Mindcare Counselling Blog

Consuming Kids throws desperately needed light on the practices of a relentless multi-billion dollar marketing machine that now sells kids and their parents everything from junk food and violent video games to bogus educational products and the family car. Drawing on the insights of health care professionals, children's advocates, and industry insiders, the film focuses on the explosive growth of child marketing in the wake of deregulation, showing how youth marketers have used the latest advances in psychology, anthropology, and neuroscience to transform American children into one of the most powerful and profitable consumer demographics in the world. Consuming Kids pushes back against the wholesale commercialization of childhood, raising urgent questions about the ethics of children's marketing and its impact on the health and well-being of kids.

'People are not disturbed by events, but by the view they take of them'. This comment by the Greek philosopher Epictetus two thousand years ago aptly reflects the basic tenet of modern cognitive behaviour therapy (CBT)-that what people believe affects their emotions. CBT is structured, problem-oriented, and set in the here and now, and has rapidly become the treatment of choice for a wide range of mental health disorders. CBT combines the scientific advances made in one branch of psychology from roughly the 1930-60’s called behaviourism, with the branch of cognitive psychology, which came later around the 1970-80’s. These two branches were combined because psychologists came to the realization that thoughts, behaviors, and emotions are all interlinked as shown in the figure below. CBT is based on the idea that our thoughts lead to how we feel and how we act and that external things, such as people, situations and events play a much lesser role. Cognitive Behavioral Therapy...