The article is based on the opinions of a Catholic cleric in England, but I think the main points are valid, whether or not you support the Catholic perspective or not.  From my experience working in an office with other people who have kids, I see the yearning for Disneyland, the desire for merchandise of their favorite characters, the aisles of crappy Chinese-made junk toys at Walmart.  Disney (and lots of other companies) are instilling a driving consumerism in children that most parents and society enable.  Many parents are clueless about how consumeristic they are teaching their children to be, and other know but don’t want their kids to feel left out of the Hannah Montana feeding frenzy or don’t want to deal with the inevitable tantrums that follow the refusal to buy something.

Black Friday, Christmas, kids birthday parties that cost thousands of dollars…so much in American society is driving people, and kids in particular, to consume.  Maybe its no different from when we were kids, but to me, the consumeristic culture in which kids today grow up makes the He-Man toys, Thundercat action figures, and Saturday morning cartoons of our youth seem like child’s play.  Maybe I am just more sensitive to this type of consumerism in childhood after being in Peace Corps and seeing a different environment that kids can grow up in.  Maybe it is because I’ve thought about how we would want to raise our kids in the future and it seems seems hard to shelter a child from the wasteful, superficial culture while also letting a kid be a kid and having fun and friends.

Of course, even considering the consumerism from my childhood and all the cartoon tie-in merchandise, atari/nintendo and other products, it seems like the current environment is more all-consuming.  We still had lots of time where we played outside, climbed trees, played with sticks and dug in the dirt.  And one of my favorite toys as a kid was a set of plain wooden blocks of various shapes that had belonged to my dad when he was a kid.  How many children today have such a simply thing as wooden blocks to play with, to imagine  and build something, without the help of Disney?