Commercial-Free Childhood. Bill Resnick talks to Susan Linn, about the corporate effort not just to sell to children, says Linn, but to takeover childhood and make them habitual consumers. Too in fact instill in them a fundamental deeply held impulse to gain pleasure and meaning in consumption. First a new toy, a new T-shirt, later a new car or kitchen. Linn discusses that must be countered by parents and schools such that children experience in their daily lives real pleasures and fulfillments -- in learning, in creation, in their social relations, in service, in making a better world, in love. Linn wrote the book: Consuming Kids: The Hostile Takeover of Childhood. She’s an activist, founded the Campaign for a Commercial-Free Childhood, now called Fairplay. And she is a puppet therapist for young children and makes appearances, in days gone by on Mr. Rogers’ Neighborhood.
- KBOO