Author looks at how businesses target kids
— -- Parents always crab that washing machines come with manuals, but babies don't. Joel Bakan's Childhood Under Siege won't tell you about the 2 a.m. feeding, but it will clue you in on parent traps you never imagined when you were decorating the nursery.
Who knew:
• How changes to the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders, used mostly by mental health professionals, can change your child's life.
• How Honesty Box on Facebook, with 8 million users, can rattle your children's self-confidence.
• Why doctors prescribe psychotropic medicines to elementary school children.
The information in Bakan's book is so stunning that a reader's first reaction might be to write him off as a cry-wolf anti-corporate crusader. He's the author of the decidedly anti-corporate The Corporation, but Bakan provides 83 pages of footnotes for his claims.
The book sounds alarms about issues that go under most parents' radar:
• He shows how marketers stir the seven emotions that garner impulsive responses from kids — love, fear, fantasy, humor, mastery, collecting and mirror effect, which is the desire of kids to imitate grown-ups.
Parents aren't surprised when they read that Grand Theft Auto IV raked in $500 billion in its first week on sale. But most would be rattled to hear that sites such as Webkinz threaten kids with unhappy endings for their pixeled pets if they quit playing.
Or that churches have begun offering Halo, a violent but popular video game, to lure youth to church.
Or that AddictingGames.com, home to games such as Sniper Assassin and Ricochet Kills, is owned by Nickelodeon's parent company.
•Scarier than any video game is Bakan's story of an 18-month-old given an antipsychotic drug after a doctor's five-minute assessment pronounced him autistic. Another doctor diagnosed him with bipolar disorder. By age three, the boy was overweight, drooling and downing four drugs daily, and his mother said he had a blank look in his eyes. A different psychiatrist weaned him off the drugs. By age six, he was a thriving kindergartener.
In 1952, Bakan says, the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders lacked any listing of childhood disorders. The 1980 version devoted five pages to attention deficit disorder alone. Other pediatric diagnoses were added in the 1990s — bipolar disorder, pediatric depression, social anxiety disorder, oppositional defiance disorder. As the list grew, so did prescriptions.
Bakan gives a guided tour of rigged clinical trials, burying adverse data, slipping "consulting fees" to physicians who tout drugs, and paying off academics who put their names on journal articles ghostwritten by public relations people.
An interesting aside: Hundreds of former college cheerleaders work as drug reps for the pharmaceutical industry.
Spirited Sales Leaders is an agency that specializes in matching cheerleaders with drug companies. Bakan says the physically attractive reps, who get bonuses for boosting prescriptions, collect information about doctors' personal lives to help them develop a rapport.
• Online entrepreneurs are coming after the $1 trillion in buying power in the hands of children.
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