Childhood has been seen as a special time when children are under the protection of all. Most would agree that children should not be exposed to adult experiences such as violence, profanity, or sexual explicitness. I would argue that profanity includes the adult emotions of cynicism, hopelessness, and despair and that children should also be protected from these. Increasingly, instead of protecting children from adult emotions, we use them to seduce our young people. Instead of collectively viewing childhood as a time to be protected, the business community increasingly uses it to develop brand identification.
Childhood is the real thing.
Children need a great deal of unstructured, self-directed time to just be. It is their rich experience of imaginative play during childhood that lays the foundation for later abstract and creative thinking. Because children's creative minds are so active during these early years, they will incorporate into their play the images that surround them. Normally these are the images of home, family, and nature. When these images are supplanted with commercial ones from the imaginations of others, play becomes imitative rather than creative, and later capacities may be compromised.