US parent's group Commercial Alert has proposed a Parents' Bill of Rights to help parents "combat the commercial influences that prey upon their children and that promote products and values of which parents do not approve."

The group claims that advertisers are coming between them and their children and that they have the right to fight back. The proposed bill includes a declaration that marketers "glorify materialism, addiction, hedonism, violence and anti-social behavior" and the promise that "the primary responsibility for the upbringing of children" be returned to parents.

These parents mean business. The proposed bill states that "the aim of this corporate marketing is to turn children into agents of corporations in the home, so that they will nag their parents for the things they see advertised, thus sowing strife, stress and misery in the family." They are calling for a Leave Children Alone Act banning TV advertising aimed at children under 12 years of age.

They face a tough challenge getting their proposal heard. Twenty years ago the staff of the US Federal Trade Commission (FTC) concluded in a long report that TV ads aimed at children were unfair because the children were too young to understand that they were being marketed to. They proposed a ban on such advertising because children are "too young to understand the selling purpose" of advertising. In response, US Congress prohibited the agency from issuing such rules, and revoked many of the FTC's powers.