spindoc,

You write that social commentators have no right to suggest a role that places them between parents and their children. However, you fail to realise that our society does not promote that premise. Consumer society places itself squarely between parents and their children. All too soon children are sucked into the system. At the earliest opportunity parents are encouraged to hand over responsibility to outside influences for the indoctrination of their children into consumer culture.
It's like a conveyor belt, these days,. Have your baby - enjoy it for a few years - it you are able. Then at the earliest opportunity deliver him or her to an institution to begin its education in consumer culture.This also frees up parents to rush back to the workplace to do their part.
Everything these days is geared to feed the furnace of desire and growth.

Dear Poirot, absolute rot.

“You write that social commentators have no right to suggest a role that places them between parents and their children.” Yes I did say that, absolutely, they can do what they want with “their” children, not anyone else’s. I have yet to meet a “social commentator” whose opinion I value, let alone allowing them to pass those values on to my kids. It’s none of their bl@@dy business.

“Consumer society places itself squarely between parents and their children.” Rubbish; that is and always will be a parental decision. If parents are not up to supervising the exposure of their children to marketing, by whatever means, that is parental failure and is their business and no one else’s.

Poirot, no one, not even kids have any place between husband and wife; it’s their relationship, owned by them. Likewise Mum has a relationship with child, their business; Dad has a relationship with same child, their business. Mum and Dad have a joint role as parents and if they leave a relationship space between them in that parenting role, the children may well try to occupy that space, intensely personal and private, their business.

For anyone to suggest that they have a right of any description between parents and their own children is astonishing arrogance. Are you now telling me that a social commentator, or anyone else for that matter, should have the right to contradict my parental attitudes, values and beliefs?

Children are exposed more and more to consumer marketing, just as they are exposed to ideological marketing. How much that impacts their values until they reach adulthood at the legal age of 16 is a parental responsibility and part of today’s parenting challenge .To suggest that “others” should get involved to impose their values is socially divisive and destructive.

Some wish to see the next generation have a lesser quality of life than their parents enjoyed. Why? They start with a false premise or “cause”, wrap themselves in guilt and then try to impose their guilt on other peoples’ children.

They are sick and up themselves.

spindoc,

Social engineering and indoctrination have been agents in the service of consumer culture and the mainstay of industrial society ever since the Industrial Revolution and have reached their zenith in the present day.
They over arch life in modern society to such an extent that many people, such as yourself, fail to see that the entire framework of work and leisure are exercised only within their parameters.