The Kids Are Not All Right

http://www.nytimes.com/2011/08/22/opinion/corporate-interests-threaten-childrens-welfare.html

This article brought up some issues, that I believe are fairly important, in a way that made them impossible to look over, and definitely gets the reader thinking. The caption at the top of the website reads Corporate Interests Threaten Children’s Welfare, and the author goes on to talk about childhood obesity, the way corporations knowingly expose children to all sorts of potentially harmful chemicals, and the way amount of time that children these days spend in using some sort of electronic, or in front of some sort of screen.

According to this article, most children spend more hours “engaging with various electronic media,” than they do in school. I realized that this statement is both chillingly accurate, and somewhat ironic, as I’m currently doing schoolwork on a computer, and what finally pushed my parents to give me my own computer (well, my mom’s old laptop) was the fact that I needed a computer for schoolwork nearly every night during the school year. Children spend so much time watching TV, or on the computer, or something similar, and since there is very little regulation of children’s media, they are exposed to violent, sexual, and other types of imagery that parents have largely tried to shield them from.Even the title of the article (The Kids Are Not All Right) derives from a movie - yet another type of electronic media that kids are very exposed to.

In the article it said: “Another area of concern: we medicate increasing numbers of children with potentially harmful psychotropic drugs, a trend fueled in part by questionable and under-regulated pharmaceutical industry practices.” It is true that diagnosis come much earlier on in life than they used to, and that many children are on some sort of medication, but I think that this isn’t as bad as the author makes it out to be. Sure, there are some harmful drugs out there, and something really does need to be done about those, but as a whole, aren’t doctors helping kids by figuring out what kind of help they need and medicating for that?

It’s a very interesting article, and it definitely gets the reader thinking, so I’d love to know what other people think about this.