A word of warning to Cinderella: should you ever encounter Susan Linn in a dark alley, you’d be wise to turn and run the other way.
It’s not that Linn has anything against story book heroines per se. Indeed, Linn, a child psychologist and Harvard professor, is a fan of fairy tales, both for their entertainment value and their emotional possibilities. “Populated with fantastical beings and abounding with wonder, they are terrific springboards for make believe. From the safety of ‘Once upon a time…’ fairy tales allow children enough distance to grapple safely with the most passionate of human emotions—grief, envy, fear, rage, and joy,” Linn writes in her new book, The Case for Make Believe: Saving Play in a Commercialized World (The New Press).
Traditional fairy tales are not without their problems, Linn notes: the racial and gender stereotypes, the violence, the dark and often terrifying themes. (I know a 40-something man who still can’t hear the words “Hansel and Gretel” without shuddering.) But Linn—who admits to often skipping the gory bits when she’s reading to a young audience—maintains that, because of their literary richness and imaginative content, “It’s worth wrestling with fairy tales to allow them a place in children’s lives.”
So whence her beef with Cinderella? The object of Linn’s wrath, it’s important to note, is not the Grimms’ put-upon stepsister, or the heroine of the ninth-century Chinese tale “Shen Teh,” believed to be the origin of the story. Rather, it’s the ubiquitous Disney Cinderella, who, along with Belle, Ariel and Jasmine, make up the Disney Princess sorority, a $3.4 billion-a-year juggernaut that has colonized the playrooms and minds of little girls in recent years. (While the line also includes two “princesses” of color, culled from recent Disney movies—Mulan and Pocahontas—they “take a back seat” to their white sisters, Linn notes. Aladdin’s Jasmine has made it to the A-team, although not without some discomfort, adds Linn, reminding readers of the controversy generated by that movie’s depiction of the “good” Arab characters as light-skinned and the villains as dark.)
“When fairytales become commercial megabrands, their depth and malleability diminish, and so does their values as springboards for creative play,” Linn writes. “Once fairy tales become visual versions of someone else’s values—viewed over and over and sold to us in combination with tiaras, jewels, ball gowns, and castles and plastered with images of specific princesses with specific physiognomies—they lock children in a set script for playing from which it is very hard to deviate.”
To Linn, the Disney Princesses are a symptom of a larger problem: the corporatization of childhood, which squelches kids’ natural impulses toward imaginative play and turns them into dutiful little consumers, both of the products being cynically marketed to them, and of the messages those products bear. Add to this other factors—from the hours kids spend parked in front of the TV to the No Child Left Untested mindset that’s turned elementary schools into standardized-exam factories—and we’re ending up with a generation of kids who don’t know how to play.
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Don’t be fooled by her animosity toward certain plastic princesses—Linn is all about play and fun. As a young adult, she turned her childhood love of puppets into a career as a ventriloquist. A protégé of Fred Rogers (she appeared on Mister Rogers’ Neighborhood and produced a series of kids’ videos with his company about issues like racism and abuse), Linn went on to get her degree as a counselor, using puppets in her work with children.
For the kids Linn works with, the puppets are a safe, familiar way to express, understand and work through troubling problems, like illness, loss, abuse. But all children, of course, benefit from play, which Linn calls the “foundation of intellectual exploration.” Through play, kids create fantasy worlds they can control. They learn how to solve problems, express their feelings, negotiate social interactions. “When children are given the time and opportunity, they turn spontaneously to pretend play to make sense of the world, to cope with adversity, to try out and rehearse new roles. They also develop the capacity to turn to pretend play as a tool for healing, for self-knowledge and for growth,” Linn writes.
Indeed, she adds, “Play is so fundamental to children’s health and well-being—and so endangered—that the United Nations lists it as a guaranteed right in its Convention on the Rights of the Child. For children in the third world, societal horrors such as exploitation through slavery, child conscription, and child labor deny children their right to play. In the United States and other industrialized nations, seduction, not conscription, lures children away from creative play.”
The seducers? The “lovable media characters, cutting-edge technologies, brightly colored packaging, and well-funded, psychologically savvy marketing strategies [that] combine in coordinated campaigns to capture the hearts, minds and imaginations of children—teaching them to value that which can be bought over their own make-believe creations.”
There are other forces that get in the way of kids’ play: the ratcheting up of academic pressure; schools cutting “extras” like recess, gym and art to save money or free up more time for test prep; the proliferation of after-school “enrichment” classes and organized sports; parents’ anxieties about unsupervised outside play. But much of Linn’s energy is focused on two things that go hand in hand: the excessive marketing to kids, and the excessive numbers of hours they spend in front of the electronic screens through which these pitches come.
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Linn dissected the cynical world of marketing to kids in her previous book, the excellent, eye-opening Consuming Kids: The Hostile Takeover of Childhood (2004; also published by The New Press). She’s also a co-founder of the Boston-based Campaign for a Commercial-Free Childhood, which fights the pernicious effects of marketing on kids.
“I feel an increasing sense of urgency—the kind of urgency that environmentalists feel about saving the rain forest—about preserving time and space for children to play,” writes Linn, who points to a survey that shows that from 1997 to 2002, the number of hours 6- to 8-year-olds spent on creative play dropped by one-third. Talking to teachers, Linn hears over and again that when children do play, they no longer know how to create their own fantasies. Instead, they dutifully follow the script of the shows and endless DVDs they watch, acted out with the official action figures.
“When screens dominate children’s lives—regardless of content—they are a threat, not an enhancement, to creativity, play, and make believe,” writes Linn, adding that kids aged two to 18 spend 40 hours a week engaged with electronic media, from the living room TV to bedroom computers, DVD players in the minivan, televisions in doctors’ waiting rooms, even cell phones, where parents can now order up SpongeBob episodes to entertain their kids while waiting on line at the bank. In the process, she writes, kids are learning to depend on a screen, not themselves, for amusement or comfort. They’re also missing opportunities to explore and interact with the people and world around them. A kid watching Dora the Explorer on a laptop might not act up in a restaurant, but she’s not exactly good dinner company, either.
Linn urges parents to shield their kids from the media and its marketing as long as possible. While the American Academy of Pediatrics recommends that kids under the age of two watch no TV, by their second birthday, 90 percent are engaged with screens (TV or computer) for 90 minutes a day, she writes. That includes the so-called “educational” baby videos that marketers have convinced anxious parents will give their kids an academic leg-up, despite all evidence to the contrary.
“The longer parents delay, the longer babies have a chance to develop the capacity to make things happen, to solve problems, to create their own amusements—to generate creative play,” Linn writes.
