earlier—than the middle-class Americans for whom this frightening trend is hitting now.40 Indeed, the blue-collar man has taken the hit for everyone else in America—and so has his family.
THE DEREGULATION EFFECT
If a freer market is the answer, what policies would enhance it, and what impact would they have on the family? Deregulation, as those who link the free-market with family values hold, encourages business, creates jobs, raises the national GDP and the average family’s income, and so strengthens families. Deregulation, the argument goes, helps families. But such a claim bears a closer look.
We can look at the television commercials for high-sugar, high-fat, high-salt foods—Cokes, candy bars, and chips—that target children and are unregulated in the United States. In her book Born to Buy, Juliet Schor documents the link between the troubles of American children and the “child industry,” as she calls it, based on the wide and increasing exposure of American children to advertising.41 Most advertising is still delivered to children through television, although television and the Internet are merging into a whole new interactive—and marketing—experience for youth. By the age of 6 years, Schor observes, the American child’s viewing time is just over two hours a day, and for 8- to 13-year-olds it rises to three and a half hours a day; a fifth of television air time is devoted to commercials.42 One study found that American children aged 3 to 5 years spent more time watching television (14 hours a week) than being in school (12 hours and 5 minutes), playing outdoors (37 minutes), or doing anything other than sleep.43 In 2004, the total advertising and marketing expenditures directed at children reached $15 billion.44 Such ads are aimed at children’s own piggy banks. Children aged 4 to 12 spent $30 billion of their own money in 2002, and a full third of that went for candy, soft drinks, and other products high in fat and sugar.45
Researchers have linked such ads to the rise in childhood obesity,46 which has, according to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, quadrupled for 6- to 11-year-olds and tripled for 2- to 5-year-olds since 1970.47 Children grow obese mainly through what they eat, of course; what has changed since 1970 includes the rise of convenience foods at home, restaurant dining, and scheduled passive pursuits, and the decline in school recess time and free roaming around the neighborhoods. But the main thing that changed is the increase in money invested in television and Internet advertisements for junk food. And on such child-targeted ads, there is no regulation.
Indeed, the junk food industry has aggressively pursued many strategies to get children to buy its products. Some companies enlist children to serve as “brand representatives” to other children. Companies fund school books—Amazon.com sells at least forty of them—that teach math and science using branded foods: the M&M’s Brand Counting Book or the Kellogg’s Froot Loops! Counting Fun Book.48 Some ads for junk food make it “cool” to be oppositional and defy parental advice about healthy eating. The restaurant and beverage companies founded and fund the Center for Consumer Freedom, which ridicules public health authorities who link obesity to disease and opposes efforts to curb childhood obesity as “anti-freedom.”49
With cuts in public funding, cash-strapped U.S. public school districts increasingly accept money in return for giving for-profit companies the right to place ads on public school buses and to create programming—including an ad for Coke—shown on Channel One television during compulsory assemblies at school. Nine states now allow ads on the outside of school buses, and some schools allow ads inside them.50 In return for corporate money, some school boards now also permit district school buses to carry radios that play ads. Other cash-strapped schools are exploring corporate sponsorship of school bands, sports teams, and the general fund. Some public schools have accepted corporate money to develop curricula such as the American Coal Foundation’s “The United States of Energy,” a fourth-grade curriculum favorable to coal, and Shell’s “Energize your Future” curriculum, which imagines the oil industry as a leader in alternative fuel production.51 Kohl’s department store’s “charitable” campaign offered $500,000 to the twenty schools with the most votes on Facebook; all voters were then placed on a Kohl’s promotional mailing list.52 As scholars at the National Education Policy Center argue, such curricula are prompted by a desire to boost company brands, not help kids think.53
Some nations permit more child-targeted advertising than others. One scholar, who analyzed twenty hours of commercial television aimed at children under the age of 12 in twelve nations, found that the United States showed television ads for 11 minutes per hour while Norway and Sweden showed ads for 1 minute per hour.54 In response to the obesity crisis in 2006, fifty-three European governments adopted the European Charter on Counteracting Obesity, which included a call to regulate the commercial promotion of “energy-dense foods,” particularly to children.55 Countries responded to this call in different ways. The United Kingdom banned ads to children under 16 for foods high in fat, sugar, and salt. France required nutritional messages on all foods targeted to adults and children—a proposal to ban ads to children failed by one vote in 2009. Ireland banned the use of celebrities in children’s food ads and requires warnings on fast foods.56 The U.S. Congress appropriated money in 2009 to set up a Working Group on Food Marketing to Children, and called for voluntary pledges by the food industry to regulate itself.57 In his survey of children in twelve rich nations, the sociologist Tim Kasser found that nations allowing advertisers the freest hand in targeting children scored the lowest on a UNICEF ranking of child well-being.58
The dark side of deregulation can be connected to a wide array of other problems that families absorb, too. With staff cuts in the Occupational Safety and Health Administration (OSHA) or looser workplace safety regulations, workers go to jobs in riskier workplaces: a nurse is stuck with an unsafe needle, a construction worker steps on an unsafe scaffolding, a miner enters an unsafe mine. A less-protected environment produces diseased plants, animals, and potentially contaminated food. Seen in one light, these are unavoidable problems of a free-market system that people must deal with, one by one. Seen in another light, they are the preventable fallout of an under-regulated economy that harms all families.
THE SERVICE-LOSS EFFECT
A final “free-market and family values” proposal is to make large cuts in public services. Medicaid, food stamps, subsidized housing for the disabled, public school lunches, and Head Start help families who are poor or have special needs. Public libraries and parks serve all families, especially middle-class ones who tend to be their heaviest users.59 The Nurse-Family Partnership program offers monthly visits over three years for poor—and often young and unmarried—mothers. According to the Coalition for Evidence-based Policy, the program has reduced child abuse, neglect, and injuries by anywhere from 20 to 50 percent.60 It also has reduced the number of subsequent births and has motivated mothers to go back to school or get jobs. According to a 2005 RAND study, the Nurse-Family Partnership program saves $5.70 for every dollar it spends.61
Similarly, Success for All, a school-wide program in high-poverty elementary schools, offers daily 90-minute reading classes and other reading help and improves reading performance by 25 to 30 percent of a grade level.62 Career Academies, which set up learning communities that prepare students in urban, low-income high schools for jobs, have also had important success.63 Head Start, which helps children improve their reading, writing, and vocabulary, aids in their emotional development as well, according to some studies.64 Youth Opportunities Grants, before their defunding, also helped low-income youth.65 Insofar as it is families that absorb the bad news of their members, such programs have greatly helped families.
The free-market family-values agenda creates a two-sided market squeeze. On one side, tax-induced inequality, deregulation, and service cuts put heavy strains on family life. On the other side, cuts in social services reduce the support for handling such strains. It is precisely this market
