Our will is to keep the torch of freedom burning for all.

Mayo Clinic pediatrician Dan Broughton is interviewed in the story. Speaking for the American Academy of Pediatrics, Dr. Broughton is the one who says that I worry too much about child abduction (after all, it’s statistically improbable), and not enough about having my children see Sponge Bob on a box macaroni and cheese in the store (statistically certain). I guess it doesn’t occur to him why, exactly, I worry about child abduction. First of all, the two concerns are not mutually exclusive. What if an abductor exposes my child to the Sponge Bob m&c? Now the kid has been stolen and corrupted by advertising! It is clear, after all, that there is no escaping from advertisers. Better to keep the kid safe from abduction, in my mind, just on the off chance that it would be better for the child to be with me than with an abductor.

But I do get Mr. Broughton’s point. Even while my children are with me physically, they can be mentally abducted right before my eyes by what they are watching on television. Don’t dismiss this as hyperbole – hours upon hours of children’s programming have a serious impact on what your kids believe. They can be pushed a socialist agenda, or a message of rugged individualism… many shows indicate that might makes right, and as a parent I sometimes have to address that. Parents do need to be aware of what their children are exposed to at school, on line, on television… everywhere. This is a legitimate concern. In fact, I have addressed the possibility that the messages in these kids' shows are a means of positive social engineering (see here).

Having said that, I don’t really care if my children are watching commercials. I am one of those parents who are capable of saying "no" to my children. And my kids don’t have money, and they don’t have cars, so they won’t be making any purchases for themselves for quite some time. In the meantime, they learn by example. I do not feed them crap, and I do not buy them whatever they ask for. My shopping habits are shockingly similar to those of my parents when I was a child, and shockingly dissimilar to what I was asking for when I was five years old. Despite all of the Smurf-watching I did as a kid, I turned out okay. And that wasn't nearly as educational as Dora, or my personal favorite, Little Einsteins.

But we all know that there are people out there who don’t think that parents can handle raising their kids without regulatory help from the government. Some of those people are parents like the ones the NPR story talks about. So the question for any level-headed lover of liberty is, How can I get these people to leave me alone? How can I keep them from pushing more regulations onto the industry – how can I stop that slippery slope? The Campaign for a Commercial-Free Childhood is a group that wants to end marketing of junk foods to children under eight. [Insert libertarian joke about black-market junk food ads]

But in all seriousness, how exactly would such a ban be enforced? The answer is, sweepingly.

If you listen to the NPR story, you will hear the president of Nickelodeon trying to explain the basic concept of supply and demand, but it’s a futile effort. The story even notes that there is a demand for healthy food to be associated with these cartoon characters, so we see the creation of things like Dora Carrots. But still, in the minds of the media and child psychologists, there is a failure to let parents raise their own children.

Update: The NPR piece I discussed was the first in a series of three. The others are here (on 'tweens) and here (teens).