Ridiculous. I would bet a lot of money that those parents are feeding their kids just as unhealthy foods at home as the Happy Meal, if not more. They’re just being trendy. How many times have you heard pancakes and sausage referred to as a healthy hot breakfast? I also bet a lot of these parents let their grade school kids get full size meals. I can’t believe the age of kids I see eating Value Meals.
A hamburger, small fries and carton of milk for dinner is not the thing that’s going to kill your child whom you let guzzle 20 oz Gatorades and eat pizza snacks and demand they have a snack between every play at soccer practice.
We take our kids to McDonald’s far too often (every two weeks or so). They really love it and don’t bug so we give them a treat and make up for it with healthy things 90% of the time.
What I don’t understand is that this is the short time in their lives where you control most of the food going into them. Why not take advantage of that instead of blaming other people?
Dad always took me to Burger King or Wendy’s because McD’s food didn’t agree with him. Didn’t have anything to do with Happy Meals because those didn’t exist until I was well out of their target age.
I don’t see this as a problem at all, really. every couple weeks is nothing.
the only other thing that I think a lot of (other) people don’t grasp is that they could take a lot of the calories out of the happy meal by forgoing the soda. I don’t think people realize just how much sugar there is in there,
because there is a small percentage of parents out there who feel that the rest of the world should bend to their will to make their job of “being a parent” easier.
It is completely ludicrous to sue McD’s over the Happy Meal w/toy. WRONG WRONG WRONG. For the love of god, it’s wrong. They should be sued over the goddam McRib!!!
Can you buy just the toy? I guess you could buy the happy meal and throw it out.
I have a Christmas job in a computer store and we sell candy and pop right at the check out stand. LOTS of candy, and the only reason it’s there is so the kids can pester their parents while they wait in the checkout line.
My DOGS prefer dog biscuits to their normal food. Guess what? They have to eat their normal food before they get any treats. I make the rules. But the two of them could tear me to shreds if they were so inclined. They don’t because THEY don’t make the rules.
This is about parents that should not be parents. They should be counter sued and the money go to the local planned parenthood clinic.
Idiots.
I hope that when this lawsuit is thrown out of court that a parade of people are waiting for the so called ‘parents’ and point and laugh.
I agree that this lawsuit is silly, but it’s not as silly as most in this thread think.
The argument made is that the advertising is deceptive because children under 8 don’t have the critical thinking abilities to assess advertising, and so advertising to children that young is inherently deceptive under California law. That may well be true, as far as I can tell.
The Complaint alleges that some member of the class spend their allowances on McDonalds without permission from parents, and that children grow up to have bad eating habits because of the millions spent to inculcate them with a love of McDonalds when they were little kids. They allege, and this is probably true, that McDonalds intentionally targets little kids knowing that there are enough bad parents that the advertising will work, and all too often work so well that those kids end up with bad eating habits when they grow up. I think parental responsibility still factors into where kids spend their allowance and what beliefs children grow up having, but I think those allegations, if true, at least get them closer to having a legitimate argument.
It’s also worth noting that many people who oppose this kind of lawsuit are perfectly fine with censoring violent video games and the like, even though the same principle of parental responsibility should apply.
This lawsuit is BS through and through. The only thing it exposes is the laziness of the parent. As to some sort of McD’s indoctrination, in which you will eat it for the rest of your life I also call BS.
It’s McD’s job to sell and market food. It is your job to buy it or NOT. It is not a secret that most fast food is pretty unhealthy.
Adults have choices. ONE of them is what their children eat.
This is a thread about lawsuits. It sounds like your 5-year old needs to file one against you.
Pretty hard actually. What I usually say is “Mmmm … only if Mommy Bear says Yes.” And then Mommy Bear [DEL]usually gives in[/DEL] says “Only if Daddy Bear says Yes.”
Yep. This lawsuit raises, imo, the important and much broader issue of do we, as a society, allow corporations/others selling something, to market directly to children OR do we collectively act to protect children from what amounts to exploitation?
I can see both sides of this. As a parent who never took my kids to McDonalds and limited their exposure to advertising PLUS both were unschooled for most or all of their early years and not being exposed to peer pressure to want to go, just say no. Easy.
But I’ve also witnessed the insidious way in which this sort of marketing works. Parents pick their kid up from preschool/school and the kid starts begging for McDonald’s immediately. Parent is exhausted, still has groceries to buy and dinner to prepare and may say NO but the kid just keeps wheedling and begging and/or pitching a fit and sometimes (even if it’s only once in a great while) the parent caves and gets the kid a Crappy Meal just to shut them up/bribe them to behave. Kid learns how and when to get what they (as they have been told via repeated advertising exposures) want.
Sure, “bad” parenting, but the advertiser who has intentionally set out to make exactly this sort of situation occur by marketing directly to kids cannot, imo, be completely exonerated of responsibility.
My first degree and career was in Child Development, and it is simply a fact that young children lack the mental capacity to 1. tell the difference between avertising and fact/other programming 2. make rational decisions in their own best interests. As adults, that is OUR job, and imo, it is a job BOTH individual parents AND adult society are responsible for.
We protect our children from exposure to pornography and sexual exploitation, and we view that responsibility as one shared by parents and the rest of society. We, as adults, have made laws designed to shield children from something we know to be not in their best interests and harmful to them.
Children who early on develop a taste for refined, processed, high fat, high sodium, high sugar foods are, arguably, being harmed, since the science is overwhelming that such a diet carries serious health risks throughout life.
We are increasingly acting collectively (via school boards and voter referendums and laws) to get junk food out of our public schools…the position that it is a private parental responsibility doesn’t wash because the individual parents are unable to control what their children consume when they are at school unless the unhealthy options are eliminated from the school. This is an example of limiting advertising directly to children, since the companies involved are marketing to a captive audience and seeking to create a new generation of consumers for their products.
Some other nations have moved to protect children from commercial exploitation, so it is not an unprecedented phenomenon. FTM, the U.S. used to ban the linkage of toys and other products to childrens’ programming (eg action figures based on cartoon characters), but Reagan, under pressure from corporate interests, eliminated that, harkening in an era of 30 min. length “shows” which were little more than commericals for the products “inspired” by them.
" In Sweden it (advertising aimed at young children) is considered unacceptable and is banned for children under 12 with the approval of the majority of the population…In the UK, restrictions exist on ads that ‘might result in harm to children physically, mentally or morally’ and on ads employing methods that ‘take advantage of the natural credulity and sense of loyalty of children’. Nor may advertisements ‘exhort children to purchase or to ask their parents or others to make enquiries or purchases’. "
At any rate, it is possible this suit DOES have a leg to stand on. I think it’s a valid debate to have and hardly some obviously ridiculous proposition that advertising aimed at children should be limited or banned outright. JMHO.
I think it is down right stupid. It puts the responsibility in the wrong place.
:: snipped from OP ::
Let me re-word that a bit for you as I see it.
‘do we, as a society, allow individuals who cannot take responsibility for their own actions, force others to behave in a way so that the individual can avoid their own responsibilities, or do we tell them to act like a fucking adult?’
Personal responsibility is, apparently, just too damned hard for some people. So the obvious answer is to have the government fix it.
Or, to rephrase as you’ve done, personal responsibility only applies to close relationships not corporations; you’re free to make every attempt to fuck over strangers in order to make a buck so long as a family member exercising good judgment has the power to stop you. Screw the children of bad parents!