Moral Panics and Consumption

Moral Panic: an instance of public anxiety or alarm in response to a problem regarded as threatening the moral standards of society.

Oxford Dictionary

According to Buckingham, “the recent wave of concern around childhood obesity” has reached a new wave of ‘moral panic’ (Buckingham, 2004, p. 105). I know that throughout my adult life, I’ve constantly heard about the new epidemic of childhood obesity. According to Buckingham, there are “Alarming accounts of children ‘dying’ from obesity, of obesity as the new ‘Black Death’ (Buckingham, 2004. P. 105). According to Buckingham, Childhood Obesity is another ‘moral panic’ that makes parents feel guilty and individual children feel bad about their appearance, which leads to an increase in eating disorders. Buckingham also writes that the insurance, pharmaceutical, food, and diet industries all help push the narrative that children are overweight, which politicizes the ‘moral panic.’  If there is money to be made by pushing the obesity epidemic, then does it call in to doubt the actual problem?

According to the CDC, Childhood obesity is a problem and lists the following statistics:

Prevalence of Childhood Obesity in the United States

Childhood obesity is a serious problem in the United States, putting children and adolescents at risk for poor health. Obesity prevalence among children and adolescents is still too high.

For children and adolescents aged 2-19 years in 2017-20201:

The prevalence of obesity was 19.7% and affected about 14.7 million children and adolescents.

Obesity prevalence was 12.7% among 2- to 5-year-olds, 20.7% among 6- to 11-year-olds, and 22.2% among 12- to 19-year-olds. Childhood obesity is also more common among certain populations.

Obesity prevalence was 26.2% among Hispanic children, 24.8% among non-Hispanic Black children, 16.6% among non-Hispanic White children, and 9.0% among non-Hispanic Asian children. (https://www.cdc.gov/obesity/data/childhood.html)

According to NPR, parents are seeking out more medical treatment to include drugs and surgeries to help their children combat childhood obesity. Other parents believe society needs to stop holding children to a standard that values thinness.  Buckingham also mentions how BMI is not a scientific way to measure obesity, but it’s the standard used by the CDC and most other medical institutes. Furthermore, Buckingham mentions how preferred body standards have changed since past beauty standards valued heavier bodies. Do you think society has commercialized obesity to push medications, beauty products, diet products, and certain foods? Or do you think childhood obesity is the epidemic the medical community says it is?

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Below is a podcast by Dr. Susan Linn, a psychologist and expert on how technology, media, and commercial marketing make an impact on children. She’s also an expert on creative play, a director of the children’s advocacy group called Fairplay (they advocate for commercial-free childhoods) and a lecturer at Harvard Medical School. Linn joined Hilary Wilkinson on her podcast called “Healthy Screen Habits” as Linn was promoting her 2022 book Who’s Raising the Kids? Big Tech, Big Business, and The Lives of Children.

The full link to the interview can be found here: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ttLZHa0dL48

Below are a few quotes from the podcast, highlighted for discussion. 

• 6:32 = “advertising to children and the creation of toys to market on television started in the 1980s and escalated even more in the 1990s…so we went from television and then there were videos and then there was the digital, you know, revolution, basically and all of a sudden kids were just being bombarded” Linn says this bombardment was all of a sudden. How do you think this impacted the extent to which children were/are impacted by consumerism? 

• 21:13 = “tech companies are quick to infer that protection of children should be placed on parents, not companies” Do you believe that companies and businesses have some shared responsibility in protecting children? In guarding them against consumerism?

• 22:16=  “We’re at a time in the United States where books are being banned, teachers and librarians are being censored, but kids can go to Alexa or to Google Search and ask anything and the answers that they get are not necessarily accurate information and in fact can be very destructive disinformation and incredible biased. I mean the way responses are ranked might have to do with popularity, but it could have to do with with how much money companies are spending to get their products or websites high up in the search engine”  Do you see a connection between the crusade of book banning in some states/districts and children’s consumerism? 

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Moral Panic and Childhood:

“The concept of moral panic was first developed in the United Kingdom in the early 1960s, principally by Stan Cohen, initially for the purpose of analyzing the definition of and social reaction to youth subcultures as a social problem. Cohen provided a “processual” model of how any new social problem would develop: who would promote it and why, whose support they would need for their definition to take hold, and the often-crucial role played by the mass media and institutions of social control. In the early 1990s, Erich Goode and Nachman Ben-Yehuda produced an “attributional” model that placed more emphasis on strict definition than cultural processes. The two models have subsequently been applied to a range of putative social problems which now can be recognized as falling into five principal clusters: street crime, drug and alcohol consumption, immigration, child abuse (including pedophilia), and media technologies. Most studies have been conducted in Anglophone and European countries, but gradually, the concept is increasing its geographical reach. As a consequence, we now know a good deal about how and why social problems come to be constructed as moral panics in democratic societies” (Critcher, 2017).

Moral panic amongst children can be seen in a variety of forms. This can be social anxiety, child abuse, and other forms of psychological, criminal, and deviate behaviors. Do you believe enough is being done to understand and preserve children’s mental health or are we facing a greater form of moral panic that is going unnoticed?

Resources

Moral Panics and Halloween Candy

Buckingham frames moral panics in regards to childhood obesity in an interesting fashion, noting that a ‘moral panic’ “tends to imply that it is merely an irrational phenomena” (107). One of the most famous moral panics over the last half century came in the 1980s, when legends began to spread about razors and drugs in Halloween candy. Listed below is a YouTube video covering these events.

But like Buckingham noted in regards to moral panics, these legends were wildly inflated and not happening nearly to the extent they were being reported. Still, there is something to be said about the intersections between consumption, childhood obesity, and ‘moral panics’ in the infamous 1980s Halloween candy legends.

Moral Panic and Online Safety

As we explore the theories of childhood and their relationship to moral panic, we’re engaging in conversations and dialogue about the importance of online safety and the threats that social media pose to our children. We use the internet for various things, from connecting with others globally to buying our necessities. Social media and the internet offer endless possibilities, both positive and negative. With the digital age and the adaptation of innovation, there has been an uprising in advocacy and programs to protect children online.

In the book “The Material Child: Growing Up in Consumer Culture,” David Buckingham delves into this topic in depth in Chapter 1, titled “Exploited or Empowered.”