easily have succumbed to, given the extraordinary nature of much of what he describes.
While his focus rests mainly on the United States, Childhood Under Siege has much to say about Canada, and in fact has much to say about broader issues than simply children and childhood. Even for those with no particular interest in child-rearing and development, much can be gained from a reading of Bakan’s book, intersecting as it does with the problem of corporate power in general. How a society treats its youth rests equally at the crossroads of many other fundamental human concerns--to employ the famous quote from Nelson Mandela (as Bakan does twice in his book): “There can be no keener revelation of a society’s soul than the way it treats its children.”
One notices another thing from a reading of Bakan’s work: he’s what you might call, in the words of Chris Hedges, a “true conservative.” Not particularly radical politically, he is the perfect advocate for exposing the system itself as radical, documenting how the rise of corporate power has interfered with and debased the conservative values we really ought to cherish: civic duty, the precautionary principle, responsibility towards the young, and the possibility of a value system independent of wealth and power. Written with strong moral conviction, Childhood Under Siege continues in the direction of The Corporation in forcing us to deeply question, for our ethical well-being and perhaps ultimately for our own self-preservation, the institutions that envelop our daily lives.
So what is this “dark underside” of which Bakan writes? As it turns out, in addition to the ignoble distinction of having the worst rate of child poverty in Canada for nearly a decade, British Columbia also has “the most astonishingly neglectful child labor laws in North America, indeed in the world.” Since 2004 in fact, it has been legal for children as young as 12 to work anywhere aside “mines, taverns, bars, and lounges,” in contravention to the International Labour Office’s 1973 Minimum Age Convention, signed by 156 countries. A recent development in the medical world is also worthy of mention: the decision of the American Academy of Pediatrics this past month to lower its age for diagnosing and treating ADHD to four. According to these guidelines, in other words, preschoolers may now be given Ritalin or equivalent drugs, although it should be mentioned that in practice, many doctors have been doing this for some time.
For these reasons and others, Childhood Under Siege is very relevant to the situation as it stands today in B.C. For those especially concerned with the welfare of children, this book will be a blessing. For those concerned with some of the other subjects Bakan’s work touches on, this book is also worth a read as it adds an important dimension to the critique of the corporate institution and the set of economic policies we call “neoliberalism.” In short, for anyone wishing to understand why the process of growing up is not what it used to be, a good place to start might just be here.
