The following is an excerpt from an article by Jonathan Rowe and Gary Ruskin, Mothering Magazine

Each week, the typical American child takes in some 38 hours (yes, a full work week) of commercial media, with its endless ads and come-ons. And that's not counting the ads that commandeer their attention from billboards and the Internet, the omnipresent brand logos, and the advertising that increasingly fills the schools.

The merchandise pushers have invaded the commons of childhood, the free open spaces of imagination and play, and turned it into a free-fire zone of commercial importuning.

Corporate advertisers have contrived to wedge themselves into the space between parents and their children. They enlist the best psychologists and market researchers money can buy to lure kids to products and values many of us don't approve of and even abhor.

On their own, parents cannot contend with the nation's largest corporations and their weapons of mass childhood seduction. It's time Washington stood up for parents. It's time for politicians to recognize that raising children is the most important task of our society.

It's time, in other words, for a Parents' Bill of Rights.

It is not comforting to know, as we cuddle our newborns, that there exists an industry eager to prod them onto their "consumer journey." Nor is it comforting to know that there are marketing consultants advising corporations on how to harness the "nag factor" to increase sales--nagging spurs about a third of family trips to fast-food restaurants, and of purchases of videos and clothing.

The morphing of advertising into life extends even to the schools. Corporations have taken advantage of tight school budgets to turn classrooms and hallway walls into billboards for junk food and sneakers. As for the Internet, it's a marketer's dream, a technology that children roam unsupervised, and that offers endless opportunities for getting into children's minds.

For advertisers, it all has been a bonanza: Market researchers estimate that children ages 4 to 12 influence some $565 billion of their parents purchasing each year.

For kids, however, the role of consumer "superstars" has meant an epidemic of marketing-related diseases. American kids are fatter than ever, and rates of obesity and type 2 diabetes are soaring. Teenage girls have become obsessed with their bodies, due largely to the images of physical perfection that barrage them in fashion magazines and ads. More than half of all high school girls say they were on diets during the previous month. Likewise, eating disorders are now the third leading chronic illness among adolescent girls.

Drinking is a problem too, and tobacco marketing is especially successful at counteracting parents who encourage their children not to smoke.

Parents deserve a little more respect. Their job is hard enough without the marketing culture treating them as cannon fodder. The technology of seduction has increased tremendously in sophistication and reach, and corporate seducers have gained new legal rights too. Yet the means for parents to contend with these intrusions, and to talk back to the intruders, have scarcely grown at all. In many respects they have diminished.

The time has come to right the balance. The government can't do parents' job for them, but it certainly can give them the legal rights they need to stand up effectively to corporations that target their kids. Parents should not be second-class citizens. They should not feel under siege by a culture designed to shake them down for money, and to usurp the function of instilling values in their kids.

The time has come for a Parents' Bill of Rights.

Jonathan Rowe is director of the Tomales Bay Institute. Gary Ruskin is executive director of Commercial Alert (www.commercialalert.org), whose mission is to keep the commercial culture within its proper sphere and prevent it from exploiting children and subverting the higher values of family, community, environmental integrity, and democracy.

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• Alternet April 28, 2003