Groups Doing Good Work
A number of organizations around the country work to fight against advertising aimed
at children and commercialism in schools. These groups provide valuable information and resources for caregivers. Find out more by checking out some of these groups:
- Alliance for Childhood - promotes policies and practices that support children’s healthy development, love of learning, and joy in living.
- American Academy of Pediatrics Committee on Communication - works to educate AAP members as well as children, adolescents, and those who care for them, about messages regarding and targeting youth.
- Campaign for Commercial Free Childhood - a national coalition of health care professionals, educators, advocacy groups and concerned parents who counter the harmful effects of marketing to children through action, advocacy, education, research, and collaboration.
- Citizens’ Campaign for Commercial-Free Schools - Seattle-based group protects the right of children and youth to a commercial-free education.
- Commercial Alert - working to keep the commercial culture within its proper sphere, and to prevent it from exploiting children and subverting the higher values of family, community, environmental integrity and democracy.
- Commercialism in Education Research Unit - conducts research, disseminates information, and helps facilitate dialogue between the education community, policy makers, and the public at large about commercial activities in schools.
- Common Sense Media - exist to give parents, educators and kids a choice and a voice about the media they consume.
- Dads and Daughters - inspires fathers to actively and deeply engage in the lives of their daughters and galvanizes fathers and others to transform the pervasive cultural messages that devalue girls and women.
- Equally Shared Parenting - dedicated to couples with children who have chosen (or wish to choose) to equally share in the family breadwinning, housework, childraising and recreation time.
- I Buy Different campaign - helps young people learn how they can make a difference by buying differently.
- The Lion and Lamb project - works to stop the marketing of violence to children.
- MediaWise - provides information about the impact of media on children, and gives people who care about children the resources they need to make informed choices.
- The Motherhood Project - forum to lead mothers in an exploration of the social, creative, moral, and spiritual qualities necessary to raise children in a culture increasingly shaped by the values of commerce and technology.
- Northwest Earth Institute - helps participants understand how the pervasive effects of advertising, media, and our consumer culture can influence a child's view of the world.
- Obligation, Inc. - Alabama-based group existing to remind businesses and governments of their responsibility to children.
- Parents Television Council - works to promote and restore responsibility and decency to the entertainment industry in answer to America's demand for positive, family-oriented television programming.
- Teachers Resisting Unhealthy Children’s Entertainment (TRUCE) - a national group of educators deeply concerned about the impact of children’s entertainment and toys on the play and behavior of children in our classrooms.
- TV-Turnoff Network - empowering people to take control of technology and not letting technology take control of them so they can live healthier lives.
Know of other national, local or international groups doing good work on kids and commercialism? Tell us in our online forum.