Letting Children be Children
Theme 4 — Making Parents' Voices Heard
Overview
- Parents have told us that they feel they cannot make their voices heard, and that they often lack the confidence to speak out on sexualisation and commercialisation issues for fear of being labelled a prude or out of touch.
- Business and industry sectors and their regulators need to make clear that they welcome, and take seriously, feedback on these subjects.
- Given the technology available, regulators and businesses should be able to find more effective ways to encourage parents to tell them what they think, quickly and easily, and to be transparent in telling parents how they are responding to that feedback.
- Once parents know that their views are being taken seriously, we would expect them to respond positively towards companies that listen to their concerns.
What we would like to see
That parents find it easier to voice their concerns, are listened to more readily when they do, and have their concerns visibly acted on by businesses and regulators.
Recommendations
12.
Ensuring greater transparency in the regulatory framework by creating a single website for regulators. There is a variety of co—, self— and statutory regulators across the media, communications and retail industries. Regulators should work together to create a single website to act as an interface between themselves and parents. This will set out simply and clearly what parents can do if they feel a programme, advertisement, product or service is inappropriate for their children; explain the legislation in simple terms; and provide links to quick and easy complaints forms on regulators’ own individual websites. This single website could also provide a way for parents to provide informal feedback and comments, with an option to do so anonymously, which regulators can use as an extra gauge of parental views. Results of regulators’ decisions, and their reactions to any informal feedback, should be published regularly on the single site. ACTION: Regulators
13.
Making it easier for parents to express their views to businesses about goods and services. All businesses that market goods or services to children should have a one—click link to their complaints service from their home page, clearly labelled 'complaints'. Information provided as part of the complaints and feedback process should state explicitly that the business welcomes comments and complaints from parents about issues affecting children. Businesses should also provide timely feedback to customers in reaction to customer comment. For retail businesses this should form part of their code of good practice (see Theme 2, Recommendation 6), and should also cover how to make it
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