Hanging with the Tater Tots: A quick Q&A with Kids

Yesterday I took the day off (yay!) and was able to visit the extended day program run by the park district that I used to work at.  I miss the kids and the people who work there (one of my best friends from High School runs it).

During particularly heated games of “Skippo” and “Baloney Sandwich” (aka B.S.), we started talking about kid pop culture.  Here’s what was said:

1. Emily, 10, LOVES “VMK” and “webkinz“  All her friends have a pet on webkinz and she plays for free on vmk (you can pay a fee and have more abilities/tokens/etc).  She knows OF Club Penguin (and talks about it like it’s a common topic of interest at lunch table convos) but doesn’t go on it because she’s happy on VMK.  She doesn’t go on Nick.com that much either.  She doesn’t like Nicktropolis because she thinks its boring– “What are you supposed to do all day?”  Her cousin and two friends from her class are on her safe list at VMK.  She hasn’t hooked up with anyone’s pets on webkinz (she treats it like a Tomagotchi).

She doesn’t watch Disney anymore (she called it “baby girl” which I thought was odd considering its three powerhouse tween shows– “That’s So Raven,” “The Suite Life of Zach and Cody,” and “Hannah Montana“) and she never watches Cartoon Network (”that thing only shows boy cartoons”).  She loves Nickelodeon and thinks Nicktoons Network is cool (although she admitted that she didn’t watch that “goth” show, which I will leave anonymous for now, grumble).  Zoey101 is her favorite. She “LOOOOOVES” it.  She “loooooves” Chase (Zoey’s pseudo-boyfriend).  She also really likes “Ned’s Declassified” a lot (yay, so do I).

Emily does NOT look at Nicktoons Network as being any different than Nickelodeon. In fact, none of the kids did. They think it’s all the same.   Instead of a being similar to a younger sibling channel (similar goals, same family, its own entity), they each seemed to regard Nicktoons as Nickelodeon’s twin channel.  Some expressed frustration at not having Nicktoons (it’s a premium channel).

2. Chandra, 11, only gets to play on the computer at school.  Sometimes she gets to play on Disney.com and Nick.com and that’s really exciting for her.  She’s been on Discovery’s website too (for school projects).  She seemed to only understand the kid internet as far as cable channel websites.  She didn’t know of Club Penguin or VMK.  Her parents aren’t really “hands on” sadly…

As for books… she’s “slowly” (and slowly is being stuck on page 90 for about 45 minutes of daydreaming, I can relate, I was the same kind of child) reading the Levine’s “Fairy” books (Tink and so on– a Disney series) and the Hannah Montana book series.  She likes “Pony Club” (which I think she means the Saddle Club, or whatever that WB show is) and the Bratz series on Saturday mornings.  She also likes “Viva Pinata” and “The Suite Life of Zach and Cody” on ABC, Saturday Mornings.

3. Hammerhead (yes, that’s a nickname that he insists is his real name… it was given to him about two years ago thanks to a headbutting incident), 9,  says that he plays on Nick.com but would rather blow it up.  Nice.  He also informed us that his mother had him at 17, he is the “best kind of mistake” and that I look as old as his grandma.  Deep sigh.  His friends are on Club Penguin, but again, he would rather “blow it up with a really cool lazer” (as he then demonstrated through his Lincoln Log construction that looked more like a lawn mower than a weapon).

He loves Lincoln Logs, loves Army guys, loves Dominoes (and destroying other’s domino constructions), finds hitting to be a “girls thing” while headbutting is a “boy thing.”  His favorite shows are “Yu Gi Oh” “Pokemon” and “TMNT: Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles” cartoon.  He also likes “Ben 10,” “Naruto,” and “Fosters Home for Imaginary Friends.”  Even though he says he doesn’t watch “The Suite Life of Zach and Cody” he sure does know a LOT about it.  Oh… an apparently Charzard from Pokemon would “so eat” me.  Nice.

He did admit that his older sister cruises the web a lot more than he does.  (His older sister is 13, I used to be her camp counselor).  “She goes on that myspace my mom hates cos thats where the boys are.”  (At this point in our conversation over “Skippo” he shoots me with his Lincoln Log Lawn Mower and runs back to the other boys building an empire out of dominos and Lincoln Logs)

Katelyn, 10.  Oh, Katelyn.  I’ve known this child for a long time.  Cute as a button, germy as a used tissue.  Forgive me for that bluntness… but the truth is, we keep a hand sanitzer around whenever she’s wanting to play cards or Mancala (oh, those darn mancala beads are like a haven of disease). Seriously.  Anyway… Katelyn is one of those darlings that always has the latest to show off.  She showed us her new gameboy, which she then dumped in her backpack after empting her automatic pencil sharpener shavings into the same backpack (instead of the trash).  We make a little fuss about her treatment of her things and she shrugs and sweetly smiles, “Mom will get me a new one.”  Nice.

She loves all things Disney.  She listed off all the shows she watches (which is basically the entire day’s programming).  At FIRST she pretended like she didn’t know what was on Nick.  “What’s on it besides Spongebob?”  However, once Emily started talking about TeenNick, she changed her tune.  She got excited when Emily brought up Zoey101.  She has Tivo in her own room and gets to watch everything when she wants– like HBO, Comedy Central, and Cartoon Network’s Adult Swim.  Zoinks.  She also found it fun to tell me that her mother is two years younger than I am…

This past weekend, Katelyn went to the Christina Agulera concert.  She’s also been to two Britney Spears concerts.  They (meaning Katelyn and Chandra) still love Britney, but concede that they’ve heard bad things about them. Emily, however, was disgusted by Britney, which started a very mature conversation between the three oft them (like I wasn’t even there) about the mistakes Britney has made (as soon as Emily expressed her views, both Katelyn and Chandra folded, saying Britney was sad and gross).  They never really said anything more about Britney than “she smokes” and “she cut her hair off” and (in a very motherly voice) “she’s made bad decisions”.

I  love it when kids hear what their parents say and repeat it as if it was their own thought. 

Anyway… I thought I would share some of the fun things I heard yesterday.  I’m going to try and get some kids in the office to do some web testing.  Learning never stops.

Tweens, shopping, and adulthood

Tweens ‘R’ Shoppers

IT is 11:15 a.m. The kids have the day off from school and I’m mall crawling The Westchester in White Plains, with my posse: my 11-year-old daughter, Lake, and two of her friends, Annabelle K, 11, and Eve W, 12.Shortly after we enter the mall, my perfectly coiffed and lip-glossed group of girls step into Louis Vuitton and gaze at a white mink stole covered with colorful logos in a plastic case. “I have to have this!” exclaims Lake.

Tweens ‘R’ Shoppers - New York Times

Okay… this article is both enlightening and freakishly scary (to me, once-a-tween who enjoyed mud pies, smudged cheeks, and ratty hair– like some little wood nymph). It’s power-packed with insights from these three tween-tots-of-shoppindom.

When we pull up in front of Abercrombie, the preteen version of Abercrombie & Fitch, silence falls over my crowd. With its cloying overspritzed air, loud thumping music, blowup posters of young girls and boys, this is ground zero for tween fashion worship: collared shirts in sorbet colors, tanks so thin they often come with holes already in them and skin-tight jeans that curvier teenagers can’t
squeeze into.

GAK! Straight up opinion here, and I’m sorry if you disagree but… for this trend I blame: Paris Hilton, Bratz Dolls, and Parents. Skin-tight jeans? Dear lord. Let’s not exploit sexuality for tweens who’ve barely even entered the suckiness of puberty!

What was surprising about watching these girls move around the mall was their depth of knowledge of even the most sophisticated brands and their brand loyalty.

Told you:

COMBINE this new emphasis on consumerism with the influence of celebrities, like Paris Hilton, and you can see where the younger set is getting its notions of fashion, style and culture. There is also TV, with its fashion shows aimed at younger viewers, from “America’s Next
Top Model” to “Project Runway.”

Curses and drat! It makes you worry about the kids who really DO look up to Paris, Lindsay (oh, how horrible), and (dare I say it) Britney “walking train wreck” Spears– these are the celebumorons who have been peddling themselves for YEARS to the younger audiences with their books, their movies, they catch phrases, their music, their websites, their brand names, and their brand stupidity. I can’t WAIT for the wave of psuedo-normal celebrity kid-turned-adult actors (like Shia Lebeouf). Better role models please. If we’re going to peddle off actor/celeb brands… let’s have some brains behind it, eh? Sheesh.

It also describes perfectly the way my posse ricochets between childlike abandon and adult composure — by the minute. As we walked past the Brookstone store, they threw themselves onto the massage chairs and jumped up and down, just like children. They are caught between two worlds and that is perhaps why stores like the Limited Too, which my group no longer considers “cool,” carry such a schizophrenic mix of bubblegum and bras.

….

“It’s not really about clothes,” Ms. Conrad said. “At this age it’s important for them to feel like they’re part of a larger club. And this does it.”

Daniel T. Cook, an associate professor of advertising at the University of Illinois, said that clothes shopping gives tweens a safe place in which to do some of the heavy lifting of adolescence.

“They get to select and survey a world of identities and selves that are presented out there,” he said. “It almost has a sense of ritualistic or magical  timeout.”

Wow. “ritualistic or magical timeout”? That’s an interesting insight I hadn’t thought of. Noted and noted.

The sociological move away from authoritarian parents to parents-as-friends has given rise to a generation of children that was born to shop. The result?

“We have this incredibly sophisticated, thoughtful, opinionated consumer,” Ms. Liebmann said. “And parents have created it.”

…

Sharon Zukin, a sociology professor at Brooklyn College and author of “Point of Purchase” (Routledge), does not deride tweens for wanting to shop because she claims it is the modern form of hunting
and gathering.

While interviewing people for her book, Ms. Zukin asked people whether they remembered their first shopping experience. “They all did,” she said. “Shopping on your own is a rite of passage.”

Damn! I’ve been foiled. This is a VERY good point. How many of us cruised the mall in junior high while Mom was off in some lamer department store picking out creepy underwear? Or having coffee in the mall cafeteria with her shopping buddy. I was always adventuring off to Spencers and Claires or some toy store, happy to feel independent… thinking “is this what it’s like to be a teen? I can’t wait to drive.” Yeah– i voiced such thoughts… a lot. “Is this what it feels like” was and still is a slogan. Aspiring older. Aspiring cooler. Wanting to FEEL more and acknowledge such an accomplishment as it comes. Can’t beat that.

Best/Worst internet laws

Over the past dozen years, the lure of regulating the Internet has proven irresistible to legislators. For example, in the 109th Congress, almost 1,100 introduced bills referenced the word “Internet.” Although this legislative activity doesn’t always come to fruition, hundreds of Internet laws have been passed by Congress and the states. This body of work is now large enough that we can identify some winners and losers. So in the spirit of good fun, I offer an opinionated list of my personal votes for the best and worst Internet statutes in the United States.

Articles

I would suggest that anyone interested in the wild world of internet law check this site out.

Here’s the “3rd worst” internet law (in that site’s opinion):

#3:
Dot Kids Implementation and Efficiency Act of 2002

As we saw with the Utah Digital Signatures Act, legislators can’t stimulate market demand simply by legislating the market into existence. In my opinion, no legislative act better illustrates this principle than the Dot Kids Implementation and Efficiency Act of 2002. In the name of providing a safe online haven for kids, Congress co-opted the .kids.us domain and decreed that only kid-safe content could reside there. In theory, parents would feel safe letting their kids loose there, and content publishers would have a good place
to reach kids. Ultimately, Internet filters could simply enable .kids.us websites and shut off the rest of the Internet to kids.

The problem? Not many content publishers saw the value of creating kid-safe websites and housing them under the restrictive rules of the law. As a result, .kids.us is a virtual wasteland, housing fewer than 20 websites—almost all of which have less-than-compelling content. (You mean to tell me you’ve never been
there? Check it out yourself.) Not exactly the most enticing destination for Junior. So .kids.us is a ghost-town-like reminder that legislators should stay out of the business of trying to manufacture markets.

I thought that was an interesting choice… and, no matter how often I shout about media responsibility & internet safety with kids… I can see the uselessness of this law. There’s nothing kids like less than being reminded of the government-issued sterile room with padded walls the “man” tries to create for them. LOL.

Would you rather hang out at Willy Wanka’s factory (it’s just as clean, remember– those Oompa Loompa’s work hard to make sure no human hands have touched the choco-river) where he makes his own crazy (yet oddly sensible) rules… or hang out at a candy factory maintained by candy-clueless bureaucrats, ya know?

Noteworthy: Barbiegirls.com

Welcome to BarbieGirls.com℠ ! The Barbie Girls™ world is designed to be
a safe, fun, and exciting place for girls to play online. Once a girl
has registered with the site, she can create a virtual character,
design her own room, shop with B Bucks (virtual “money”) she earns,
play games, watch videos featuring her favorite Barbie™ movies and
products, and have real-time chats with other registered users. Our
sophisticated word filter keeps this chat appropriate for girls and
prevents personal information — such as your child’s name, phone
number, and address — from being given out to anyone unknown to you.

Barbie Girls

It’s in Beta now, and they have a great informational video on the mainpage.  Last week a large handful of people tossed this site my way.  I stay positively excited until it’s open publically and I can get a solid impression.  So far, so great. :) 

I’m disappointed at their use of “word filters”– but that seems to be the way of it these days.  Predictive text & predictive dictionaries are a bit frustrating, but alas… moderation teams = large overhead.  Maybe if Barbiegirl.com gets a great following they can open up the site to hands-on moderation, thus allowing for more freedom of words– what do I mean by this?  Nicktropolis uses the same technique and I found it wretched– words like “see” and “donut” were not available to use.  Uber lame.

Anyway, I always did love my barbies (I was a sad sap that played with ‘em until I was 14– privately, of course… nothing like being pegged as the “weird barbie girl” in hell– aka Junior High.  Barbies = a great way to creatively express stories & imagination.  That’s my story and I’m stickin’ to it).