Are you a fan of the classic sitcom Leave it to Beaver? The show had an innocence that we never see from modern sitcoms. Generations bold young and old love the idyllic American life that Leave it to Beaver portrayed.
One wouldn’t think of Leave it to Beaver as being a stylistically unique show, however. It didn’t take experiments with its style of storytelling. That is, until the final episode. The final episode had a scene that was incredibly unusual for the time period. This scene also confirmed to the audience that Leave it to Beaver was going to get taken off air. In many ways, Leave it to Beaver wasn’t afraid to take risks like other shows. While it may seem wholesome and risk-averse, it was released at a time when television was beginning to experiment with edginess. For example, Leave it to Beaver remained in black and white at a time when color was growing in popularity. It took a lot of effort to transition to color and the producers felt it wasn’t worth it. Nevertheless, the show remained popular and is remembered as one of America’s best sitcoms. But what really made Leave it to Beaver such a groundbreaking show is that it was told from the child’s point of view. Many other popular shows focused on adults and lived entirely in the adult world. Leave it to Beaver showed the innocence and sweetness of childhood in America. As we look back on reruns of Leave it to Beaver, we should appreciate the incredible talents of the cast and crew who brought the show to life. We must remember the impact it had on America in the 1950s and 1960s and why today, there’s still so much to learn from the troublesome Beaver Cleaver! Watch this video to learn more about the scene that took Leave it to Beaver off the air. Learn about how the show came to be, why it was so special, and its enduring legacy.
Leaked Facebook Docs Depict Kids as ‘Untapped’ Wealth
Kids between 10 and 12 are a ‘valuable but untapped audience,’ company research says.
The Wall Street Journal on Tuesday published the latest in its investigative series “The Facebook Files,” diving even deeper into the ubiquitous platform’s efforts to target and recruit young children.
Internal documents obtained by the Journal now reveal that Facebook formed a special team to study children and ponder ways in which they could be monetized. One such document is said to refer to children between the ages of 10 and 12 (“tweens”) as a “valuable but untapped audience.” Another suggests “leveraging playdates” as means to drive Facebook’s “growth.”
Another document cited by the paper, dated March 2021, notes that Facebook is struggling with “global teen penetration” and warns that “acquisition” of teen users “appears to be slowing down.” Internally, Facebook expects its teenaged audience to plummet by an additional 45% by 2023, according to the Journal.
Facebook’s lucrative ad-driven business derives nearly all of its profit from the pervasive tracking of its users; data which it, in turn, uses to create exhaustive behavior profiles used to “micro-target” ads and measure their effectiveness. While federal law prohibits the harvesting of data belonging to children under the age of 13, Facebook has spent years searching for a way to convince children to adopt its services as soon as they’re old enough to be tracked.
Another Facebook document cited by the Journal states that children are “getting on the internet as young as six years old.” “Imagine a Facebook experience designed for youth,” it says.
This week, Facebook said it was pausing efforts to launch an “Instagram Kids” app. The announcement followed another Journal report indicating Facebook was aware through internal research that Instagram had had negative impacts on some teenage users’ mental health. “We make body image issues worse for one in three teen girls,” the research said, noting as well that some teen girls had traced their own suicidal ideations to their experiences on the platform. Facebook later claimed that line from the research was misleading, and that the finding only applied to “those teenage girls who told us they were experiencing body image issues reported that using Instagram made them feel worse—not one in three of all teenage girls.”
The report led Democratic lawmakers to call on CEO Mark Zuckerberg to shutter the Instagram Kids project, saying they believe the app “poses significant threats to young people’s wellbeing.”
Facebook has challenged the Journal’s characterization of its Instagram research, but has so far refused to make that research available for review—and has worked to frustrate independent research into its platforms’ inner workings, generally. Nick Clegg, the company’s policy chief, said at a conference on Monday that Facebook will release two internal slide decks summarizing its research “both to Congress and then to the public in the next few days.”
The Facebook documents referring to children as a “valuable” and “untapped” demographic run contrary to its stated motivations for rolling out a kids-centric service: Facebook has argued that kids under 13 are likely to try and join Facebook and Instagram anyway while lying about their age. Creating an app specifically for children would help to protect them by segregate them from adults online, the company claims.
A Senate subcommittee chaired by Sen. Richard Blumenthal will convene a hearing at 10:30 am ET on Thursday to address the findings of Facebook’s unshared internal research. Expected to testify is Antigone Davis, Facebook’s global head of safety.
“This hearing will examine the toxic effects of Facebook and Instagram on young people and others, and is one of several that will ask tough questions about whether Big Tech companies are knowingly harming people and concealing that knowledge,” Blumenthal said.
The Making of the Picky Eater
Parents have fretted over children’s diets since Victorian times, but today’s mealtime fussiness is different: Blame snacking, unwholesome foods aimed at the young and contradictory signals from adults
What’s surprising is how recent the fight is. The phrase “picky eater” first appears in the lexicon in 1970. Until the early 20th century, there’s scant evidence of concerns over children refusing what they were given, even though what they were given often was an afterthought of an adult menu. As the food historian Bee Wilson wittily put it, during the Victorian era, “Children’s food could be summed up by the word ‘scraps.’” This is something I think about after cooking three different entrees for various family members before eating my own dinner of rejected grilled cheese crusts over the kitchen sink.
If children or parents were unhappy with the older arrangement, their grievances don’t inform the historical record until the late 19th century. That’s when we start to find middle-class parents and experts worrying about children’s diets, as Scottish physician Thomas Dutton did in his 1895 book, “The Rearing and Feeding of Children: A Practical Mother’s Guide.” But his complaints sound like dream wishes to modern ears: “Children will eat anything and everything,” he wrote, complaining about the lack of a special diet for them. Families were feeding children “at the same table as their elders” and giving them grown-up food that he considered “not suitable” for little stomachs.
American pediatrician Luther Emmett Holt’s influential 1894 book “The Care and Feeding of Children” amplified the era’s growing obsession with children’s delicate digestive systems. In detailed charts, he laid out a diet of the blandest foods imaginable: barley gruel, a sort of pudding called rice jelly, oat water, stale bread and broth (which he called “beef juice”). Raw fruits and vegetables were out of the question—Dr. Holt called for them to be stewed—and oatmeal was to be cooked for three hours or more before it was safe for children. “All omelets are objectionable,” he added; eggs were OK only if poached or soft-boiled.
To be fair to Dr. Holt, in the days before reliable washing and refrigeration, he was hardly alone in suspecting fresh fruits and vegetable of causing digestive upset, or worse. British court records from the 19th century include cases of childhood fatalities attributed to “death by fruit,” and until vitamins were discovered, fruits and vegetables were considered empty calories at best.
.. To be fair to Dr. Holt, in the days before reliable washing and refrigeration, he was hardly alone in suspecting fresh fruits and vegetable of causing digestive upset, or worse. British court records from the 19th century include cases of childhood fatalities attributed to “death by fruit,” and until vitamins were discovered, fruits and vegetables were considered empty calories at best.
.. Canadian pediatrician Clara Davis, who conducted a series of experiments in the 1920s and ’30s to see what would happen if small children, including babies, were allowed to pick their own foods. For her study, Davis was able to round up 15 infants from indigent teenage moms or widows and supervise all of their eating for periods ranging from six months to 4½ years, according to articles she published in 1928 and 1939 in the Canadian Medical Association Journal and a 2006 re-examination of her work in the same publication.The children were allowed to choose among 34 items, including milk, fruit, vegetables, whole grains and beef, both raw and cooked. They made some rather eccentric choices, including fistfuls of salt, and most were apparently fond of brains and bone marrow. Sometimes they ate little, and sometimes more than an adult (notably, six hard-boiled eggs on top of a full meal, or five bananas in a single sitting). The tiny subjects varied widely in their self-chosen menus, but the idiosyncrasies evened out over time, and each child, Davis reported, ended up eating a balanced and complete diet.Sickly and scrawny at the start of the study, they became healthy and well-nourished, she wrote, supporting a concept that was becoming known at the time as body wisdom. “For every diet differed from every other diet, fifteen different patterns of taste being presented, and not one diet was the predominantly cereal and milk diet with smaller supplements of fruit, eggs and meat that is commonly thought proper for this age,” she wrote. “They achieved the goal, but by widely various means, as Heaven may presumably be reached by different roads.”
For decades, experts relied on the study to support the claim that when left to their own devices, children naturally eat what’s best for them. What it actually proved, however, is that children naturally eat a healthy diet when they’re provided only with wholesome options. Davis’s study excluded processed foods, refined flours and sugar. She planned a follow-up experiment to see what would happen if children could choose from processed foods as well, but she never carried out the research.
Not in a clinical setting, anyway. In an uncontrolled and undocumented way, the study has been proceeding on a mass scale for the past 80 years. It shows that given enough choices, children are no more likely to eat what their bodies need than I am—which is not at all, unless my body actually does require Diet Mountain Dew and tortilla chips.
Benjamin Spock discussed Davis’s study at length in his 1946 classic “Baby and Child Care,” using her findings to encourage parents to take a more relaxed approach to feeding. By getting worked up about it, he wrote, you could turn a temporary issue into a lifelong problem.
Sam has a peculiar set of food sensitivities, but he also may just be giving us the business. Modern children learn very early that food is one area where they can wield some agency. Long before they can control what comes out of their bodies, they’re controlling what goes into them.
If this is Sam’s power play, it’s something I probably deserve, having used food as a cudgel for most of my own adolescence. I put my own parents through a good 10 years of mealtime torture. Though I ate without complaint the broccoli and squash that my mother served, being confronted with meat of any kind sent me into fight-or-flight mode (and still does). My carnivorous husband behaves the same way when presented with salad. Because we’re adults, we ascribe this not to pickiness but to preference. Meanwhile, our 9-year-old daughter, having watched us both, will eat neither meat nor most vegetables.
What ends up working in “Green Eggs and Ham” is leaving the protagonist alone. I can see the appeal of this approach. Ignorance seems to have worked for centuries; intervention, in the last hundred years or so, rather poorly. I sometimes wonder if it’s time to stop. This suits Sam just fine. He’s happy to make a meal out of four cotton-candy-flavored yogurts and a Popsicle, as he did recently.
On the other hand, I’d like him to reach his full adult height and retain his teeth, which means he’ll have to expand his menu. As Clara Davis demonstrated, children make good choices when all their options are good, but in modern America—and in our own home—that condition rarely holds. Sam is unlikely to start eating kale and quinoa if they aren’t even in the house.
But the new year brings the kind of zeal and optimism that sends a parent to the farmers market, to replace the Bomb Pops with bananas; the pizza, with peas. If we swap the bad choices with better ones, perhaps 2019 will be the year in which Sam learns to keep down exotic foodstuffs like cucumber or toast.
And maybe the rest of us will do better, too: cutting down on the relentless snacking that keeps us from eating more nutritious foods at mealtimes, and trying the healthier foods whose tastes can take longer to appeal. It’s still January, and one can still hope.
Adverse Childhood Experiences International Questionnaire (ACE-IQ)
Adverse Childhood Experiences (ACE) refer to some of the most intensive and frequently occurring sources of stress that children may suffer early in life. Such experiences include multiple types of abuse; neglect; violence between parents or caregivers; other kinds of serious household dysfunction such as alcohol and substance abuse; and peer, community and collective violence.
It has been shown that considerable and prolonged stress in childhood has life-long consequences for a person’s health and well-being. It can disrupt early brain development and compromise functioning of the nervous and immune systems. In addition because of the behaviours adopted by some people who have faced ACEs, such stress can lead to serious problems such as alcoholism, depression, eating disorders, unsafe sex, HIV/AIDS, heart disease, cancer, and other chronic diseases.