Last week Mamamia took to the road at Lend Lease shopping centres as part of Family Life Forum . The awesome line up of speakers (including Mia Freedman, Rebecca Sparrow, Paula Joye and Jo Lamble) has been further strengthened with the presence of Joanna McMillan who will address attendees in two of the forums in Victoria.
Joanna will cover the hot topic of food battles. A growing number of kids are getting dangerously overweight and at the other end of the scale girls as young as five are now expressing a desire to be thin. Joanna will explore how parents can encourage kids to eat well while also helping them to foster a positive relationship with food and establish a healthy body image.
But today we are battling video clips. Or rather trying to work out if there are any music videos that you would be happy for your kids to watch. Is there any music clip that you’d be happy to let your child watch unattended or even with you sitting next to them? And I’m not talking about The Wiggles because at some stage all children will grow out of watching them (although no one in the family will ever forget the words. Ever.)
The leap from four men clapping and waving their hands in the air to the gyrating hips of the top 40 video hits covers a chasm. So what is an appropriate music clip for children who have outgrown Hot Potato but aren’t yet allowed to watch soft porn, because well that’s what the current video hits seem to portray ?
Mike Stock, who was part of the legendary pop factory Stock, Aitken and Waterman, is well aware of the differences between potatoes and porn and he worries that our children are being sexualized by pop.