Susan Linn

Marketing Drowns Out Innovation

Susan Linn is director of the Campaign for a Commercial-Free Childhood and author of “The Case for Make Believe: Saving Play in a Commercialized World.”

Creativity — our ability to invent, conjure, envision, think divergently, and change the status quo — is essential to a thriving democracy and is rooted in children’s creative play. Yet as a society, we seem to do just about everything we can to prevent even very young children from playing. Over-scheduling, lack of access to green space and early emphasis on rote learning are a few of the barriers we’ve constructed. Another primary culprit is today’s unprecedented convergence of unfettered commercialism and ubiquitous screen media.

A commercialized, screen-saturated culture deprives children of what’s essential to creativity: time, space and silence. Children constantly bombarded with stimulation are so busy reacting that they never learn how to generate. Instantaneous access to an endless array of videos, television, apps and games may stave off boredom. But those stretches of having “nothing to do” are exactly what foster the creative intersection of children’s inner world and their immediate surroundings.

The current crush of licensed toys also deters creativity, especially those that sing, dance and talk at the press of a button. Children play less creatively with media-linked toys, which arrive with predetermined names, voices, personalities and scripts. Try making Elmo or Dora into anyone but themselves. Kids also play less creatively with kits — construction sets or packaged art projects designed to achieve one specific end result. The toys that nurture creativity suggest possibilities, but don’t insist on who or what they are and how they must be used. They just lie there, waiting to be transformed.

The childhood experience of initiating transformation, and finding the inner resources of flexibility and stamina to bring it to fruition, is the foundation of life-long creativity. Amid the glitter and noise of screen-based commercialism, we need to actively carve out commercial-free, screen-free time and space for children.
Susan Linn, NYT