Parenting Stress at the Hands of McDonald's Restaurants

It seems that parents are being harassed by their kids to buy McDonald's Happy Meals. In the Globe and Mail, an Associated Press article by Mary Clare Jalonick on Jun 22, 2010, reports that a US consumer advocacy group has actually filed a lawsuit claiming that McDonald's "unfairly and deceptively" exploits children in order to sell the Happy Meals. Shock!!

It all seems to be the height of parental stress when parents feel so disempowered that they aren't even in charge of what their kids are eating. How times have changed! And the consequences are very real, too. The Center for Disease Control, in the US, reports that one in three children born after the year 2000 will have Type 2 Diabetes in his/her lifetime and if the child is of African, Hispanic or First Nations heritage, the statistics rise to one out of every two children (50%), born after 2000, will get this debilitating disease in his/her lifetime.

Michael Jacobson, executive director of the consumer group, says parents must take responsibility to feed their kids properly, but that they get worn down by all the pressure from the hard marketing directly to kids.

In my own family, we don't have that problem, but then we also don't have cable or satellite. When my kids go out into the world, they haven't been brainwashed into believing that McDonald's food tastes good, so the odd time they are served a McDonald's product, they won't eat it.

We normally eat whole-grain bread products and non-processed meats and cheeses, in our home, so fast food is quite a turn-off for my children. A few years ago, if we passed a Happy Meals sign at a Walmart, the kids would go look at the poster and ask for just the toy, not the food. We indulged a couple of times, but they stopped asking.

I guess the question is, "Has my family suffered without access to TV?" In fact we own two TV's and four computers with Internet, plus a myriad of other electronic devices, but we don't have the cable or satellite hook up. Nobody dictates a programming schedule to us and nobody forces us to watch 15 minutes of commercials in one hour of programming.

And no we have not suffered. We rent, buy, and borrow movies and full TV seasons and watch them as we want. At different times, we watch a lot of TV and movies, but then we also turn it off and forget about it for extended periods, as well.

Perhaps this advocacy group would do better to empower parents to turn off the TV rather than fight McDonald's. If parents better understood their parenting styles, they may not be so intimidated by their kids' demands. Using EFT or Emotional Freedom Techniques to get back in that parenting driver's seat may be just what the doctor ordered.

Of course, it wouldn't be anywhere near as profitable for the advocacy group. It seems the consumer advocacy group may be the most exploitative of all.